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least he should not discount the possibility.

Mansard did not shake off this sense of unreality at once. Indeed, with

the occasion for action past, with nothing to do but explore and reflect,

this sense grew, and with its growth he felt the beginnings of dread --

of a subtle terror worse than anything he had experienced in the hall

outside the transmitter. For it is possible to flee the figures of a

nightmare, but there is no escape from the nightmare itself, but waking.

The worst of it was that none of the people that he passed on the city

streets, the drivers of cars and buses, the clerks in stores, no one would look at him. They disregarded Hansard with an indifference worthy

of gods. Hansard stood between the jeweler and his lamp, but the wraith's

shadow was as imperceptible to the jeweler as was the wraith himself.

Hansard grasped the diamond in his own hand; the jeweler continued his

careful cutting. Once, when he was crossing a street, a truck turned

the corner and without even ruffling Hansard's hair drove straight

through him.

It was as though he were a beggar or deformed, but in that case they

would at least have looked away, which was some sort of recognition.

No, it was as though each one of them had said to him: You do not exist ,

and it became increasingly difficult not to believe them.

So that Hansard walked through this unheeding, intangible city as through

a dream-landscape, observing but not understanding it, not even endeavoring

as yet to understand it. He walked past the immemorial, unmemorable white

stoneheaps of the capital buildings: the unfenestrated mausoleum that

housed the National Gallery; the monumental Yawn of the Supreme Court;

the Capitol's Great White Wart; and that supreme dullness, the Washington

Monument.

Though he had lived in the District of Columbia for the last eight years,

though he had passed these buildings almost daily, though he even supposed

that he admired them, he had never seen them before. He had always regarded

them with the same unseeing, reverential eyes with which he would have

regarded, for instance, his nation's flag.

But now, curiously (for architecture was far from being his immediate

concern), he saw them as they were, with the veil of the commonplace

ripped away. Why, he wondered, did the capitals of the columns

burst into those Corinthian bouquets? Why, for that matter, were

the columns there? Everything about these buildings seemed arbitrary,

puzzling. Presumably they had been built for human purposes -- but what

purpose can be served by a five-hundred-fifty-five-foot obelisk?

He stood beneath the blossoming, odorless cherry trees and tried to argue

against the horror mounting within him.

At those rare moments when the skin of the world is peeled away and its

substance laid bare before us, the world may assume either of two aspects

-- benign or malignant. There are those sublime, Wordsworthian moments

when Nature apparels herself in celestial light; but there are other

moments too, when, with the same trembling sensibility and the same

incontrovertible sureness, we see that the fair surface of things --

all flesh, these white and scentless blossoms, the rippled surface of

the reflecting pool, even the proud sun itself -- are but the whiting

on the sepulchre within which . . . it were best not to look.

Hansard stood at such a brink that first afternoon, and then he drew back.

Once already in his life, long ago and in another country, he had stepped

beyond that threshold and let himself see what lay there, so that this

time he was able to foresee well in advance that such a moment threatened

again. (The symptoms were clear. A minacious cold seemed to settle over

him, followed by a feeling of hollowness that, originating in the pit

of his stomach, spread slowly to all his limbs; his thoughts, like the

music on a record placed off-center on a turntable, moved through his

consciousness at eccentric tempi -- now too