it swung. What were they? I became silent as night and thought
no more.

Two figures awful in their power opposed each other; the frail
being wavering between them could by putting out its arms have
touched them both. It alone wavered, for they were silent, resolute
and knit in the conflict of will; they stirred not a hand nor a foot;
there was only a still quivering now and then as of intense effort,
but they made no other movement. Their heads were bent forward
slightly, their arms folded, their bodies straight, rigid, and
inclined slightly backwards from each other like two spokes of a
gigantic wheel. What were they, these figures? I knew not, and
yet gazing upon them, thought which took no words to clothe itself
mutely read their meaning. Here were the culminations of the human,
towering images of the good and evil man may aspire to. I looked
at the face of the evil adept. His bright red-brown eyes burned
with a strange radiance of power; I felt an answering emotion of pride,
of personal intoxication, of psychic richness rise up within me gazing
upon him. His face was archetypal; the abstract passion which
eluded me in the features of many people I knew, was here declared,
exultant, defiant, giantesque; it seem to leap like fire, to be free.
In this face I was close to the legendary past, to the hopeless
worlds where men were martyred by stony kings, where prayer was
hopeless, where pity was none. I traced a resemblance to many of
the great Destroyers in history whose features have been preserved,
Napoleon, Ramses and a hundred others, named and nameless, the long
line of those who were crowned and sceptered in cruelty. His strength
was in human weakness, I saw this, for space and the hearts of men
were bare before me. Out of space there flowed to him a stream
half invisible of red; it nourished that rich radiant energy of