the World Above a Duologue

The scene is laid in a shadowy and mystic place known to the dwellers there as The Darker Realm. It has been built and burrowed from time immemorial far down underneath some great, beautiful, sunny, human metropolis, called The World Above, but of this light-crowned city those who inhabit the subterranean retreats of The Darker Realm know but little, of its happy days and doings they can but dream.

The galleries of The Darker Realm are like an interminable network—one could so easily be lost there! Some parts are new and are built up smoothly with polished stone; other parts are old—so old and irregular that it seems as if they must have been set there many, many centuries ago. Perhaps the place has been an ancient mine where dim-eyed people sought the turquoise gem for their devil-altars; perhaps it was once a human town over which volcanic ashes and desert sands have fallen and drifted for many a long century. Unexhumed and rediscovered, it lies there, and the dwellers in The World Above find use for the water-way conduits that thread its interminable passages.

There are two persons in the story: Jean, a young man, a workman in The Darker Realm, and Angelica, a young maiden, daughter of another workman in the same...