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Now raise yourself up a little higher hold on to the grass if you feel giddy so and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea." I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive.

Perhaps the most fascinating and the most dangerous character in the infernal world is this Mater tenebrarum Our Lady of Darkness. “A lady devil,” says Daniel Defoe, “is about as dangerous a creature as one could meet.” When Lucifer fails to bring a man to his fall, he hands the case over to his better half, and it is said that no man has ever escaped the siren seductions of this Diabo-Lady.

He seems to have been suckled from birth at the breast of that Mater Tenebrarum, our Lady of Darkness, whom De Quincey in one of his 'Suspiria de Profundis' describes among the Semnai Theai, the august goddesses, the mysterious foster-nurses of suffering humanity. He cannot say the simplest thing without giving it a ghastly or sinister turn.

They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable," and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi." We will say, then, that I am mad.

Around the place of the head the words princeps tenebrarum could be deciphered. In the lower hemisphere there was a space hatched all over with cross-lines and marked as umbra mortis. Near it was a range of mountains, and among them a valley with flames rising from it. Above and below Draco were outlined various figures not unlike the pictures of the ordinary constellations, but not the same.