On the contrary, at the moment there seems to have been a slight retrograde movement; man is Homo insipiens. We are hovering on the brink of a precipice, winding round that dizzy path up which we may ultimately reach the peaks of Wisdom, but off which we may so easily topple to destruction.

Blanche Stroeve was in the cruel grip of appetite. Perhaps she hated Strickland still, but she hungered for him, and everything that had made up her life till then became of no account. She ceased to be a woman, complex, kind and petulant, considerate and thoughtless; she was a Maenad. She was desire.

[…] to the Hebrew and Arabic word “korban” as now used in the Abyssinian Church to denote the sacramental bread specially prepared in the “Bethlehem,” or “House of Bread.”

He put out his arms and folded her to his breast. And for a while she lay there sobbing. He looked at us over her bowed head, with eyes that blinked damply above his quivering nostrils. His mouth was set as steel.