my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I
went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and
almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming
before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or
supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
accept it.

For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that
time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous
incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its
decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really
seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and
metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at
dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal
candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this
spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to
someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely
over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the
clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr's--not only his
interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,
but also his unexplained and mysterious end?

Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great
personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who
have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow
of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with
mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,
like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the
present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;