BY DR. AGONSON
The floating Isle of Lolth is only seen through clouded mists upon the lonely hills, and as though ’twere mist itself, it vanishes before the eye knows what it sees. Many a hiker wonders at the mirage; many of them feign polite credulity when they’re told the legend. There’s one bloke I know, artist chap, who set out to paint the isle. It was labelled a work of fantasy, but better to say, imagination, for Lolth will not be studied by the eye. He worked what glimpses he stole onto a canvas, and went mad before his brushes were dry.
They keep the painting in the chapel down the street there, if you want to see it. A queer effect it has on the mind. You sit there staring at it, losing all track of time. At first it seems too simple, or even incomplete, but then you notice a detail here or there in the clouds. And staring long enough, all at once you’ll see Lolth, that floating island, as though some new painting was somehow switched in front of you without you noticing. You’ll see its fields and its crumbling castle and . . . then it disappears.
I’ve said we should make prints of the thing, sell postcards, there’s a real genius to that painting, but people be a fearing it. Suppose that’s why they keep it in a chapel where you have to ask to be shown it. People don’t want to be haunted by it, suppose, though they’re haunted anyways by the thought of it. I say if it puts fear in you, bring it to light, but they don’t listen. Natives here, specially the imaginative ones, they don’t go out on the hills when a fog rolls in, or when the morning dew rises.
The painter chap, nice fellow he was, took him to some sanitorium afterward. They found him raving with a fever, so’s the tale, speaking of the old king and a missing crown. Of course, he had heard the legends, and that must ‘av colored his mind some when it finally broke. Long hours he worked, and when he wasn’t working, he was traipsing through them hills hoping for another glance of the Isle. He needed a rest, he did, but what do artists know? No wonder he went mad, trying to see what’s hid from man’s eyes. Can’t be done.
Tale Told 