Page:The Quest Volume 11 (1919-20).djvu/553

 still, pointing with its hand to the interior of the island.

"I advanced through a wood on a smooth white road, but without feeling the ground beneath my feet. When I tried to touch the trees and shrubs around me I could not feel them. It was as though there were a thin layer of air between them and me which I could not penetrate. A phosphorescence as from decaying wood covered every object and made seeing possible. But their outlines seemed vague and loose and soft like molluscs, and all seemed strangely over-sized. Featherless birds, with round staring eyes, swollen like fattened geese and huddled together in a huge nest, hissed down at me. A fawn, scarce able to walk yet as big as a full-grown deer, lay in the moss and lazily turned its fat pug-dog-like head towards me.

"There was a toad-like sluggishness in every creature I happened to see.

"By and by the knowledge of where I was dawned on me—in a land as real as our own world and yet but a reflection of it, in the realm of those unseen doubles that thrive upon the marrow of their terrestrial counterparts, that exploit their originals and grow into ever huger shapes, the more the latter eat themselves up in vain hoping and waiting for happiness and joy. If the mothers of young animals are shot off and their little ones waste and waste away longing in faith for their food until they die in the tortures of starvation, spectral doubles grow up in this accursed spirit-land, and like spiders suck up the life that trickles from the creatures of our world. The life-powers of all that thus wane away in vain hopes, become gross shapes and luxurious weeds in this Leech-land, the very soil of which is impregnated by