I have stood before the breach in that Barrier, fighting that nightmare duel, until the place of colossal desolation, last frontier the human race might hope to keep, became as well known to me as a landscape on earth. Yet the effect of the Thing's assaults upon me never lessened. On the contrary, the horror gained in strength. A dreadful familiarity grew between It and me. Communication flowed more readily between us with use. I will not set down, perhaps I dare not set down the intolerable wickedness of Its alternate menaces and offered bribes. Contact with Its intelligence poisoned. There were nights when It was dumb, when all Its monstrous power concentrated and bore upon me, Its will to destroy locked with my will. My victory was that I lived. * * * * * In the shadow, Desire Michell and I drew closer to one another. How can I tell of a love that grew without sight? So much of the love of romance and history is a matter of flower-petal complexions, heart-consuming eyes, satin lips, and all the form and color that make beauty. How can I make clear a love that grew strong and passionately demanding, knew delicate coquetries of advance and evasion, intimacy of minds like the meeting of eyes in understanding--all in the dark? The blind might comprehend. But the blind have a physical communication we had not; touch has enchantments of its own. Every night, near midnight, I switched off the lights and waited in the chair at my writing-table, where I was accustomed to work. If she had not come by two o'clock, I learned to know she would not visit me that night. I might sleep in that certainty. A strange tryst I kept there in the dark; listening to the flow of the waterfall from the lake, loud in that dead hour's stillness, or hearing the soft, incessant sounds of insect life awake in trees and fields. If she came--a drift of perfume, a movement slight as a curtain stirred by the wind, then an hour with such a companion as the ancient magician might have drawn out of the air to his nine mystic lamps. Strange, fantastic tales she told me, spun of fancies luminous and frail as threads of glass. She could not speak without betraying her deep learning in sciences rejected and forgotten by the modern world. Alchemy, astrology, geomancy furnished her speech with allusions blank to my ignorance; which she most gently and politely enlightened when I confessed. I learned that the Green Lion of Paracelsus was not a beast, but a recipe for making gold; that Salamandar's Feather was better known today as asbestos; and that the Emerald Table was by no means an article of furniture. I give these examples merely by way of illustration.