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"But one might flow along with it, and let it carry one along," I replied. And even as I spoke, I saw boats drifting on the black water, which came to the shore, each laden with the ghosts of the dead. They left the boats and drifted away to find a rock or a ridge to wait out the rest of eternity. And the boats drifted on downstream, empty.

"One could take one of those boats and let it carry one along," I said.

"The river takes the boats down to the Great Cave, whose mouth is a monster’s jaws," the ghost replied. "If you should take a boat, the current will catch hold of you and bear you along, for the boats have no oars nor rudder, nor any other way to steer. Then the river will carry you into the monster’s jaws, the teeth will destroy the boat and throw you into the water; and you will be lost evermore."

"I am lost already," I said. "There is nothing worse that can happen to me, than I am going through now. I will take a boat, and let it bear me where it will."

"Then you will be as those who have gone before," the ghost sighed.

"So others have gone before?" I asked.

"Yes, and they have never returned. The river took them into the monster’s jaws, and they were heard from nevermore."

"If I am lost, there’s nothing to be done about it. But if I am not, there may be wonders yet to see, and things I can only dream about."

"Then, come back," sighed the ghost like the wail of winds over the frozen wastes. "Come back, and tell me what you find, and what wonders you see. Come back, and let me know."

But I paid it no further heed, and drifted down from the ridge to the bank of the river. Fortuitously a boat arrived just then, small, bearing just three ghosts. And as soon as they had disembarked, the boat began to drift out again into the current.

But I had already climbed aboard it, and let it carry me along. I could not do otherwise, for it had no oars or rudder, or indeed any other way to steer. The current caught the boat, and bore it along past the ghost-crowded banks and the gloomy mountains, until at last it brought me to the entrance of the cave, which was a monster’s mouth set with immense teeth. And then I would have perhaps wished to try to escape the way I had come, but for the anguish that still burned inside me, so that I preferred destruction in the monster’s jaws to an eternal wait among the lightless wastes,

And the current bore the boat into the monster’s teeth, and they crushed and splintered the boat, and threw me into the water, so that I thought I should surely be destroyed. But the water bore me up, carried over the monster’s jaws, and the dark flow bore me down the cave.

And then all around me was darkness – darkness so profound that it went through my very being, darkness that seemed to consume me, and a silence that transcended death, for all that I was a ghost. Through that darkness and silence the black river bore me along, until I truly began to believe that I had merely traded one eternal wait for another and infinitely worse one.

But then the darkness began to lift with a sullen red glow, which began to pervade the cave; and in the glow I saw that I was passing between banks which were crowded with ruins – the ruins of mud huts and great cities, of forts and churches, of slender high-arched bridges of marble and squat watchtowers of granite. And I saw the villages sprout from the mud, grow and change, cottages crushed under the weight of palaces and mansions; and they, in turn, crumbled away, until there were only ruins once more.

And overhead, along the roof of the cave, I saw great and angry suns, flaring blue-white with fury, which were born, flared a moment, and then became sullen red with age; until they burned to a cinder, and left only the ruins of planets, swinging endlessly through the stellar night.

Around me now, in the river, things swam; things with the faces of crocodiles and the bodies of worms or eels, things with razor fins and other, nameless limbs, which writhed and squirmed in the black water. And they saw me, but their teeth could do me no harm, for I was but a ghost.

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