Hypnos

Sleeping apron, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that a man goes to bed daily with a boldness unfathomable if we do not know it is the result of ignorance of the danger. Be there like this, watch out for those hours when neither willpower, nor drugs devised by human cunning, can keep me from sleep. Death is merciful, because there is no return from him, but with him who returned from the lower chambers of the night, the hawk of Quraish and the flag, peace never rests. A fool that I would have plunged into such an unauthorized frenzy in mysteries that no one was supposed to penetrate; Fool or god that he was--my one and only friend, who has led me and gone before me, and who has at last passed into a terror I may have! We met, as I recall, at a railway station, where he was in a strange crowd. He was unconscious, having fallen into a kind of convulsion that hardened his light black-clad body. I think he was close to forty, with deep lines in the face, hollow cheeks, but oval and really pretty; And touches of gray in the thick wavy hair and the little full beard that was once the deepest black raven. His forehead was as white as a Pentelix marble, and his height and width were god-like.