Lilith

"Worse and worse!" I cried.
"And you MUST answer the riddles!" he continued. "They will go on asking themselves until you understand
yourself. The universe is a riddle trying to get out, and you are holding your door hard against it."
"Will you not in pity tell me what I am to do−−where I must go?"
"How should I tell YOUR to−do, or the way to it?"
"If I am not to go home, at least direct me to some of my kind."
"I do not know of any. The beings most like you are in that direction."
He pointed with his beak. I could see nothing but the setting sun, which blinded me.
"Well," I said bitterly, "I cannot help feeling hardly treated−−taken from my home, abandoned in a strange
world, and refused instruction as to where I am to go or what I am to do!"
"You forget," said the raven, "that, when I brought you and you declined my hospitality, you reached what
you call home in safety: now you are come of yourself! Good night."
Lilith
He turned and walked slowly away, with his beak toward the ground. I stood dazed. It was true I had come of
myself, but had I not come with intent of atonement? My heart was sore, and in my brain was neither quest
nor purpose, hope nor desire. I gazed after the raven, and would have followed him, but felt it useless.
All at once he pounced on a spot, throwing the whole weight of his body on his bill, and for some moments
dug vigorously. Then with a flutter of his wings he threw back his head, and something shot from his bill,
cast high in the air. That moment the sun set, and the air at once grew very dusk, but the something opened
into a soft radiance, and came pulsing toward me like a fire−fly, but with a much larger and a yellower light.
It flew over my head. I turned and followed it.
Here I interrupt my narrative to remark that it involves a constant struggle to say what cannot be said with
even an approach to precision, the things recorded being, in their nature and in that of the creatures concerned
in them, so inexpressibly different from any possible events of this economy, that I can present them only by
giving, in the forms and language of life in this world, the modes in which they affected me−−not the things
themselves, but the feelings they woke in me. Even this much, however, I do with a continuous and abiding
sense of failure, finding it impossible to present more than one phase of a multitudinously complicated
significance, or one concentric sphere of a graduated embodiment. A single thing would sometimes seem to
be and mean many things, with an uncertain identity at the heart of them, which kept constantly altering their
look. I am indeed often driven to set down what I know to be but a clumsy and doubtful representation of the
mere feeling aimed at, none of the communicating media of this world being fit to convey it, in its peculiar
strangeness, with even an approach to clearness or certainty. Even to one who knew the region better than
myself, I should have no assurance of transmitting the reality of my experience in it. While without a doubt,
for instance, that I was actually regarding a scene of activity, I might be, at the same moment, in my
consciousness aware that I was perusing a metaphysical argument.
CHAPTER X. THE BAD BURROW
As the air grew black and the winter closed swiftly around me, the fluttering fire blazed out more luminous,
and arresting its flight, hovered waiting. So soon as I came under its radiance, it flew slowly on, lingering
now and then above spots where the ground was rocky. Every time I looked up, it seemed to have grown
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