He smoked his pipe. Hilda played morosely. Delicious, she was when she was half asleep like this! She leaned her head on one hand, her elbow on the table.... When she had been checkmated at the end of half an hour she sank back wearily in her chair. She looked at him intently for a moment and began to smile. “And how about the dark city tonight?” she asked. He took slow puffs at his pipe and stared meditatively at the ceiling. “Ah--the dark city, Hilda! The city submerged under an infinite sea, the city not inhabited by mortals!... It was there again--would you believe it?... It was there.... I went out to the stone steps, smoking my cigar, while you played Bach. I hardly dared to look--I watched the hill out of the corner of my eyes and pretended to be listening to the music.... And suddenly, at the right moment of dusk, just after the street lamps had winked along the base of the hill, I saw it. The hill that we see there in the daylight, with its water-tower and marching trees, its green sloping fields and brook that flashes in the sun, is unreal, an illusion, the thinnest of disguises--a cloak of green velvet which the dark city throws over itself at the coming of the first ray of light.... I saw it distinctly. Immense, smooth and black, old and cold as the moon, are the walls that surround it. No gate gives entrance to it. Of a paler stone are the houses upon houses, tiers upon tiers of shadowy towers that surmount those sepulchral walls. No motion was perceptible there--no light gleamed there--no sound, no whisper rose from it. I thought: perhaps it is a city of the dead. The walls of it have no windows, and its inhabitants must be blind.... And then I seemed to see it more closely, in a twilight which appeared to be its own, and this closer perception gave way in turn to a vision. For first I saw that all the walls of it are moist, dripping, slippery, as if it were bathed in a deathlike dew; and then I saw its people. Its people are maggots--maggots of perhaps the size of human children; their heads are small and wedge-shaped, and glow with a faint bluish light. Masses of them swarm within those walls. Masses of them pour through the streets, glisten on the buttresses and parapets. They are intelligent. What horrible feast is it that nightly they celebrate there in silence? On what carrion do they feed? It is the universe that they devour; and they build above it, as they devour it, their dark city like a hollow tomb.... Extraordinary that this city, which seen from here at dusk has so supernatural a beauty, should hide at the core so vile a secret....” Hilda stared at him. “Really, Andrew, I think you’re going mad.” “Going? I’m gone! My brain is maggoty.” They laughed and rattled the chessmen into their wooden box. Then they began locking the doors and windows for the night. [2] Copyright, 1922, by The Dial Publishing Company, Inc. Copyright, 1923, by Conrad Aiken.