Diary of a Drug Fiend

326 The Diary of a Drug Fiend Presently I heard the deep booming of a bell in the far-off cathedral. It was twelve o'clock. He immediately rose and went to the doorway, down the steps and on to the moonlit terrace. He faced the north. In a deep solemn voice he recited what was apparently an invocation. “Hail unto thee who art Ra in thy silence, even unto thee who art Kephra the beetle, that travellest under the heavens in thy bark in the midnight hour of the sun. Tahuti standeth in his splendour at the prow, and Ra-Hoor abideth at the helm. Hail unto thee from the abodes of evening!” He accompanied the speech with a complicated series of gestures. When he had finished he returned and noticed that I was awake. “Well, did you have a good sleep ? ” he said softly, standing over my mattress. “I never had a better one.” It would be impossible to give the details of even one day at Telepylus. Life there has all the fullness of the heroin life with none of its disillusions. I must simply select such incidents as bear directly on our Purgatorio. I dropped off to sleep again after a short chat with Basil about indifferent affairs, and woke in the morning very much refreshed, and yet overpowered by the conviction that it was impossible to get up without heroin. } But the bright spring sun, his rays falling so freshly on the crags green-gray and dun opposite, reminded me that I had come to Telepylus to renew my youth. I held back my hand. Little by little, strength came back to me; but as it did so the feeling of helplessness in the absence of heroin was replaced by the presence of craving for it. I dragged myself from the mattress and got un- steadily to my feet. Lou was still sleeping, and she looked so lovely in the pure pale light that filtered into the room that I took a firmer resolve to break off the