AT EGMOND.
Within ten days everything was settled: the Comtesse de
Pichegru-Picard, burnt out of Château Grönland, came to an arrangement
with Monseigneur Piscari (who had already got from her the lease of
Egmond in Brittany on behalf of the League), to go down there for the
wedding of Miss Eve without interfering with the prelate’s house-party;
and Lepsius, for his part, on hearing now that Miss Eve would be at
Egmond, agreed to go down, too, to meet the other political intriguers.
By the last day of June all the party were there, except a Monsieur
Brisson of Rouen, and Lepsius, who had arranged to come on the 2nd of
July for two days, the date of the wedding remaining fixed for the 5th
of July.
As for this Monsieur Brisson, who lived not far from Brittany, why he
did not appear was not very clear, for though he had been written to by
Monseigneur Piscari, he had sent no reply.
However, about an hour after dinner on the 1st of July, Monsieur
Brisson was announced just as a council which met to consider last
details as to Lepsius had sat round a table in a chamber in a tower.
The door was already locked when the card of Monsieur Brisson was
brought, who, on being admitted, was seen to be the embodiment of the
_bourgeois_ in glasses, one of his legs bowed and booted with a sole
inches deep, on which he steeply limped. As he was unknown by sight to
the others, he had to produce some of his notes from the League before
being given leave to assume his seat; and the conference then began
in a gloaming still unlighted by any lamp, present being Monsieur de
Courcy, the Abbé Sauriau, Monsieur Leflô, the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet; the
bent back of Dr. Lepsius sat sideways to the table, dumb; Monseigneur
Piscari, a lank and stark inquisitor, presided; Isabeau Thiéry was
absent; but there were some ten more, men of wit or weight.
The difficulty was to get Lepsius into Egmond without scandal: for
if he once came in as a guest, and was seen, his disappearance would
naturally excite comment and unrest; but after much discussion one
Captain Pertius, a spark of the _beau sabreur_ type, who had five
_pioupious_ (privates) at command in the château, proposed that as
Lepsius came, his capture should take place outside a summer-house in a
south avenue, and Lepsius there kept till everybody was abed; and this
was carried.
But now Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, with a rasping throat of the
_nouveau riche_, at last gave a croak, saying, “It will be a great risk
to keep him idling there for hours in that summer-house.”
And now, too, for the first time, Dr. Lepsius breathed a weary word, “I
agree.”
However, their votes were overborne on the authority of Pertius, who,
having thoroughly examined the summer-house, had found it strong and
sound.
Then, till it was almost dark, many details were discussed, many
proposals put to the vote, everybody knew what his own duty was to be,
and the council was now about to be broken up when anew the throat of
Monsieur Brisson of Rouen was croaking, “But I feel uneasy.... _Who_
chose the chamber in which Lepsius is to be kept?”
“It was Captain Pertius,” said Monseigneur Piscari.
“And you have all inspected it?” asked Monsieur Brisson.
“Most of us,” remarked Monsieur de Courcy; “it is a good, good place,
monsieur.”
“It may be good,” said Monsieur Brisson, “but is it the best? Oh,
believe me, messieurs, in everything there is a bad, a good, a better,
and a best, the best ever more grievous than the rest, but so greatly
better than the better.”
“True,” murmured the Abbé Sauriau: “_is_ it the best?”
“I propose that we search the château in a body first,” suggested
Monsieur Brisson.
“I agree,” murmured Dr. Lepsius, and after some talk this was done.
Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet took with alacrity a blue candle from
a candelabrum of ormolu, and with it led the procession, first up the
tower’s stair to the chamber prepared for the prisoner’s sojourn, and
then down and through almost the whole building, down to the vaults, up
other towers, through crowds of halls and corridors, now with sounding
footsteps, now with muffled, everyone chattering with some other in
sets nonchalantly, Monsieur de Courcy and Monseigneur with their heads
together before, and, behind, the Abbé Sauriau with the good bonhomme
Brisson, whose right side, as along he stumped, stooped at every step
of his right bow-leg. He was giving the abbé a reason why he must
needs leave Egmond that very evening, having come merely to attend the
committee-meeting, when for the twentieth time he stopped to stare at a
painting; and since he had already explained that he was then buying,
he was left to pursue his hobby by the abbé, who did not observe that
behind each of the pictures that Monsieur Brisson peered at he left a
certain little object resembling a night-light; and behind one picture
he left a vial and his handkerchief.
After all, it was found that the tower-chamber which Captain Pertius
had chosen was the most eligible; and, everything at last arranged, the
committee separated to come among the ladies.
At this hour, with the moon in the clouds, and groups of ladies and
their gallants moving round the grounds, and sounds of music in the
_salons_ and galleries, Egmond looked a stately and picturesque place.
The Misses Vickery were strolling with Monsieur de Courcy along the
brink of an oblong of water that stretched far-slumbering in boscage
from the bottom of the terraces to a mosque of marble at its far end,
when there came up to them Dr. Lepsius to take part in their walk; but
presently a messenger from Monseigneur Piscari came to call Monsieur de
Courcy, who with his lips just touched a finger-tip of his future-one
with a great parade of grace, and went away; soon after which Miss
Ruth, too, was called by another party of promenaders—a Schuré group,
Fanny Schuré burnished in coloured fires like mother-of-pearl, with
whom Miss Ruth stopped to gossip, the innocent with the guilty, Dr.
Lepsius and Miss Eve meantime going on to the mosque.
And there, sitting alone in a casement, they two spoke some time in low
tones, while more and more the moon imbued the night with the mood of
her beauty and her quietude, and communed sleepily the lily-leaves of
the pool. It was when they were getting up to go away that Dr. Lepsius
said, “But I mustn’t trouble a bride with an old man’s sorrows—in three
days’ time you will be a bride, and I rejoice in your choice, which I
think a wise one.”
Miss Eve had risen, seeming in her white evening-dress, with whitest
cheeks, even weird in that sheen, and she replied with a chuckle, “It
was prophesied me that I should not be a bride for some time to come!”
“By my son?... Well, he has no little might in this lower world,” the
old man murmured, “but have no fear, he is by no means omnipotent, and,
as I have hinted, he is at this moment in extreme peril for his own
skin.”
Sharply at this, with a haughty heave-up of her chin, Miss Eve asked,
“Who could touch him?”
“Ah! it is dubious,” the old man said musingly, bending over his oak
stick; “still—I believe—by many eyes, and by many hands, and by the
agreement of many wits and wills of men and God, it shall be achieved!”
and now he struck the stick sharply upon the _perron_ of steps down
which they were now passing to the path, Miss Eve laughing a little
with a meaning that was hardly understood, saying, “And his father, if
I am rightly informed, is with his enemies?”
“That is so,” said Dr. Lepsius with an inclination of his head, whereat
she stopped walking to face him, asking, “With your eyes quite open,
Dr. Lepsius?”
“Well, I hope so,” the doctor answered.
“You have thought, then, of what will certainly happen, if—after—I am
married on Friday?”
Dr. Lepsius glanced up at her, having noted her tones go shaky, and on
beholding her face bony with agitation, said with some astonishment,
“No, what will happen?”
“Your son will _kill_ himself.”
And while the doctor with an eye of scare stared at her, she with a
certain roistering and hilarity added, “And since royalty should have
servants rejoicing to join in its voyages, _two_ you may see, if not
more, go to attend on his ghost.”
“Two—I do not quite——” the doctor stammered.
“I meant my poor father for one,” she sighed, continuing to walk.
But since her “kill himself” the doctor had but absently heard what was
said, and “kill himself!” he cried suddenly, crimson with anger, “let
him! let him! I will go to his funeral! For I’d sooner follow him to
the tomb——”
“Now, Dr. Lepsius, a father ought not to be down on a son,” Miss Eve
said, “though I know that he has been beastly to you.”
At this tears gushed to the old man’s eyes. “Oh, it isn’t that, dear
Eve—it isn’t the bitter ingratitude, the bruise, the gash in here: but
how shall I not be against him in what he undoubtedly aims to bring
about, when the mouth of every gash which he gives our race will shout
out in rage against me? You see, do you not——?”
But now the old man, touched on the shoulder, looked about, and saw
Monsieur Leflô, who had come down an _allée_ in the leafage as a
messenger of the Count de Courcy, seeking the doctor; so the doctor
went off with Monsieur Leflô, while Miss Eve, spying Miss Ruth in a
group ahead, moved to go to her; but suddenly became aware of a stump,
stump, of one limping in an _allée_, and in some seconds was accosted
with a murmur of the word, “Mademoiselle.”
It was Monsieur Brisson of Rouen.
And when Miss Eve looked at him without seeming to know him, he, though
undoubtedly agitated, said with a coarse chuckle that she and he had
been shoulder to shoulder at the Quai d’Orsay that evening when a
particular individual had dared to take a liberty with her lips: at
which thing Miss Eve stood like a queen who stands astonished at so
much insolence under the sun, then silently went on her way.
But this Monsieur Brisson was not one who could be banished with a
chin; he followed to breathe near Miss Eve’s ear, “I wish to speak to
you of him, he may be here to-morrow, and I have a message....”
“_Here?_”
“Let us go down that _allée_.”
She hesitated, and he glanced like lightning at his watch. “Only three
minutes to be with you—come.”
Now she walked with him into the dark of the _allée_, looking down at
the ground, like one magnetised, drawn with a cord.
“For what reason will he be here?” she breathed.
“On business.”
“You are to inform your master, monsieur,” she then said in a haughty
manner, “if Monsieur Lepsius happens to be your master, that I know him
to be in much danger, so that he should have a care.”
“Oh, trust in him!” said Monsieur Brisson imploringly, stumping along
by her side with dippings of his right shoulder; “do you imagine that,
loving you, he can miscarry? He feels that the breath of his love is
vibrant enough by itself to heave mountains out of their beds, and bear
them as bubbles to the sea. Nor is his danger so much; it will be
nothing, if you will consent to fly with me this instant.”
“This instant?” she whispered furtively: “to fly? Away? With you?...
But what, then, am I? A beast, with a beast’s soul? Evil to the core?
Reckless, furious, moon-struck? Is there no Christ for me on high, I
wonder? No right? No wrong?”
“If you came,” said her companion with some bitterness, though touched
by her trouble, “it would save much time; and you would come, if
hypocrisy was not your breath and bread,” upon which she rushed into an
irritation not to be restrained, crying, “That is monstrously untrue
and unkind! I mean well!”
“Well,” he said, “I did not expect you to come with me, for I know you.
But you have to show me the windows of your bed-chamber.”
Now she stopped walking, standing tall, gaunt, her heart galloping up
in her gorge, asking, “Why my windows?”
“Oh, nothing: just show,” he muttered; and when she had stared a little
while at him, she paced on in silence.
Presently she went down another _allée_ which led them to the terraces
at the front and south of the house, and hence went on to the brink
of a lake which laved with its waters a platform of marble at the
château-back. Not a soul was thereabouts, no sound, only the spirit of
the moon brooding upon the face of the lake and down the solitude of
avenues of yews; and here immediately Monsieur Brisson stooped to whip
off that thick-soled boot of his, whipped off his frock-coat, wrapped
his two boots, with his top-hat, his spectacles, and his waist-coat in
the coat, and cast all into the water, where they sank; in doing which
very hurriedly, he asked, “Well, which are your windows?”
She, with her back toward the house and toward him, her brow bent
downward, replied to the ground in a proud guttural that trembled, “I
am sure I do not know why such a question should be asked of me.... My
windows happen to be those two on the first floor immediately over the
balcony-end near by the statue—since it seems that the knowledge is
desired.”
The plash of the coat with its weight sounded now in the lake, and
“Monsieur Brisson,” that bow of his right leg quite gone, stood now
limber on his bare feet, his elbow suddenly about Miss Eve’s waist:
whereat she, feeling his lips stealing near her face, went fearfully
pale; nearer, and she shivered with sickness; nearer, and she sucked in
her breath as at luscious juice and shooting pangs, sighed “By heaven,”
and had his lips.
He put her to lie on a bench of marble by the waterside, whence she
through her half-shut eyelids watched him run away with a deer’s ease
up an avenue of the park, and disappear in darkness.
Some way down that avenue was a summer-house in a bower, and there the
runner stopped his career some seconds to conceal beneath the seat
some sheets of paper, a piece of pencil, and two tiny tools of steel
like keys, then shot on. And it was there that at 6 p.m. the next day,
as Lepsius was driving from St. Brieuc station to the château in a
carriage of Monseigneur Piscari, the carriage stopped, and was at once
surrounded by a crowd of _pioupious_ and others. When he demanded of
them what was the matter, they answered that he was a captive, and
Captain Pertius, who was with them, then proceeded, with a perfectly
ashen visage and hands which shivered like leaves, to search each nook
of Lepsius’ costume, even his shoes, searching especially for a certain
little key, which, however, was not to be found. Lepsius’ trunk was
sent on to the house, and everything taken from him. “Oh, let one have
his watch,” he protested, but without effect. However, by an act one
might say infinite in deftness, he contrived as he was being hustled
down out of the carriage to snatch behind him the watch of Shan Healy
who attended him, and was not seen. He was then imprisoned in the
summer-house with a sentry of some ten mounted upon him; and in there,
having taken the paper and pencil from their place of concealment
beneath the seat, he threw himself, face down, on the seat, and in a
brown light began to draw diagrams.
On the day commencing to dim, he took out his collar-stud, touched it,
and it shed round his sheets an electric sheen.
Soon after two in the morning he was removed to the room fitted out for
him in the tower; the same hour the members of the League being met in
council to congratulate each other and resolve on the next measures.
But early the next day their joys suffered much alloy through the
turning up at the château of a certain Monsieur Brisson of Rouen, who
had no resemblance to that first Monsieur Brisson of the conference!
this new Brisson having the story to tell that, on going to a bogus
business interview in Rouen, he had been imprisoned in a room by a gang
of men, his papers grabbed, and he made to write a letter to his family
saying that he was safe, and in Amiens on affairs. Only after four and
forty hours had he been set free. So now the problem arose—_who_ could
have been that Brisson-of-the-limp who had attended the conference?
Lepsius, however, was there in the tower, safe enough, which was
everything.... It was an eight-cornered chamber where he was, arranged
with some little luxury, and large; but he suffered, being unaccustomed
to be between walls, and here was but one window, with bars in it,
while, as to the lush carpet, the eye of his consciousness was at every
moment open to the microbic hordes that must be at barracks within it,
nor could he bathe with ease, he who bathed frequently each day, nor
was the food such as was usual with him, being much too luscious.
This was first served to him by a person who had a beard and appeared
to be a man, but was not so loosely costumed but that certain curves
of the womanly could be observed in him—or her. On seeing her when she
bore in his breakfast, Lepsius moaned, and flew to the other extremity
of the chamber, where he held a chair-back, ready if she attacked; but
when she had put down the breakfast without glancing at him, and had
gone, his brow reddened, and having begged one of four guards for pen
and ink, he wrote to Monseigneur Piscari, asking whether monseigneur
was privy to the fact that one Jeanne Auvache, a convict with a mania,
who had been aided by his, Lepsius’, enemies, to evade prison, had been
sent to attend upon him. He received no answer to this, but the woman
ceased to appear at meals.
It was a superb day—the third of July—and by springing up to his little
window-ledge, and hanging on, as he twice did, he could see groups of
elegant folk moving remotely over the terraces or gossiping in retreats
of greenery, appearing pigmy far down below all that half-globe of sky
and tabernacle-hall of cloud, like spirits idling in paradise; and
once he was able to make out the face of Mr. Vickery, and once knew
Miss Ruth, but of that form that his eyes sought saw no sign.
Most of the day he spent on his face on his table over plans of
buildings and machines, which he concealed when the meals came in
at one o’clock and at seven in the evening—for it was not suspected
that he had any pencil and paper; and when the meals—none of which he
touched—had been cleared away, he bathed at a basin of delf ware that
stood on a tripod of iron under the window. This window looked toward
the west, though the tower itself formed the south-east corner of
the château, which looked eastward. So as the afternoon’s heat waxed
fierce in the room, he drew down his blind of dimity, and now continued
his labour cooler in a cave of shade which the blind’s maroon colour
imbrued with a blush of ruby; but when the sun had well declined, he
anew drew up the blind, sprang up to the window, and, like a monkey
peering keenly into something never previously seen among its trees,
clung on long to peer into the scene of the sunset—a sight rather high
and tragic really for the heart of a man, the sun going down all among
bars of crimson, the brow of God drooped, disgloried, His arms far
outcast in gory crucifixion. Then the door opened and the meal of the
evening came in, to be immediately taken away untasted; and now with
feet of impatience, frowning, the prisoner paced about the chamber. No
light was brought him when it became dark, for his jailers, having an
apprehension that he might turn objects to unusual uses, took care that
as few objects as might be should be in the chamber, not even a knife
having been taken him with the meals. But by the aid of an electric
stud, he spent some time in prying into the make of the lock of the
door, though he had already looked into it two nights before, after the
conference, in his rôle of “Monsieur Brisson”: which done, near eight
o’clock, shunning the bed with its bed-clothes, he chose a part of the
floor where no carpet was, cast a look at Shan Healy’s watch, and went
to sleep there.
He knew (having been at the council), that at the hour of two he was to
be roused to go on board a brig, bound for the bastille on the Ile de
Bas; so he had commanded Shan Healy to conceal himself in the château
and come to the prison-door exactly at 1.50, so as to help Lepsius to
carry a load which Lepsius conceived that he would have need to carry.
Ten minutes, then, before that 1.50, at a moment when preparations were
being made in the château below to take him to the ship, Lepsius awoke
to act. He was still at the lock of the door with the two little tools
that he had hidden in the summer-house before his capture, when howls
of “Help! help!” broke out without the door, and he was made aware that
Shan Healy must be engaged in a struggle with the greenhorn _pioupiou_
on guard out there; but the _pioupiou’s_ howls were at once drowned in
the sound of a disturbance resembling the bursting of some tremendous
drum somewhere, which just then made the château to tremble through its
breadth and length; and before that roaring was well over, Shan, who
had felled the _pioupiou_ with the _pioupiou’s_ lantern, broke blithely
with the lantern-light into the room, the lock of whose door had at
that moment opened to the key of Lepsius.
But the poor fellow’s blitheness had no long life. He did not enter the
chamber alone—at least, scarcely less closely than a shadow follows
did the feet of a female follow him in. No word had yet been uttered
between Shan Healy and Lepsius, and Lepsius was just going to call
out “Come!” (in a din now as dreadful as all the guns of Armageddon
mouthing, the house racking its frame to fragments, the ground quaking)
when he changed his “Come” into a shout of “Out with the light!” at
the same moment bolting to the other side of the chamber. But either
Healy did not hear, or stood in a condition of mind too flurried for
sprightly action (for he, too, had spied the woman as she had slammed
the door after her); at all events, nothing was done as to the light,
and Lepsius, as he pelted, moaned, the ogress after him, staring,
her hair cut close, ugly, ghostly, grim as the very grave. “Shoot!”
shrieked the fugitive to Healy, who, too, was in hot pursuit; but, even
assuming that Healy was able to hear in the blare of that tumult, he
must have perceived that he lacked the time to fire—unless, indeed, he
was quite wondrously quick—because at that moment the woman’s arm was
drawn back to throw her liquid; he saw it; did not see that by this
time Lepsius was safe, having a chair with which to hide his face; and
as the fluid was starting from the vial, wildly Healy flew between,
receiving the bath of vitriol all over his right cheek and throat.
He could not help shrieking...!
“Idiot!” hissed Lepsius, who, as he now darted away, caught a weapon
out of Shan’s pocket, sent with one glance backward and a nervous
gurgle of chuckling a bullet into the woman’s bosom, which, however,
chanced not to end her, and was out and away.
Right through the howling hell of the house from east to west he had
now to hie: and fleet were his feet and alight his eye. Twice only he
stopped a moment, once when, in pelting up a stair, he met flying down
in a nightgown a girl whom with his lowered head he felled by butting
her, knowing that if she descended she would be butchered; and a second
time he stopped in a corridor to take the vial and handkerchief which
as “Monsieur Brisson” he had placed there behind a painting. No want
of light anywhere: for at various places the building was already in
flames, which flames, serving as flambeaux, reddened the chambers
where no flame burned; but as he spurted onward with his vial, the
flooring violently sprang beneath his feet, and he was thrown against
a wall, where he remained rather aghast some moments, until smoke in
his throat caused him to cough, and anew he flew, though at one point
forced to win his way with toil and patience over floorless joists.
And afresh every forty seconds or so all the house started at a sound
which opened its mouth to appal the heart and astound the darkness
with the message of its solemnity, after each of which deep-mouthed
sounds count one second’s pause and waiting, and now came downfalls
crackling, like the brittle outbreaks of arrays of rifles prattling:
for the bombs resembling night-lights that “Monsieur Brisson” had left
behind statues, etc., had been timed to fuse, not in a mass, but one
by one; and though he had so placed them in the below-stairs as not
much to imperil the lives of the château slumberers, they were many,
and were meant by him thoroughly to wreck the structure wherein men in
their vanity had ventured to hem him. Anon he was aware of fugitives,
single or in groups, staring, conscious of sin and of doomsday come:
the Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, all toothless now, his nightshirt aflaunt,
flying down a curving stair, calling out upon the rocks and hills to
cover him; then the stout Abbé Sauriau clambering over a mound of
débris, his trousers unbraced; then through the fumes that rolled all
round a courtyard Miss Ruth Vickery in a dressing-gown on a gallery,
dragging her father faster than he could go, Monsieur de Courcy, too,
with them, Lepsius himself then flying along a lower gallery on the
opposite side of the court; and as they were going west—to see to Miss
Eve, he guessed—and were well ahead of him, never did his feet so
fleetly speed. The delay of some seconds occasioned by the invasion
of his chamber by Jeanne Auvache had disturbed the course of events
as forecasted by him, and he had hardly burst into his darling’s
apartments and turned the outer key, when her father’s poundings were
sounding at the panels without.
Erect on her bare soles in an alcove, robed in a bedroom-robe of lace,
a stone stone-still, her hair a rope plaited to a bow of ribbon at her
knees, Miss Eve stood, waiting, aware of his tumults, but beauteously
dead, as one who has interviewed the stare of Medusa; and all in a
tick, like a cat fawning, Lepsius was cast at her feet, kissing them,
pleading, “Dear, will you come with me?”
Her friends were pressingly clamouring at the entrance; they screamed,
“_Eve!_”
She took no notice of them, if she heard; as to Lepsius, she hurled up
her right hand to strike him dead, crying, “You brute!”
“Oh, do—for us two—beloved——”
“I bitterly hate and abhor the pair of us!”
“But you will get us both killed——”
“Thank God!”
Now he started up, an arm about her. “I have to make you faint,” his
handkerchief at her face; and like fate she took it, did not fight, or
very slightly, resigned herself, smiled, sighed, closed her eyes ...
and in some moments, by means of a sheet, he had reached the platform
of marble thirty feet beneath, heard through the turmoil in his rear
the noise of guns booming before—a signal from his yacht in the
bay—leapt the balusters with his burden into the lake waters, waded,
swam a bit, obliquely north-westward, reached the lake’s bank, and
there among reeds and bulrushes sat down to breathe and rest, her brow
on his breast.
Southward, a smoke that soared to the clouds was being poured
out steadily from the château, which ever throed inwardly with
loud-bursting noises and sounds of rumbling like poisoned bowels and
Etna boiling; and that plume of fume-and-fire slanted continually from
point to point of the compass, for a wind boisterously blew, drizzle
sprayed the face, and the moon, while suffusing the night wildly with
the whiteness of her light, was herself quite hidden away out of sight
in cloud.
Lepsius was soon up and gone again with his load, knowing that pursuit
would not be slow: but it was a great labour; the country there is
rugged; Miss Eve, drugged, could not, or would not, keep on her feet;
Healy, with whose help the load would have been easy, moaned in his
agonies somewhere; and the bay lay nearly a league away.
However, half-way to the shore he found waiting in a gorge where the
gloom was gross under crags the Hindoo Nundcumar, together with four
of his mariners, their eyes raised to the inflamed sky; nor was it
long before a little half-harbour snoring in sleep between the arms
of beetling crags, a brig’s green and crimson beams, a steam-yacht’s
three beams, lay before them, and near a little pier of stone the men
of two boats who lay on their oars for him, one a boat of his foes,
one his own; and flushing the vault of heaven, even here, a false dawn
flung far abroad from the château, and over the shore the breakers
making their snoring, Miss Eve’s feet bleeding, and streamlets of
drizzle-spray in haste on her face.
They lodged her, still unconscious (as it seemed), among cushions,
and plied to the ship, which, lying with steam at a moment’s notice,
immediately steamed away, turning toward the west: and rushing
she went, urgently churning the sea—a long boat burnished with
Tobin-bronze, burning the eye like a strip of the sun; and as the dawn
worked and began gradually to overspread all the world of waters and
of coast, Lepsius, prying a port on the stern, spied like pearl the
pinnacles of Serapis.