Dark stretches of emptiness! The rush of chaos through endless space! Nothing anywhere that knows.... An equation without a sign....

Off in dark Eternity, a gleam of light—dividing all space—where minus changes to plus, is not to is. Towards it struggles, battling with all its little strength, a mortal consciousness.

Up out of the void, voiceless utterances sweep, like the drone of far-off, undiscovered seas: “Minus 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... Minus 3 ... 2 ... 1.... Decimal point!... 9 ...”

Back around an infinite circle the Soul sweeps to strike again for being beyond the Point!

“Minus—Point ... 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...” intones the judgment from the deeps.

Over and over, the drifting consciousness hurls itself through the wilderness of the Lost—and over and over, the awful voices measure throughout infinity the losing fight. Swept to the pits of zero—Eternal Silence—the Soul, with its last desperate knowing force, sends through the terror of the wastes its agonized appeal: “God, life!”

That other planet had been one of light—light that streamed over the world, and into the faces of its beings. Here, in this ... sphere, black animate shadows—possibly ... very doubtfully, human—crawled in and out of the holes of the universe.

Again, in that unfathomable fashion, two worlds convulsively changed places—and there was no clear mark between the real and the unreal.

Pushing at the mists did no good! One moment you were zero; the next, you were minus.... The horror of it was too much to bear!

At last the pall of those dark, terrible outer places lifted. The girl came fearfully back into consciousness, her being shaken to its foundations by the terror of the thing it had passed through. It had touched awful and unknown areas.

Memories broke through indistinctly, fragmentarily. She had suffered—been fearfully ill: Something had been agonizedly sensible of that. How many beings were there in her to be aware? She had known things before her complete awakening—but had not known herself.

It was not an unpopulated world into which she had dropped: she knew now, somehow, that dim, fearful people were in it—she had heard and felt them ... their passing through the air ... and even the silences that fell dreadfully down upon them.

Over and over her dim, sickened wits repudiated her mind’s claim to this self ... denied that anything that was she could find lodgment in this ragged figurement. The personality offered for her acceptance was distorted out of the slightest semblance of credibility. Some time her real self would come back to her—all gathered together, and decently clad.

Thirst obsessed her every faculty!

She dragged herself up, and found that, though so weak she could not hold one idea long, she was not too ill to move. She felt that if she could get her mind wholly to come back and to grip hard, her limbs would not shake so.

She stared around her in astonishment, her mind fluctuating uncertainly before what she looked out upon. Another chimera! A toppling crazy world, patched together. She gave a mad little scream. How could one live in a world in which there were so many holes? One would be always falling out of them. What incredible kind of senses must one have to exist in those moon-struck huts?

She fled unsteadily out of the hovel where she had found herself. Before what confronted her, her mouth opened again to cry out, but closed gulpingly without a sound. That crooked coast, that retching mouth of a bay, those blood-red nets!

She pressed her hand across her head, as if to hold the recollections that came flitting disjointedly through it, trying fearfully but futilely to make coherent connections. A vision came suddenly shocking before her—revolving, ribald human groups, clawing and jeering about her, only to take flight.

It was indeed in an outrageous form and surroundings that she had found life. They had looted her dress, her shoes, stockings—her hair, which her groping fingers had been so long trying to find. Some one, in saturnine mercy, had flung a filthy rag over her, which automatically she clutched about her. Having picked her clean, it was inconceivable why they had let her live!

Too stupefied to be afraid, she moved about in the nightmare. Strange sounds came from the huts. She stopped and listened, and commenced to tremble in fresh terror. She stumbled quickly away across the sand.

Suddenly her foot struck a bundle of rags. She stopped and gazed down. Something ghastly lay there in the sand: a child struggling hideously with its last pinch of strength—so futile an atom against the forces of the universe! As she stooped closer and stared, horror swept over her in a chill of ice. She knew now why there was no roar of moving here, no devil’s laughter; the place had been stricken with the plague—the creatures were dying like rats in their trash-made huts.

She wanted to run, but in her terror could not command her muscles to move. The child’s head, crusted with sores, lay convulsed upon the sand. She regarded it in horror, repugnance, and pity. Before her shaking vision rose a Pavilion—an Eastern market-place, and from it a leper stretched forth a supplicating hand.

Pestilence-stricken hordes, unstaunched running sores! Day by day she had passed the Pavilion, had shuddered at the leper’s bleached face turned, empty of hope, to the pitiless sun, and had run away. In what dream had she seen those tortured masks?—faces, praying for death—

Always before she had fled—there had come a moment of violent contention with herself, when it had become inevitable that she could not always go round, that sometime she must go through, clear through. She had always run away—failed completely: the cycle of those past failures seemed now to burn like one of their sores within her. And now she was facing again this crisis—her soul finally would no longer let her off. She closed her eyes and put forth trembling fingers. The clutch of the leper closed chilly around them. The circuit at last was complete.

The moment her eyes opened, she uttered a piercing cry. Locked in her grasp lay the hand of the plague-stricken child. The rigid fingers clutched around hers in a last hold upon slipping life. Spasm after spasm of agony tore the puny frame. A great throb of answering human pain shot through the girl’s heart. She sank down in the sand, deliriously clinging to this scrap of life as if it were the last in the world. The child shivered into stillness. Julie stared resentfully, indignantly about her into hot space. Hopeless—hopeless! everywhere! She began to cry weakly, dropping her head in the sand.

Her thirst was overwhelming. She gathered herself up, and crept cautiously among the huts. It was early afternoon, and the denizens of the place were either absent, ill or dying. A few men were fishing out on the bay. Nobody in this hole of death cared anything about her. She moved on, peering stealthily through the apertures of the huts. What she saw staggered her, but she went doggedly on till she came upon some blackened water vessels. She knelt down to drink—the water was afloat with skating insects—joyous, horrible things, dancing on the water of dying men!

She picked up one of the vessels, and went searching till in one empty hut she found some matches and a pot of rice. With her spoils she wandered down the sandy coast to the shelter of a great rock, where, after much diffused effort, she contrived to make a fire of driftwood.

Drowsing upon the sand, she waited for her meal to cook. The thought of leaving this ill-omened spot had already occurred to her, but vaguely and accompanied by the presentiment of obstacles facing her. First, she had no clothes; one could not walk out into the city in an underskirt with a rag over one’s head. Then, she could not reason out where she was to go or what she was to do, if she did go out. Last, hidden in the back of her brain, and not yet presenting itself fully to light, was an insuperable obstacle. Some unknown fettering chain was binding her—she knew that she could not go.

She drank thirstily of the hot boiled water, consumed a part of the rice, and dropped asleep on the sand under the rock.

Again came the torture of the same dream, the hard wrenching out of drift land; it was morning when she awoke—dim morning, before the sun. The first thing her eye lighted on was the vessel of rice. She reached out and ate heartily of it. Then she rose, and walked through the gray shadows of her monstrous world.

Confronting her lay that sordid bit of doomed coast, those crazy huddled huts shaken by the winds of devastation and hiding the terror of death. Across her path a human body lay stark, like a dead fish on the sand. The creature had died there in the night, and no one had come to bury it. She was seized with the frantic impulse to get out of this malevolent place as quickly as possible. She walked past the huts, and heard again the moaning sounds. She stopped in despair. Why had these people been abandoned to their destruction? Where was the Board of Health? Nobody had come to help—nobody was coming.

She leaned back against the wall, beyond which she had meant to escape. She understood now how far beyond control the plague had swept. She gazed back at the thing on the sand, at the livid face, and empty mask that fixed with its hopeless stare. Everywhere somebody was staying to see it out.

Suddenly the complete chain of her life’s circumstances came sweeping back into her consciousness. She remembered why she was here—the stupendous, ineffectual effort she had made to wrench herself free. And here she was back once more in the old insoluble conditions, with nothing changed—up against the same uncombatable odds, dumped here on this spot by a leveling, inconjectural fate, lost among the lost! Her constant use of that odious drug had insured her against the full fatality of the morphine dose. She should have remembered that she would need far more than any one else.

It did not occur to her to try again. The horror of that Outside Struggle still darkened her mind. There was no chance in the world she would not take rather than risk again those unnameable terrors. It had been made absolute that she must go on—even though there was no hope: to struggle and still struggle, to the end. She stood there against the wall, and tried to face once more the relinquished battle.

The moment when resolution came engulfed the world.

Before it these creatures and their tragedy grew dim and the Plague was wiped out. She shook away the tears that had fallen on her face, and walked back to the huts.

A glance through the holes that answered for windows sufficed to reveal the extremity her life had touched. But before the decision at the wall, she had already embraced the plague; before reason had found the courage, an inner self had already stretched forth her hand. And thus began the sojourn in the Pavilion—among dying men.

In sheer surrender beyond belief the creatures gave up to die. The girl did what she could: boiled water, cooked food, cared for the sick, attempted to clean up the wretched community. The bodies were buried along the shore, till Julie managed to get a frenzied appeal through to the Board of Health.

Finally, native servants of the Board came and took charge of the bodies, assisted half-heartedly in cleaning out the dirt, left medicines and food, and promised a doctor—who never appeared. They stood themselves in deadly fear of the cholera, and knew that in the general panic they would scarcely be held to account for this wretched spot. They told Julie that the cholera suddenly, like smoldering fire fanned to flames, had broken out from end to end of the city. Always in cycles of time the Plague had come to sweep them to destruction but never before as now. Terrible was the will of God over his little men. The Americans were taking it too, they said. There were not doctors enough to cope with the pest; certainly—when honest men were stricken—none were to spare for this rogues’ nest. The Americana who was so singularly situated—ought, they thought, to be looking out for herself. It did not matter what happened to this spawn of Beelzebub, to whom not even Mary in Heaven would stoop.

Julie’s mind burned with the fierce rage of defeat—a pygmy battling along the sands of creation, she seemed to herself. At times the cold horror of it seemed about to crush her; a big, hideous game where, in ceaseless opposition, she moved, and the Plague moved, and the Plague took the pieces—a low, one-sided contest in which the pieces had never a chance. They were trash, floatage on the current of life, but they were human. They—who were in the possession of the miracle of thought—to be swept away like straws by this filthy, insentient thing! At times, she too dropped into their mood of apathy and capitulation, but roused always to fight. She pressed into the struggle her every faculty, conjured from passionate depths forces that had never before seen light. Away back in Nahal, she had cast her soul into the beginnings of this struggle, and it seemed as if the old fervor had come to life and was being put to its crucial test.

Along with the Plague, she fought the Hunger. The fire of the old desire burned often in wild spurts. Sometimes she would pace the sand, crying and clenching her hands, hour after hour. When the delirium of the Hunger was at its worst, she would run madly out into the surf and let the water break over her. There was nothing to lean on, nothing to help!

Then the Plague, with its monstrous fatality, would sweep over her senses, and submerge her personal struggle. With so much misery always before her eyes, she began to lose track of herself. The Plague swallowed up everything; it came finally to stand as the real antagonist of her existence, for it sought to rout the supreme stand her spirit had taken. Deep in her consciousness she cherished a dream of eventual conquest, of a time when inconceivably she should win. Just to beat it back once! For so long it had snatched everything from under her struggling hands. Of this she thought incessantly as she made her rounds doggedly, combating each hopeless moment.

But her creatures continued to die as under a doom of God. Julie felt as if she had come up against the wall of the universe, where against its insensible strength her human will was being shattered.

Her charges, terribly broken, had accepted her as a partner of their dark fate. They dug into their miserable stores, and those of them who had still escaped the Plague went forth on errands of industry or depredation, and returned to pour their spoils into the common fund. What marvel of loyalty always brought them back to the accursed spot, Julie could not fathom.

At night she would steal out in the street, to claim her own soul back for a moment. The streets were the universe. Even the grotesqueries had a way of stumbling out toward the open, as if at the last their wretched beings sought egress to freer spaces. She would stand knitting her brows at the darkness, as if trying to claim some solution out of it. Some time she meant to go away—but where? The silent, empty streets troubled her. Up and down them the gay light of the sun had poured upon brightly passing people; the perfume of baskets of flowers being borne to market before the dew was off the day; the cheery grind of ox-carts milling the golden dust of earth; the lilt of the water-carrier’s song; the rhythmic beat of the washer-women’s bats upon the stones; the flash of paddles, and the swish of glad little boats making down the river to the sea—all this had been part of the immortal stir of life that had made this place for them a paradise of the sun.

Terrible days these were! Sometimes peering out in the daylight, she caught glimpses of the dejected funeral processions, the bearers and mourners bowed down, as if the fate of man were too heavy to be borne. The inconsequence of these lives made them more than ever tragic: they were so humble; they never rebelled. Julie thought that if God had been responsible for such things as these, man would have rebelled against Him ages ago; but it was because man saw his own ancestral mistakes made manifest that he bowed his head without protest to their consequences.

There had been heavy toll taken in the Tondo district. In old newspapers that drifted into her retreat, Julie had read familiar names; and, as the black hearses had dragged wearily by, she knew that they carried many of her old pupils. As she watched them pass, a vision would rise before her of big boys in cheap drill suits and barefooted maidens pondering at the blackboards—poor blundering things, eternally wistful over the courtesies and the wisdoms of the West; Julie wept.

Then she would remember that Chad had called her the little lady goddess of the East. Standing in her ragged camisa, gazing from her walls across the streets, a desire would sweep over her to go and reveal to Chad the heart of the East that she had found far from his haunts.

Where was Barry? The query arose a thousand times in her mind. One of the papers had reported that he had left the city. Isabel, too, she gleaned, had taken herself away. Julie recalled the visit Isabel had made to some secret Island, and the paradise she had conjured up.

Her own disappearance, Julie saw, had apparently not caused a ripple of concern. In this hour of stress, her absence from her own world was not noted. Who, after all, was there to remark it? From the Department, from the SeÑor, from Barry even, she had cut herself adrift. She had gone away from the Reredos without explanation: but not even had they troubled themselves to discover what had become of her.

When the pain of her isolation struck too deep, she would steal back behind the broken walls to the oblivion that inevitably lay there. Here where the worms were being trodden out, one was forced to forget one’s own despair. Gradually she forgot everything but the desire to find somewhere a power to conquer the Plague. In its struggle, the girl’s soul seemed to be reaching out toward something which, though she could in no-wise define it, began to appear accessible.

One night, with the old sense of futility and wretched helplessness, she was standing over the body of one of the poor creatures who was taking too long to die. Through the tremendous stretches of space above her great bolts of lightning intermittently flashed. Power! Everywhere, great and invincible power. She wondered passionately what a man must think or feel in his soul to touch the source of it.

The man’s body before her commenced to take on its final repose. His eyes lay open to the sky. Julie, bending over him stared in sudden awe; for from under the dirt and grime of that abandoned thug, a mystery was emerging. Suddenly the Veil pulled apart; down there in the dust—the Common Soul! The Soul that was through all things. She and the worm and God—in one unbreakable bond!