"In the desert," she cries. "Here I play for their dances; there I am queen. My name is Thea and it is resonant through storms. They chained me with golden chains; they lured me with golden speeches until I left my people and followed them to their prison that is corroded with lust.... Ah, if you knew with my knowledge, you would not sit here either.... But the slave of the moment knows not liberty." "I have known it," I say drearily and let my chin sink upon the table. "And you are here?" Contemptuously she turns her back to me. "Take me with you, Thea," I cry, "take me with you to freedom." "Can you still endure it." "I will endure the glory of freedom or die of it." "Then come." A brown arm that seems endless stretches down to me. An iron grasp lifts me upward. Noise and lights dislimn in the distance. Our way lies through great, empty, pillared halls which curve above us like twilit cathedrals. Great stairs follow which fall into black depths like waterfalls of stone. Thence issues a mist, green with silvery edges.... A dizziness seizes me as I strive to look downward. I have a presentiment of something formless, limitless. A vague awe and terror fill me. I tremble and draw back but an alien hand constrains me. We wander along a moonlit street. To the right and left extend pallid plains from which dark cypress trees arise, straight as candles. It is all wide and desolate like those halls. In the far distance arise sounds like half smothered cries of the dying, but they grow to music. Shrill jubilation echoes between the sounds and it too grows to music. But this music is none other than the roaring of the storm which lashes us on when we dare to faint. And we wander, wander ... days, weeks, months. Who knows how long? Night and day are alike. We do not rest; nor speak. The road is far behind us. We wander upon trackless wastes. Stonier grows the way, an eternal up and down over cliffs and through chasms.... The edges of the weathered stones become steps for our feet. Breathlessly we climb the peaks. Beyond them we clatter into new abysms. My feet bleed. My limbs jerk numbly like those of a jumping-jack. An earthy taste is on my lips. I have long lost all sense of progress. One cliff is like another in its jagged nakedness; one abysm dark and empty as another. Perhaps I wander in a circle. Perhaps this brown hand is leading me wildly astray, this hand whose grasp has penetrated my flesh, and has grown into it like the fetter of a slave. Suddenly I am alone. I do not know how it came to pass. I drag myself to a peak and look about me. There spreads in the crimson glow of dawn the endless, limitless rocky desert--an ocean turned to stone. Jagged walls tower in eternal monotony into the immeasurable distance which is hid from me by no merciful mist. Out of invisible abysms arise sharp peaks. A storm from the south lashes their flanks from which the cracked stone fragments roll to become the foundations of new walls.