Chapter 6
THE EXPOSURESUCH were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again
and again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their
presence. Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were
subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom
was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an
unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again. Each figure
seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their
theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of
these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road
of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that
if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find
something—say a tree—that was more or less tha
