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By Root 8867 0

worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there. Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together. While what had given rise to all these reflections was doubtless only the photograph on the wall both were now studying, whose presence there at all must surely discount most of those old stories, of a small camouflaged freighter, at which the Consul suddenly gestured with replenished toothmug:

" Everything about the Samaritan was a ruse. See those windlasses and bulkheads. That black entrance that looks as though it might be the entrance to the forecastle, that's a shift too--there's an anti-aircraft gun stowed away snugly in there. Over there, that's the way you go down. Those were my quarters... There's your quartermaster's alley. That galley--it could become a battery, before you could say Coclogenus paca Mexico...

" Curiously enough though," the Consul peered closer, "I cut that picture out of a German magazine," and Hugh too was scrutinizing the Gothic writing beneath the photograph: Der englische Dampfer tragt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-boote. "Only on the next page, I recall, was a picture of the Emdenk the Consul went on, "with 'So verlies ich der Weltteil unserer Antipoden,' something of that nature, under it. 'Our Antipodes.'" He gave Hugh a sharp glance that might have meant anything. "Queer people. But I see you're interested in my old books all of a sudden... Too bad... I left my Boehme in Paris."

"I was just looking."

At, for God's sake, A Treatise of Sulphur: written by Michall Sandivogius i.e. anagramatically Divi Leschi Genus Amo; at The Hermetical Triumph or the Victorious Philosophical Stone, a Treatise more compleat and more intelligible than any has been yet, concerning the Hermetical Magistery; at The Secrets Revealed or an Open Entrance to the Sub-Palace of the King, containing the greatest Treasure in Chymistry never yet so plainly discovered, composed by a most famous Englishman styling himself Anonymus or Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita who by inspiration and reading attained to the Philosopher's Stone at his age of twenty-three years Anno Domini 1645; at The Musaeum Hermeticum, Reformatum et Amplificatum, Omnes Sopho-Spagyricae artis Discipulos fidelissime erudiens, quo pacto Summa ilia vera que Lapidis Philosophici Medicina, qua res omnes qualemcunque defectum patientes, instaurantur, inveniri haberi queat, Continens.Trattatus Chimicos xxi Francofurti, Apud Hermannum a Sande CID IDC LXXVIII; at Sub-Mundanes, or the Elementaries of the Cabbala, reprinted from the text of the Abbi de Villars: Physio-Astro-Mystic: with an Illustrative Appendix from the work Demoniality, wherein is asserted that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides men...

"Are there?" Hugh said, holding in his hand this last extraordinary old book--from which emanated a venerable and remote smell--and reflecting: "Jewish knowledge!" while a sudden absurd vision of Mr Bolowski in another life, in a caftan, with a long white beard, and skull-cap, and passionate intent look, standing at a stall in a sort of medieval New Compton Street, reading a sheet of music in which the notes were Hebrew letters, was conjured to his mind.

"Erekia, the one who tears asunder; and they who shriek with a long-drawn cry, Illirikim; Apelki, the misleaders or turners aside; and those who attack their prey by tremulous motion, Dresop; ah, and the distressful painbringing ones, Arekesoli; and one must not forget, either, Burasin, the destroyers by stifling smoky breath; nor Glesi, the one who glistens horribly like an insect; nor Effrigis, the one who quivers in a horrible manner, you'd like Effrigis... nor yet the Mames, those