THE GATES OF HELL.
MY bedside book was The Pilgrim's Progress. In it I was reading as my eyes closed;-- '• So they told the King, but he would not come down to see him; but commanded the two Shining Ones that conducted Christian and Hopeful to the City to go out and take Ignorance and bind him hand and foot and have him away. Then they took him up and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill and put him in there—Then / saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction- So I awoke, and behold it was a dream!" And I dreamed, and in my dream I stood at the Gates of Hell.
He who has seen the entrance to the Pisani Villa at Stra can form an impression of what I beheld. He will remember the stupendous insolence and grandeur of that strange enormity of architectural magnanimity. Huge pillars, wreathed not with garlands of fruits and flowers, but with the spirals of flying staircases, flank the vast portal—itself a huge triumphal arch. On each side the colossal boundary walls slope away in long perspective, pierced and fretted with minor gates and private posterns, some actual, some merely decorative achieve- ments, but all conceived on a scale of gigantic magnificence. Who drew them I know not, but if I were told that Piranesi in the wildest and yet most grandiose and most terrible of his opium dreams flung those gates, pillars, arches, walls, and columns upon the drawing-board of a brother-architect, I should not doubt the legend. But at Stra the cracked buff stucco resolves the turbulence and menace of the design. In my dream it was otherwise. There it was not stucco, or stone, or any kindly work of mason or bricklayer, but the dreadful product of the furnace and the fire. The Gates of Hell and the colonnaded boundary wall that shut in that soul-shaking enceinte were all of shining yellow brass and towered far above their earthly prototype, if prototype it were. On the outline waved and flickered a pale-blue sulphurous flame. Its light tongues licked the tops of the columns, the convolutions of the stairs, the endless levels of the architrave, and the bases of the columns. It was as if some cunning artist in illumina- tion bad picked out all the salient points with his quivering lamps. But all that was nothing to what I most call, for want of better and juater words, the aerial background of the Gates. As I looked I knew what Virgil and Milton meant when they wrote of gates, though gates so different "With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms." Through the bare of the Gates, all along the top of the walls, at the minor openings I saw, and felt where I could not see, these awful presences—a suffusion of white, wan visages, fierce, threatening, ill-ominous. They were everywhere watching me with their wicked eyes, and yet I could never hold or catch their glance. They looked over me, under me, above me, beyond me, through me, and beside me, but never at me. Outside the Gates of Hell surged a crowd so vast, so tem- pestuone, so unruly, so disarrayed that I know not how to describe it. Nothing that I have ever read of beaten armies, of despairing and hunger-stricken mobs, of men maddened by the thoughts of plunder and revenge, will help me to paint that surging ocean of the damned. Its moat significant
and awful feature was its tireless vacillation. That was constant and essential. It took new phases every moment, like the slimy, frothy, changeful stuff in some sorceresa's shameful cauldron. Here, as it were, bubbled up shapeless abortions from the bottom. There sank from the top things terrible and things obscene. But always vacillation was the dominant. Fear was uppermost, and fear is the begetter of wavering and despair. Like some monstrous jelly quaked and quivered the throng, or shivered and grew still for an instant of mutable equilibrium more atrocious even than the wild lap and surge and eddying rushes that succeeded it. And all the time there was clear, ringing laughter in the air—not from the crowd outside, for they were speechless, but from inside the Gates. It was "Laughter heard of." The most dread- ful thing about this laughing was not that it was almost silvery in tone, but that it was drilled, regular, controlled—made to order. It was the laugh of an infernal elague—of people ordered to laugh, and of people who knew and did their horrible business perfectly. May I never hear that rippling, shimmer- ing sound again! It most come from the place from which come the smiles, the gestures, the voices, and the beckoning. of the mad. The dreadful faces seemed as nothing to that far-away, limpid, yet cheerless laughter floating up from the deepest depths of the Pit—far far down, beyond even the reach of thought.
The crowd surged and shivered, sweated and splashed round the Gates, and the grim guardians were perpetually pulling in batches of the men and women who had been thrown up by that sea of sorrow, or rather of despair, for sorrow has something in it of dignity and gentleness. Hers was no dignity. but all was savagery and implacable discouragement. Yet not quite all. As I watched more narrowly—it was the privilege of that dreadful place that all one's faculties were tuned to an inhuman pitch of sensitiveness—I saw standing close outside the gates, yet not of the armies of the lost, some of those whom Bunyan calls "Shining Ones." These Shining Ones scanned the men and women before them keenly and not unkindly, and every now and again they would seem to recognize and then single out an individuaL These they took gently aside, and led them to where I saw a little archway hardly four feet high in a great wall capped by a cloud, and, what was strange, inside the arch were steps that seemed to go upwards not down. But it was a winding stair, and those who trod it after they had bowed their heads and bent their knees to enter were soon lost to view. And I noticed that those whom the Shining Ones touched on the shoulder and led by the hand to the little low archway seemed at once to lose the strange. rigid contraction that bad belonged to them but an instant before, as to all that throng. They grew suddenly relaxed. With tears and low lamentations and tremors of the limbs, they leant on the Shining Ones as if they felt once more the pains of dissolution. Yet a moment before they had seemed things of steel or granite.
Often they were of a prouder and more confident bearing than the real, and did not share the vacillation of the crowd, but marched even to the Gates of Hell itself with head erect and a brave, confident bearing. I saw one especially who bore himself like some gallant soldier almost without fear, or, at any rate, with fear repressed. His arm enfolded a woman. But her face was knotted with horror and dread, and again and again she buried her teeth in his shoulder in her selfish and shameless agony. He, however, looked down oa her with something that even in that blue glare seemed like mercy and lovingkindness. I could even—greatest miracle of all in such a place l—hear him speak. "I'll stand by you whatever happens. I'll go with you to Hell itself. They can't separate us. I'll make it impossible. We'll face it together whatever it ie." But she did not listen or regard him, but only struggled to get free, and bit and frowned and spat on him in her dumb fury.
When the Shining One touched the man's shoulder, he whom I had thought so haughty and so hard fluttered and grew quiet like a captured bird. The splendid taut thews and sinews gave way. The fierce blue eyes softened and shone like those of a girl. His arms fell to his sides, and the woman sprang away from him, shaking him off with malice and terror. Spurning him with her foot, she ran hither and thither in her agony. For him that touch of the Shining One's finger had been the wave of Lethe. He had already forgotten everything—even her for whom he had marched to the infernal Portal and dared the Powers of Hell to keep him out. Very gently they led him to the little archway, set his feet upon the stair, and I saw him no more.
Then I turned to one who stood near me, and whom I knew for a guide to those who wander in their dreams to places strange and far, and asked him the meaning of what I had seen, and he answered : "There is a way to Heaven, even from the Cates of Sell, as well as from the City of Salvation."
So I awoke, and behold it was a dream f lanorne.
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