of its eyes, darted swiftly up and down the miles-long fiery trail of its all-penetrating tongue, split into myriad needles of fire, and with long voluptuous licks sucked away the man's marrow, until the man, all shivering and shaking, was scorched and roasted and shrivelled within. . . . The beast left him no blood, licked up his marrow and blood and poured fire into him instead. When the beast smacked its lips voluptuously, when it greedily swallowed the blood and the marrow, when the man thought that he was dying, then the beast pricked him with a needle of its fiery tongue and goaded him to shivering-point; and the man shivered and raised himself high upon the waves with his shivering, as though his fever were a stormy sea. . . .
Thus the man lay twisting and tossing, till he put out his hands towards the demon and tried to fight the beast with human hands. . . . And it seemed to him as if he were flinging his hands, the hands of a brave man and a martyr and a hero, around the beast; and, while the stormy sea, the sky, which was churned into billows by the contortions of the beast, bore him up and up and up, he fought and wrestled with the ever more violently writhing and coiling beast; and the beast humped its way through the sombre universe of clouds, shooting out its thousands of feet; its head was now here, now there; its tail flicked now high, now low; the beast lashed earth and sky; the beast became
