To the readers of this poem an apology is needed for affixing thereto a praem. Some friends of mine have been plaguing me beyond the restrictive line of Patience for the true cause of conceiving the accompanying collection of words, balderdash or what you will, some even asseverating with the eruditeness of an Aristole that it was a nebulous idea, an embryonic form of thought hibernating within the cavities of my sinciput's inner apex, the remnants of that wild phantasmagoric dream of "vicious, vulpine labyrinths of hell," partly expounded in my "The Flight of a Soul."
Now to satisfy everybody but my friends I throw my prejudices to the winds and confess, to wit: That I, with the buckler of Will, wooed Oblivion on September the sixth at exactly 5 p.m., having been up at my desk mauling and drubbing the English language with a vengeance for thirty-six consecutive hours, and that I awoke at 12.30 a.m. that selfsame night with the entire contents of the accompanying——? (have as yet not decided in what category the critics will consign this weird hypotyposis of the Supernal) jingling through my tired brain. I set to work at exactly 12.45 a.m. and wrote until our esteemed companions of the nocturnal hours ceased their unloved music (mosquitos), 5.05 a.m., hied myself back to bed and hypothecated as many winks as Dame Slumber saw fit to allot to me, who am at continued war with her silent wand. The same tactics were employed during the succeeding fifteen nights, wherein I penned eight thousand one hundred and sixteen (8116) lines. This is the truth, the whole and integral truth, and nothing but the unexpurgated truth, so help me Muse (she's blind as a bat) and Satan, of whom I've writ in such an unbecoming manner that, henceforth, I must perforce seek my future Elysian in other haunts than those of the above named Cosmopoietic's own, for fear that his uncoped wrath may blast me into an ape-faced minstrel or, like one red-haired varlet draped with the cognomen of "Nero," use my unbleached bones for illuminating the highway to his insidiate lair.
To the readers this question may present itself, to wit: Why place Hell in the bowels of Betelguese? Why not the sun or moon?
In the first instance the former sphere is eliminated as a possibility on account of its nature. Being a huge nucleous mass of aËriform fluid, nothing containing animal or vegetable life could possibly exist either on or within its bowels. The moon, too, is excluded for the same reason as is our earth, it having at one time been a part of the latter, broken off by one of the giant planets long before the pleioncene era. Betelguese being a celestial pariah, an outcast, the largest of all known comets or outlawed suns in the universe; and, further, so long as Hell has not been definitely placed, why not figure this hybrid planet as a possibility?
Astronomers throughout the world remember the colossal outburst in the constellation Perseus that occurred on February 20, 1901, when one sun exploded, or two made collision with appalling force. It was observed through telescopes and could be seen with the naked eye in full daylight. Both suns were destroyed as suns—that is, they were turned into thin gas and vanished from sight of the largest telescope within less than a year.
Had each sun been the centre of a system of eight worlds like our sun; and imagine each world, sixteen in all, to be inhabited with human beings; then they all perished in a short time after collision and died of what the astronomers call "fervent heat."
Vega, far more larger than our sun, appears stationary. Our sun, with its family of moons and comets, is moving toward it at the fearful pace of fourteen miles per second. At its present rate of speed—and if Vega is really a "fixed" planet—then our sun would reach it in 320,000 years. However, it is a known certainty that the quantity of matter that is invisible is so much greater than the visible that the visible may be ignored. There may, too, be hundreds of millions of dark bodies, extinct constellations far larger than our own sun. Any one of these could approach our solar system and annihilate it with its impact for, in passing the orbit of the earth on their way around the sun, they attain a regular velocity of 26½ miles per second. If one of these dark comets should overtake the earth and strike it, the velocity of impact would be about eight miles per second; but if it should meet the earth in a head-on collision, the speed, when it struck, would be forty-five miles per second, a momentum beyond the power of the brain to fathom—indeed, man can not think of sixty miles per minute. Let a solid nucleous collide with the earth and imagination would reel at the result.
The earth moves over 18½ miles every second, and this added to or subtracted from 26½ makes 45 or 8. If a comet should strike at right angles to the direction of the earth's motion the speed of collision would be 26½ miles. But 8, 26½ or even 15 would hurl destruction if large enough.
A visible change is taking place in the giant sun Betelguese. Its nebulÆ is slowly but surely disappearing. One hundred years hence it may be a dark planet, invisible to even the most powerful telescope. However, Hell will reign on, through eons and eons; and, if this sun, or any other, contains its kingdom, and mankind lives for another thousand years or more, those who should be so unfortunate as to miss the jagged heights to Paradise need not worry, for glozing imps will lead them to the fasthold of Typhon's weird home. Have no fear.
September 22d, MCMVII.
