St. Peter was polishing the large knocker of the Gate of Heaven, leaving it as bright as the sun—which is not to be wondered at since the knocker St. Peter was cleaning is the sun we see appearing every morning in the east.
The holy porter, merrier than his colleagues at Madrid, was humming some little air not unlike Ça ira of the French.
“Hola! You get up very early,” said he, bending his head and staring at a person who had stopped before the threshold of the gate.
The unknown did not reply, but bit his lips, which were thin, pale, and dry.
“No doubt,” continued St. Peter, “you are the savant who was dying last night?... What a night you made me pass, friend!... I never closed my eyes once, thinking you might be likely to knock; my last orders were not to let you wait a moment, a piece of respect paid to your sort here in heaven. Well, welcome, and come in; I can’t leave the gate. Go through, and then straight on.... There is no entresol.”
“THE STRANGER DID NOT STIR FROM THE THRESHOLD.”
The stranger did not stir from the threshold, but fixed his little blue eyes on the venerable bald head of St. Peter, who had turned his back to go on rubbing up the sun.
The newcomer was thin, short, and sallow, with somewhat feminine movements, neat in his attire, and without a hair on his face. He wore his shroud elegantly and nicely adjusted, and he measured his gestures with academic severity.
After gazing for some time at St. Peter working, he wheeled round and was about to return on the journey he had come he knew not how; but he found he was standing above a gloomy abyss, in which the darkness almost seemed palpable, and a horrisonous tempest was roaring with flashes of livid light at intervals like lightning. There was not a trace of any stairs, and the machine by which he dimly remembered he had mounted was not in sight either.