Orpheus going to
find Eurydice. No Cerberus about, thank goodness. Wonder if any rats
or blackbeetles? By the way, Cerberus would have been a nasty one for
rats. Cerberus, with three to one on him ("Heads I win--tails you rats
lose"), doing a match against time in killing rats, is a fine subject
for a weird classical picture yet to be painted. What R.A. could
grapple with so tremendous a composition? On returning to "carp the
upper air," must mention the subject to Sir FREDERICK the Great.
Cerberus would be a nasty one for rats to tackle. My ideas of anything
alive underground are generally associated with suchlike warmint.
At last--out of the tunnel! and now, I presume, in the caves. Here
someone, gradually assuming a palpable form, emerges from somewhere
out of a dark corner, and hands to each of us a long piece of wood
about the length of a harlequin's bat (_note_, pantomime again), only
that this is an inch or so thick and quite two inches wide at one end,
where presently a candle is fixed by an attendant sprite,--the slave
of the tallow candle,--and the wand, so to speak, tapers off towards
the handle. _A propos_ of "tapers off"--the question occurs to me,
later on, as we pass through labyrinths of dark passages, where should
I be in the case of "taper off"? Beautiful title for sensational
story--"Lost in the Catacombs.
Pages:
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49