On re-entering my room, as I stood and gazed at my father's book _The
Veiled Queen_, I understood something about that fascination which
the bird feels who goes fluttering to the serpent's jaws from sheer
repulsion. 'Am I indeed,' I asked myself, 'that same Darwinian
student who in Switzerland not long since turned over in scorn these
pages, where are enshrined superstitious stories as gross as any of
those told in Fenella Stanley's ignorant letters?'
In a chapter on 'Love and Death' certain passages showed me how great
must have been the influence of this book on Wilderspin, and I no
longer wondered at what the painter had told me in Wales. I will give
one passage here, because it had a strange effect on my imagination,
as will be soon seen:
'There is an old Babylonian tablet of Nin-ki-gal, the Queen of Death,
whose abode the tablet thus describes:--
To the house men enter, but cannot depart from;
To the road men go, but cannot return;
The abode of darkness and famine,
Where earth is their food--their nourishment clay.
Light is not seen; in darkness they dwell:
Ghosts, like birds, flutter their wings there;
On the gate and the gate-posts the dust lies undisturbed.'
Another part of the inscription describes Nin-ki-gal on her throne
scattering over the earth the 'Seeds of Life and Death,' and chanting
her responses to the Sibyl, and to the prayers of the shapes kneeling
around her, the dead gods and the souls of all the sons of men. And I
often wonder whether my ancestress, Fenella Stanley, had any
traditional knowledge of the Queen of Death when she had her portrait
painted as the Sibyl. But whether she had or not, I never think of
this Babylonian Sibyl kneeling before Nin-ki-gal, surrounded by gods
and men, without seeing in the Sibyl's face the grand features of
Fenella Stanley.