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foolish and blind, to say those very

words!
    Yet the gods hear even the maunderings of fools. And some-times, their eternal hearts are moved to

compassion by the very blind stubbornness of those who deny them.
    Oh, my beloved, forgive me for the blindness that continued my work, my mission, in the selfsame

narrow crevice of scien-tific methodology for which I so scorned my poor benighted colleagues here!

That I continued it stubbornly, seeing nothing beyond what I thought was “truth,” while all the while a

greater truth was approaching, like the inexorable descent of thunder-clouds from the Simla hills to the

plain!
    He is coming, and we all of us-you, me, Vixie-will be saved!
    ***
    Dreams of blood. Dreams of life, like specks of flame, coursing and sparkling through his veins. Deep

in opiated sleep, it seemed to Renfield that he was yet awake, aware of each separate life in the world,

like individuated atoms of searing light.
    When he had taken opium in India, he had had such a vision. He had felt himself separately conscious

of every beetle, every monstrous roach, every solitary white ant in the swarms that dwelt beneath his

bungalow, every bird in the trees and every snake in the weeds, aII of them: a seething mass of life

soul-shaking and wonderful in its hugeness.
    Even in this thin chilly climate, he was aware. Flies, spiders, sparrows … the brilliant dots of their

individual lives glittered and danced in his veins. The kitchen cat he’d seen through the window the other

day, who had fired him with such wild hopes, so cruelly and unnecessarily dashed. Fools, all of them … !

From the window he’d seen her looking at him, gazing across the space between them with round golden

eyes.
    In his dream those eyes returned to him, drawing him to them through darkness. But he saw now that

they were a man’s eyes. Cold gripped him, the damp cold to which even eighteen years back in his native

country had not accustomed him. Cold, and the smell of the ocean. In his dream he was standing, and

underfoot the rough boards of a ship’s hold rocked. He heard the slosh of waves against the hull, smelled

the familiar stinks of a cargo-hold, rats and bilge-water and dirty leather and rope, and above all else the

thick, mouldy smell of earth. The ship was transporting boxes of dirt-Renfield mentally calculated the cost

per pound of shipping, and concluded that someone must be both rich and mad. In Rome he had visited

a monastery whose chapels had been floored with earth brought from Jerusalem, that the monks who

died might be buried in the holiest ground in Christendom without the inconvenience of making an actual

pilgrimage. Was there, he wondered sardonically, some equally pious coward still at large in England?
    How did he know the ship was bound for England?
    Then he saw the eyes. Not gold now, but red, gleaming from a dark shape which rose up from among

the earth-boxes. A cloaked form, hiding power in the folds of its garments, like the Pilgrim God in

Wagner’s Siegfried: the Wanderer stepping from the shadows, concealing yet unable to conceal all of

what he is.
    Renfield sank to his knees. “Who are you?” he whispered, and to his lips came the words in German of

Mime the Dwarf from that opera. “’Who has tracked me to this retreat?’”
    A voice which seemed to emanate less from the column of darkness before him, as from the dark at the

back of his mind, whispered, echoing the words of Wagner, “’Wanderer’ the world calls me:

wide are my wanderings; I roam at my will all the earth around.’”
    A vast shudder shook Renfield’s bones. He managed to breathe the name, “Wotan . . .” but could

make no other sound. The dark shape continued: “’I’ve mastered much and trea-sured much;

I’ve told wondrous tales to men. Men have believed Their wisdom great, but it is not

brains that they should treasure. ‘”
    “`I have wit enough,”‘ Renfield gasped-Mime gasped. “’I