Brood of the Witch-Queen quotes

“Yes, in a bottle. His governor is at Bart’s; he sent it up yesterday. You ought to see it.”

“Nobody will ever want to put your brain in a bottle,” predicted the scowling Sime, and resumed his studies.

Cairn relighted his pipe, staring across the quadrangle again. Then—

“Only that if some of your books are to be believed, sir, Trois Echelle, D’Ancre and others have gone to the stake for such things in a less enlightened age!”

“Less enlightened, boy!” Dr. Cairn turned his blazing eyes upon him. “More enlightened where the powers of hell were concerned!”

“Think! Have I spent half my life in such studies in vain? Did I labour with poor Michael Ferrara in Egypt and learn nothing? Just God! what an end to his labour! What a reward for mine!”

His voice had become husky. Dr. Cairn stood still, as a man of stone, watching him.

“In the stillness, very faintly, they rustled!”

Silence fell. A car passed outside in Half-Moon Street; its throb died away. A clock was chiming the half-hour after midnight. Dr. Cairn spoke:

At present it is evidently localised. There are laws governing these things; laws as immutable as any other laws in Nature. One of them is this: the powers of darkness (to employ a conventional and significant phrase) cannot triumph over the powers of Will.

Below the Godhead, Will is the supreme force of the Universe. Resist! You must resist, or you are lost!

”

The flood of strange words was dammed. Ferrara stood quivering, but silent.

“The laws by which such as you were burnt⁠—the wise laws of long ago⁠—are no more,” said Dr. Cairn. “English law cannot touch you, but God has provided for your kind!”

“Perhaps,” whispered Ferrara, “you would like also to burn this box to which you object so strongly?”

“How can you know?” she whispered. “How can you know! Oh, Dr. Cairn!” She laid her hand upon his arm—“if you can prevent those dreams; if you can assure me that I shall never dream them again—!”

It was a plea and a confession.

This was what had lain behind her coldness—this horror which she had not dared to confide in another.

Port Said, a panorama of twinkling lights, lay beneath him.

The beam from the lighthouse swept the town searchingly like the eye of some pagan god lustful for sacrifice.

He imagined that he could hear the shouting of the gangs coaling the liner in the harbour; but the night was full of the remote murmuring inseparable from that gateway of the East.

She raised the jewelled hands, and with a swift movement discarded robe and yashmak, and stood before him, in the clinging draperies of an ancient queen, wearing the leopard skin and the uraeus, and carrying the flail of royal Egypt!

Her pale face formed a perfect oval; the long almond eyes had an evil beauty which seemed to chill; and the brilliantly red mouth was curved in a smile which must have made any man forget the evil in the eyes.

But when we move in a dream world, our emotions become dreamlike too. She placed a sandalled foot upon the mud floor and stepped out of the sarcophagus, advancing towards Dr.

“By God! Look!” whispered his son.

Swathed in white wrappings, Antony Ferrara lay motionless before them.

The seconds passed one by one, until a whole minute was told, and still the two remained inert and the cold light shone fully upon that ivory face.

It was his own—which he had handed to his father in that awful cellar at the moment when the first spider had dropped; and a card was enclosed, bearing the pencilled words,

“With Antony Ferrara’s Compliments.”

Dr. Cairn turned himself in his chair, looking fully at his son.

“The smell of Hades, boy!” he said grimly, and turned away again.

“Naturally,” continued Sime, “I can give you no particulars on the point, but it must have been something very fearful to have affected the Egyptian native!

… of granite, its peculiar orange hue a ghastly yellow in the moonlight, now assumed truly monstrous proportions, seeming like a great square tower rising in three stages from its mound of sand to some three hundred and fifty feet above the level of the desert.

There is nothing more awesome in the world than to find one’s self at night, far from all fellow-men, in the shadow of one of those edifices raised by unknown hands, by unknown means, to an unknown end;

for, despite all the wisdom of our modern inquirers, these stupendous relics remain unsolved riddles set to posterity by a mysterious people.

He was gasping, as if nearly suffocated, but retained a wonderful self-control.

Once over into the Borderland, and bravery assumes a new guise; the courage which can face physical danger undaunted, melts in the fires of the unknown.

Sime, his breath whistling sibilantly between his clenched teeth, hauled himself through the low passage, with incredible speed. The two worked their way arduously, up the long slope. They saw the blue sky above them. …

“

Until the Pyramid of Méydûm is pulled down, stone by stone, the world will never know her fate!

Sime and I have looked in at the gate of hell! Only the hand of God plucked us back! Look!”

It is needless to recount, here, the broken sentences (punctuated with those first kisses which sweeten the memory of old age) that now passed for conversation, and which lovers have believed to be conversation since the world began.

As dusk creeps over a glorious landscape, so the shadow of Antony Ferrara crept over the happiness of these two.

Gradually that shadow fell between them and the sun; the grim thing which loomed big in the lives of them both, refused any longer to be ignored. Robert Cairn, his arm about the girl’s waist, broached the hated subject.

“I do not approve of orchids,” jerked Cairn doggedly. “They are parodies of what a flower should be.

Place an Odontoglossum beside a rose, and what a distorted unholy thing it looks!

”

Will no exact scientist condescend to examine the properties of a planchette? Will no one do for the phenomena termed thought-forms, what Newton did for that of the falling apple?

Ah! Rob, in some respects, this is a darker age than those which bear the stigma of darkness.

”

“He focuses his will—yes!

The man who can really control his will, Rob, is supreme, below the Godhead.

Ferrara can almost do this now. Before he has become wholly proficient—”