that everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only take comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you. "Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absentmindedly. There W&S that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened animal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and bone. "I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps tomorrow and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to ask him a question. "Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, 'and rather distressing. Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about-about what I spoke to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am beginning to think that there is a fourth. . . . "He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. "That world is the Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, and perhaps I am getting near the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of. I tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost screamed, that no mortal can think of and live.' "You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning out of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with mathematics? I don't see it yet... At any rate, I——— You may be sure I cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The only way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And yet I couldn't, you know-it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving bosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross, very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty often...." The pony, with a great elevenpointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches and emerged on the white glen highway. Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, "between dog and wolf," when the mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on the morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Those airy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns! "I want to hear the end of your story," I told him, as the lights of the Lodge showed half a mile distant. "The end was a tragedy," he said slowly; "I don't much care to talk about it. But how was I to know? I couldn't see the nerve going. You see I couldn't believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have seen. But I still think there was something in it-up to a point. Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows. . . . "I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started I got a postcard from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words-'I know at lastGod's mercy.-H. G. H.' The handwriting was like a sick man of ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend. I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary olimbing accident-you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talked about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals—the usual rot. There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body was only recognised by the clothes. He had fallen several thousand feet. "It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs and Dupont, and they had done some hairraising things on the Aiguilles. Dupont told me that they had found & new route up the Montanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a 'diable fou,' and if you know Dupont's standard of madness you will see that the pace must have been pretty hot. 'But Monsieur was sick,' he added; 'his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved for him and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.' "He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day he spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everything in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister. The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the Grèpon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below. "He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his tongue. We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. The thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the twilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After all, there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind to comfort. Leithen, I saw, did not share my mood. He looked glum and puzzled, as if his tale had aroused grim memories. He finished it at the Lodge door. "... For, of course, he had gone out that day to die. He had seen the something more, the little bit too much, which plucks a man from his moorings. He had gone so far into the land of pure spirit that he must needs go further and shed the fleshly envelope that cumbered him. God send that he found rest! I believe that he chose the steepest cliff in the Alps for a purpose. He wanted to be unrecognisable. He was a brave man and a good citizen. I think he hoped that those who found him might not see the look in his eyes." 2 R VOL. CLXXXIX,—NO. MCXLVII. THE BIG BASS OF SALAJAK. ON a hot afternoon in the middle of July, I took train at Haidar Pasha Terminus for Pendik, a village at the entrance of the Gulf of Ismidt, and there picking up my ancient fisherman Yanni, with his hulking son, and an extra slave to row, we waited for the Bey, whose smart 35-ton yawl was riding free outside the pier-head. Our party was small, consisting only of the Bey, my friend A., and myself, with the aforesaid 'fishermen, and a crew of three brothers and the house gardener, taking down flowers for the villa on the sea at Dermendereh. At seven o'clock our host arrived, and in ten minutes we were heading for Touzla Point under a fair breeze. One of the beauties of yachting in the Gulf of Ismidt is the night wind, which blows steadily from sunset till dawn, and no sooner had we rounded the head than we were served at the rate of a good nine knots. It was & glorious night, with the moon just waning from the full, and the air fresh and cool after the almost tropical heat of the day. The origin of the expedition was an old yearning of mine to make acquaintance with the big bass of Salajak, a place lying between Derinjeh and Ismidt, near the head of the Gulf on the European side. A. had just come back from six weeks spent in pursuit of them, in company with Niko, the hopeful son of Yanni, the master of craft; and his record of seventeen-pounders caught on the rod, and bigger fish, as usual, lost, had fired my soul with emulation. When the Bey said to me over a cup of coffee in Stamboul that he was going down for the week-end to a little property he had bought at Dermendereh, not an hour's row from Derinjeh, and that if I liked I could come with him and fish, it was too good an opportunity to lose. And in spite of his recent long sojourn on the waters of the Gulf, A. was almost as anxious as myself to have another try for "that twenty-pounder" who had thus far beaten him, and he was included in the invitation. On our way down, the Bey entertained us with bottles of stout, and stories of the revolution and of his own checkered career. He had been for a while one of the ruling spirits of the Committee, and was now contemplating the result of his efforts. It cannot be said, however, that he looked upon it with entire satisfaction, and no European critic could have been severer on the errors committed, or more keenly alive to the difficulties that still beset the new régime. He was quite a self-made man, and told us how, when a mere lad, employed in one of the Ministries at five pounds a-month, he had conceived the ambition of founding a newspaper. But he had not a farthing in the world, and to begin with he started trans lating one of Jules Verne's hope of reaching Dermendereh novels. When he had saved up by dint of the utmost economy some couple of hundred francs, he had the first sixteen sheets of his Turkish translation printed, and, with his mother and sister, folded, cut, and stitched them at home. The sale far exceeded his expectations, and enabled him to continue, and put by a little profit on each serial issue. He then decided on a venture so daring as almost to frighten himself, and with nearly the whole of his capital bought up the plates of the French editions to illustrate a Turkish one. It was the first attempt in this direction, and it was a huge success. And so he went on from small beginnings, till he determined on publishing a weekly illustrated paper. Before doing this he went to Paris, and worked for three months in an office there, to learn the various stages of lithographing and other illustrative processes. Two of his young friends-he himself was not much more than twenty-joined in furnishing the capital, and the paper was launched and has continued ever since. The Bey is at present at the head of this and another daily paper, and of the largest and most modern printing establishment in Constantinople, filled up with the newest English, French, and German machines, the whole having been made into a Company of which he is manager and principal shareholder. The hours slipped by quickly, and towards eleven we turned in, with the sure and certain at dawn next morning. But the extra deck passengers probably had a great deal to talk about, and instead of attending to the chart, were so engrossed in cigarettes, coffee, and exchanging ideas, that at two o'clock we were roused by a slithering jar, and shouts of "Kathisomai' ("We are Яground"), and so we were,piled up on a sandbank within a couple of hundred yards of the lighthouse at Dil Bournou, too, a most extraordinary proceeding on a fine moonlight night, for which no excuse was, or could be, forthcoming. The captain appeared to have gone to sleep, and left the tiller to his second brother, who must have left it to itself. The Bey took the accident philosophically, and there was none of the language that most skippers would have employed, though his silence did not exactly bode well for the culprit. Of course there was a tremendous show of activity now evinced by all hands, but after laying out anchors in various directions and tugging on them, it was clear that we were bedded for two-thirds of our length on the sandy bottom, and that, except by being hauled off by some passing steamer, there was not the remotest chance of moving. At about five Yanni ranged up in his caïque, which we had towed behind us from Pendik, and with a cunning leer on his orabbed old face whispered, "Suppose we throw a shrimp?" As no steamer was likely to pass much before ten, I slipped overboard, and we rowed off |