Hieroglyphics
Hieroglyphics
By
Arthur Machen
"Author of "The Great God Pan," etc.
London
Grant Richards
1902
TABLE OF CONTENTS
| Page | |
| NOTE | v |
| I | 1 |
| II | 42 |
| III | 68 |
| IV | 99 |
| V | 125 |
| VI | 150 |
| APPENDIX | 171 |
NOTE[v]
It was my privilege, many years ago, to make the acquaintance of theobscure literary hermit, whose talk I have tried to reproduce in thepages that follow. Our first meeting was one of those chance affairsthat now and then mitigate the loneliness of the London streets, and asecond hazard led to the discovery that we had many interests in common.I think that the Hermit (as I shall call him) had begun to find theperpetual solitude of his years a growing terror, and he was not sorryto have a listener; at first, indeed, he talked almost with the joy of achild, or rather of a prisoner who has escaped from the house ofsilence, but as he chose subjects which have always interested meintensely, he gave as much pleasure as he received, and I became anassiduous visitor of his cell.
He had found an odd retreat. He avoided personalities, and had a happyknack of forgetting any that I vouchsafed on my side, (he forgot my namethree times on the first evening that we spent together, and succeeded[vi]in repeating this feat over and over again since then), and I nevergathered much of his past history. But I believe that "something hadhappened" many years before, in the prehistoric age of the 'seventies.There had been a break of some sort in the man's life when he was quiteyoung; and so he had left the world and gone to Barnsbury, an almostmythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road. Here,in the most retired street of that retired quarter, he occupied tworooms on the ground floor of a big, mouldy house, standing apart fromthe street and sheltered by gaunt grown trees and ancient shrubs; andjust beside the dim and dusty window of the sitting-room a laburnum hadcast a green stain on the decaying wall. The laburnum had grown wild,like all the trees and shrubs, and some of its black, straggling boughsbrushed the pane, and of dark, windy nights while we sat together andt