The Stratagem and Other Stories

situation. Infinitely as the phenomena were varied, they were yet recognized as essentially the same. All human tasks are lightened by the certainty that they must end. Even our joys would be intolerable were we convinced that they must endure, through irksomeness and dis- gust, through weariness and satiety, even for ever and for evermore. In this inhuman, this praeterdiabolic in- ferno was a wearisome repetition, a harping on the same hateful discord, a continuous nagging whose inter- vals afforded no relief, only a suspense brimming with the anticipation of some fresh terror. For hours which were to him eternities this stage continued as each cell that held the record of a memory underwent the degenerative changes which awoke it into hyperbromic purulence. VIII The minute bacterial corruption now assumed a gross chemistry. The gases of putrefaction forming in the brain and interpenetrating it were represented in his consciousness by the denizens of the pustules becoming formless and impersonal—Arthur had not yet fathomed the abyss. Creeping, winding, embracing, the Universe en- folded him, violated him with a nameless and intimate contamination, involved his being in a more suffocating terror. Now and again it drowned that consciousness in a gulf which his thought could not express to me; and in- deed the first and least of his torments is utterly beyond human expression. It was a woe ever expanded, ever intensified, by each vial of wrath. Memory increased, and understand- ing grew; the imagination had equally got rid of limit. What this means who can tell? The human mind cannot really appreciate numbers beyond a score or so;