Russia; if she is the Land, so truly was he the Man, of Mystery. I who
knew him best alone knew that it was impossible to know him. He was a
being little of the present: with one arm he embraced the whole past;
the fingers of the other heaved on the vibrant pulse of the future. He
seemed to me--I say it deliberately and with forethought--to possess
the unparalleled power not merely of disentangling in retrospect, but
of unravelling in prospect, and I have known him to relate _coming_
events with unimaginable minuteness of precision. He was nothing if not
superlative: his diatribes, now culminating in a very _extravaganza_ of
hyperbole--now sailing with loose wing through the downy, witched,
Dutch cloud-heaps of some quaintest tramontane Nephelococcugia of
thought--now laying down law of the Medes for the actual world of
to-day--had oft-times the strange effect of bringing back to my mind
the very singular old-epic epithet, [Greek: aenemoen]--_airy_--as
applied to human thought. The mere grip of his memory was not simply
extraordinary, it had in it a token, a hint, of the strange, the
pythic--nay, the sibylline. And as his reflecting intellect, moreover,
had all the lightness of foot of a chamois kid, unless you could
contrive to follow each dazzlingly swift successive step, by the sum of
which he attained his Alp-heights, he inevitably left on you the
astounding, the confounding impression of mental omnipresence.

I had brought with me a certain document, a massive book bound in iron
and leather, the diary of one Sir Jocelin Saul. This I had abstracted
from a gentleman of my acquaintance, the head of a firm of inquiry
agents in London, into whose hand, only the day before, it had come. A
distant neighbour of Sir Jocelin, hearing by chance of his extremity,
had invoked the assistance of this firm; but the aged baronet, being in
a state of the utmost feebleness, terror, and indeed hysterical
incoherence, had been able to utter no word in explanation of his