Page:Captain of the Polestar.djvu/242

 228 piercing and yet dreamy gaze upon Sir Overbeck, `all things lead to nothing, and nothing is the foundation of all things. Cosmos is impenetrable. Why then should we exist?'

"Astounded at this weighty query, and at the philosophic demeanour of his visitor, our hero made shift to bid him welcome and to demand his name and quality. As the old man answered him his voice rose and fell in musical cadences, like the sighing of the east wind, while an ethereal and aromatic vapour pervaded the apartment.

"`I am the eternal non-ego,' he answered. "I am the concentrated negative—the everlasting essence of nothing. You see in me that which existed before the beginning of matter many years before the commencement of time. I am the algebraic x which represents the infinite divisibility of a finite particle.'

"Sir Overbeck felt a shudder as though an ice-cold hand had been placed upon his brow. `What is your message?' he whispered, falling prostrate before his mysterious visitor.

"`To tell you that the eternities beget chaos, and that the immensities are at the mercy of the divine ananke. Infinitude crouches before a personality.  The mercurial essence is the prime mover in spirituality, and the thinker is powerless before the pulsating inanity.  The cosmical procession is terminated only by the unknowable and unpronounceable'

"May I ask, Mr. Smollett, what you find to laugh at?"