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gondola is riding is getting thicker, at all events,” he went on, resuming the narration of his dream.
    â€œI get the impression that we are reaching a length of the Grand Canal in which there is nothing but oil. The black stuff begins to pour over the gunwales in a thin sleek waterfall. Yet the Black Gondola is moving ahead as steadily and strongly as ever and even more swiftly. We are like an airplane taking off—downward. Or like a submarine diving.
    â€œI nerve myself to loosen my grip on the gunwales and make a wild plunge toward the bank, although I fear I will drown in even that short distance. But at that instant the gondolier’s pole comes down firmly on my right shoulder, projecting perhaps a yard ahead of me and pinning me to my seat. Though its injunction not to move is more hypnotic, or magical, than physical, it is absolute. I cannot stir, or break my grip on the submerging gondola.
    â€œI know this is Death. I peer yearningly one last time for the lights of a mounting airplane. Then as the oil, moving past me in an unending sleep caress, mounts to my face, I shut my lips, I hold my breath, I close my eyes.
    â€œThe oil covers me. I am aware in those last paralyzed seconds that we are moving still more swiftly through the black stuff. Yet the solid oil rushing past does not unseat me from the gondola, or even tug at me. The effect is always of a great unending caress.
    â€œDeath and Agony do not come. I wait for the urge to breathe to become overpowering. There is no urge. The straining muscles of my chest and jaw and face relax.
    â€œI open my eyes. I can see through the oil. It has become my medium of vision. By a darkly green shimmering I can see that, still descending and even more swiftly now, we are traversing a great rocky cavern filled with oil. Evidently we plunged into it from the Grand Canal, by way of some unsuspected gate or lock, while I waited with closed eyes for my death-spasm.
    â€œDuring the same period of blindness, the Black Gondolier has moved from behind me and taken up a position below and a little ahead of the Black Gondola, dragging it along like some mythic slim long dolphin or infernal merman. Now and again past the forward gunwales I glimpse, greenly outlined in midkick, the black soles of his long narrow sharply pointed feet—or bifid narrow tail-fin.
    â€œI say to myself, ‘I have received the Black Baptism. I have partaken of the Black Communion.’
    â€œOur speed ever increasing, we pass through weird grottos, we twist and turn through narrow passageways whose irregular walls flash with precious gems and nuggets of gold and copper, we soar across great vaults domed with crusty salt crystals glittering like thick-packed diamonds.
    â€œI know, even in my dream, that this picture of underground oil in vast interconnected lakes and tanks is false by all geology—that untapped oil is mixed with earth and porous rocks and shales and sand, not free—but the picture and experience remain the same and exquisitely real. Perhaps I have suffered a size-change, become microscopic. Perhaps I have suffered a sense-change and see things symbolically. Perhaps geology is false.
    â€œOur speed becomes impossible. We flash about like a single black corpuscle in the oil plasma of the great world-creature. I know, intuitively, that one instant we are beneath Caracas; the next Ploesti; then Baku, Iraq, Iran, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Columbia, Oklahoma, Algeria, Antarctica, Atlantis . . .
    â€œIt is more as if we were flashing through black outer space, softly gleaming with galaxies, than through earth’s depths.
    â€œThere is a feeling of nightmare-ride now . . . wild whirlings and spiralings . . . a blurred glitter . . . a blessed sense of fatigue . . .
    â€œYet at the same time I become aware that the white-green sinuous gleamings I see are the nerves of oil, which stretch everywhere to every tiniest well; that I am approaching the