somehow I had remembered that early adventure in the slime, and that it
was a verity of long-previous experience, when I was not yet Darrell
Standing but somebody else, or something else that crawled and bellowed.
One experience was merely more remote than the other. Both experiences
were equally real--or else how did I remember them?

Oh, what a fluttering of luminous images and actions! In a few short
minutes of loosed subconsciousness I have sat in the halls of kings,
above the salt and below the salt, been fool and jester, man-at-arms,
clerk and monk; and I have been ruler above all at the head of the
table--temporal power in my own sword arm, in the thickness of my castle
walls, and the numbers of my fighting men; spiritual power likewise mine
by token of the fact that cowled priests and fat abbots sat beneath me
and swigged my wine and swined my meat.

I have worn the iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and
I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and
sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of
peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted
the roaring of lions and the cries of jackals. I have crouched in chill
desert places warming my hands at fires builded of camel's dung; and I
have lain in the meagre shade of sun-parched sage-brush by dry
water-holes and yearned dry-tongued for water, while about me,
dismembered and scattered in the alkali, were the bones of men and beasts
who had yearned and died.

I have been sea-cuny and bravo, scholar and recluse. I have pored over
hand-written pages of huge and musty tomes in the scholastic quietude and
twilight of cliff-perched monasteries, while beneath on the lesser
slopes, peasants still toiled beyond the end of day among the vines and