Page:Betelguese, a trip through hell.djvu/12

6 hypotyposis of the Supernal) jingling through my tired brain. I set to work at exactly 12.45 a.m. and wrote until our esteemed companions of the nocturnal hours ceased their unloved music (mosquitos), 5.05 a.m., hied myself back to bed and hypothecated as many winks as Dame Slumber saw fit to allot to me, who am at continued war with her silent wand. The same tactics were employed during the succeeding fifteen nights, wherein I penned eight thousand one hundred and sixteen (8116) lines. This is the truth, the whole and integral truth, and nothing but the unexpurgated truth, so help me Muse (she's blind as a bat) and Satan, of whom I've writ in such an unbecoming manner that, henceforth, I must perforce seek my future Elysian in other haunts than those of the above named Cosmopoietic's own, for fear that his uncoped wrath may blast me into an ape-faced minstrel or, like one red-haired varlet draped with the cognomen of "Nero," use my unbleached bones for illuminating the highway to his insidiate lair. To the readers this question may present itself, to wit: Why place Hell in the bowels of Betelguese? Why not the sun or moon?

In the first instance the former sphere is eliminated as a possibility on account of its nature. Being a huge nucleous mass of aeriform fluid, nothing containing