I understood nothing of all this, of course, and was standing bewildered, when the old obscenity beckoned me.
“See,” he said, taking his pipe from his mouth and pointing with the scarlet tongue of it: “a beautiful landscape, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” I faltered.
“Ah!” said he. “I’ll tell you—just you, mind. I don’t take a-many into my confidence. It’s the beauty of pain, child; a local inflammation in the system.”
I murmured something, and he chuckled.
“They call this tower ‘Rupert’s Folly,’” he said privately; “and I laugh, settin’ up here in my shell. D’ye think they’d laugh too, if they guessed where the smut came from that blasted of their crops?”
“From you?” I whispered.
He bent over, and pointed upwards. For the first time I noticed that the muzzle of a telescope projected from the little dome on the roof. While I was gazing, I suddenly felt my wrist in the clutch of his apish claw.
“Hush!” he said. “It’s there I gathers my star-powder, and discharges it where I will. I’m Briareus, the last of the Uranids, left behind to rack the world to all eternity for its presumption.”
He let me go, squinting and nodding at me. I backed from him in horror. Nothing was plain to me but that here was one of those astrologic demons who delight to bring heaven close that they may measure our remoteness from it, and to cast away poor souls amidst the eternal silences. That he seemed to rave was nothing. Such inhumanity is in itself a madness.