“Star of strange hope,

Pharos beyond our desperate mire,

Lord of unscalable gulfs,

Lamp of unknowable life.”

The hopeless, half-satiric yearning for another sphere which he had expressed in this poem, haunted his thoughts with a weird insistence.

“Of course, you have no idea who or what I am,” said the stranger, “though your poetic intuitions are groping darkly toward the secret of my identity. On my part, there is no need for me to ask you anything, since I have already learned all that there is to learn about your life, your personality, and the dismal predicament from which I am now able to offer you a means of escape. Your name is Theophilus Alvor, and you are a poet whose classic style and romantic genius are not likely to win adequate recognition in this age and land. With an inspiration more prophetic than you dream, you have written, among other masterpieces, a quite admirable ‘Ode to Antares’.”

“How do you know all this?” cried Alvor.

“To those who have the sensory apparatus with which to perceive them, thoughts are no less audible than spoken words. I can hear your thoughts, so you will readily understand that there is nothing surprising in my possession of more or less knowledge concerning you.”

“But who are you?” exclaimed Alvor. “I have heard of people who could read the minds of others; but I did not believe that there was any human being who actually possessed such powers.”

“I am not a human being,” rejoined the stranger, “even though I have found it convenient to don the semblance of one for a while, just as you or another of your race might wear a masquerade costume. Permit me to introduce myself: my name, as nearly as can be conveyed in the phonetics of your world, is Vizaphmal, and I have come from a planet of the far-off mighty sun that is known to you as Antares. In my own world, I am a scientist, though the more ignorant classes look upon me as a wizard. In the course of profound experiments and researches, I have invented a device which enables me at will to visit other planets, no matter how remote in space. I have sojourned for varying intervals in more than one solar system; and I have found your world and its inhabitants so quaint and curious and monstrous that I have lingered here a little longer than I intended, because of my taste for the bizarre—a taste which is ineradicable, though no doubt reprehensible. It is now time for me to return: urgent duties call me, and I cannot tarry. But there are reasons why I should like to take with me to my world a member of your race; and when I saw you on the bridge tonight, it occurred to me that you might be willing to undertake such an adventure. You are, I believe, utterly weary of the sphere in which you find yourself, since a little while ago you were ready to depart from it into the unknown dimension that you call death. I can offer you something much more agreeable and diversified than death, with a scope of sensation, a potentiality of experience beyond anything of which you have had even the faintest intimation in the poetic reveries looked upon as extravagant by your fellows.”

Again and again, while listening to this long and singular address, Alvor seemed to catch in the tones of the voice that uttered it a supervening resonance, a vibration of overtones beyond the compass of a mortal throat. Though perfectly clear and correct in all details of enunciation, there was a hint of vowels and consonants not to be found in any terrestrial alphabet. Once more, as if in reply to an evocation, dim, splendid increate images arose in processional on the borderland of his brain and passed uncomprehended to the gulf from whence they issued. However, the logical part of his mind refused to accept entirely these intimations of the supermundane; and he was now seized by the idea that the man before him was some new type of lunatic. Of course, Alvor was far from sharing the vulgar prejudice against lunacy, and his feelings while he received this idea were those of imaginative interest or even envy, rather than horror.

“Your thought is natural enough, considering the limitations of your experience,” observed the stranger calmly. “However, I can easily convince you of its error by revealing myself to you in my true shape.”

He made the gesture of one who throws off a garment. Alvor was blinded by an insufferable blaze of light, whose white glare, emanating in huge beams from an orb-like center, filled the entire room and seemed to pass illimitably beyond through dissolving walls. When his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw before him a being who had no conceivable likeness to his host. This being was more than seven feet in height, and had no less than five intricately jointed arms and three legs that were equally elaborate. His head, on a long, swan-like neck, was equipped not only with visual, auditory, nasal and oral organs of unfamiliar types, but had several appendages whose use was not readily to be determined. His three eyes, obliquely set and with oval pupils, rayed forth a green phosphorescence; the mouth, or what appeared to be such, was very small and had the lines of a downward-curving crescent; the nose was rudimentary, though with finely wrought nostrils; in lieu of eye-brows, he had a triple series of semi-circular markings on his forehead, each of a different hue; and above his intellectually shapen head, above the tiny drooping ears with their complex lobes, there towered a gorgeous comb of crimson, not dissimilar in form to the crest on the helmet of a Grecian warrior. The head, the limbs and the whole body were mottled with interchanging lunes and moons of opalescent colors, never the same for a moment in their unresting flux and reflux.

Alvor had the sensation of standing on the rim of prodigious gulfs, on a new earth beneath new heavens; and the vistas of illimitable horizons, fraught with the multitudinous terror and manifold beauty of an imagery no human eye had ever seen, hovered and wavered and flashed upon him with the same unstable fluorescence as the lunar variegations of the body at which he stared with such stupefaction. Then, in a little while, the strange light seemed to withdraw upon itself, retracting all its beams to a common center, and faded in a whirl of darkness. When this darkness had cleared away, he saw once more the form of his host, in conventional garb, with a slight ironic smile about his lips.

“Do you believe me now?” Vizaphmal queried.

“Yes, I believe you.”

“Are you willing to accept my offer?”

The poet was unable to answer for a short interval. Vast inchoate symbols, broken pictures of a novel allurement and a no less novel horror crowded upon his mind and confused his impulses. Then he remembered his sordid lodgings, his empty pockets, his pile of unsalable manuscripts, and the foul river into which he had been ready to cast himself an hour ago.

“I accept it,” he quavered. A thousand questions were forming in Alvor’s mind, but he dared not ask them. Divining these questions, the stranger spoke as follows:

“You wonder how it is possible for me to assume a human shape. I assure you, it is merely a matter of taking thought. My mental images are infinitely clearer and stronger than those of any earth-being, and by conceiving myself as a man, I can appear to you and your fellows as such. Though I have been among you no more than a few months, I have had no trouble in learning your language, in adapting myself to your ways, and in comprehending all I have desired to comprehend through the same excelling faculty.

“You wonder also as to the modus operandi of my arrival on earth. This I shall now show and explain to you, if you will follow me.”

He led the way to an upper story of the old mansion. Here, in a sort of attic, beneath a large sky-light in the southward-sloping roof, there stood a curious mechanism, wrought of a dark metal which Alvor could not identify. It was a tall, complicated framework with many transverse bars and two stout upright rods terminating at each end in a single heavy disk. These disks seemed to form the main portions of the top and bottom.