Where the sky was not red it was black. The place looked like hell.
Another time Orth's imagination would have gathered immediate
inspiration from this wildest region of England. The fair and peaceful
counties of the south had nothing to compare in infernal grandeur with
these acres of flaming columns. The chimneys were invisible in the lower
darkness of the night; the fires might have leaped straight from the
angry caldron of the earth.
But Orth was in a subjective world, searching for all he had ever heard
of occultism. He recalled that the sinful dead are doomed, according to
this belief, to linger for vast reaches of time in that borderland which
is close to earth, eventually sent back to work out their final
salvation; that they work it out among the descendants of the people
they have wronged; that suicide is held by the devotees of occultism to
be a cardinal sin, abhorred and execrated.
Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary
people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates
their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed
greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush,
once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world.
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