mimicked the miracles of the apostles.

* * * * *

It was now dark; the order to extinguish all lights on the moor had been
obeyed. Only a panting sound as if from a wilderness of frightened
animals betrayed the presence of thousands. As long as the sun shone
there had been a babel of sound; at the disappearance of our parent
planet, a hushed awe had fallen with the night. Gone the rude joking and
wrangling, the crying of children, and the shrill laughter of the women.
A bitter breeze swept across from the waters, and the stars were mere
twinkling points.

Then from the vault of heaven darted a ribbon of emerald fire. It became
a luminous spiral when it touched the sea of glass, which was like unto
a floor of crystal. This was the sign of Karospina's undertaking, his
symbol of the road to moral perfection. Gerald recalled Whistler's
pyrotechnical extravaganzas. Following this came a pale moon which
emerged from the north; a second, a third, a fourth, started up from the
points of the compass, and after wabbling in the wind like gigantic
balloons, merged overhead in an indescribable disk which assumed the
features of Michael Angelo's Moses. Here is a new technique, indeed,
thought Gerald; yet he could not detect its moral values.

A golden landscape was projected on land and sea. A central aisle of
waters, paved by the golden rays of a lyric sun high overhead, was
embellished on either side by the marmoreal splendours of stately
palaces. An ilex inclined its graceful head to its liquid image; men
moved the blocks that made famous in the mouth of the world Queen Dido's
Carthage. Clouds of pearl-coloured smoke encircled the enchanting