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CHAPTER IV.
THE FALL
"Whoever associateth any other with God is like that which falleth from heaven *** *This is so."-Al Qur'an, Chapter XXII.
As is evident from the heading of the present chapter, we are transporting the reader to the little-explored dark continent of mythology, where he must prepare himself for a fight with the Dragon of Superstition, whose very touch reduces all that lives to dust. This is the land of strange spectacles, of unlikely events and impossible relationships, the region where people seldom hesitate to pronounce, on little or no provocation, the most deadly and dreadful of curses which are also immediately effective on those with whom they are displeased; it is the realm of un-human men, of un-womanish women, of un-goddish gods,-in short, of all that has its raison d'être in a sense of delight at the discomfiture and breaking down of poor, normal commonsense. In this quaint and uncanny region is distilled the terrible vintage of unreasoning, fanatical faith a few drops of which suffice to produce a life-long insensibility of wits, its sense-stealing properties not being the result of any physical processes of fermentation, but of the magnetism of the magic personality of its Brewer, the High Priest of Superstition and Myth. He who would free his soul from the effects of the
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