While she had been speaking he had wandered on the track of the
enigma, out of the world of senses into the region of feeling.
Levin tried through her to get a solution of the weighty
enigma her husband presented to his mind; but he had not complete freedom of ideas, because he was in an agony of embarrassment.
"I don't understand
enigmas. I never could guess a riddle in my life."
But his thoughts seemed to stumble in the darkness of some not-solved
enigma, and soon he fell silent.
How are we to explain this
enigma? These islanders were heathens!
Beloved by one, a sort of instinctive and savage half-man, for its beauty, for its stature, for the harmonies which emanated from its magnificent ensemble; beloved by the other, a learned and passionate imagination, for its myth, for the sense which it contains, for the symbolism scattered beneath the sculptures of its front,--like the first text underneath the second in a palimpsest,--in a word, for the
enigma which it is eternally propounding to the understanding.
Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that unfathomable
enigma out there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses longer to function sanely.
But Brissenden was always an
enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.
I think Daddy Jacques did wrong to leave behind him the weapon with which the crime was committed and, as he occupied the attic immediately above Mademoiselle Stangerson's room, the builder's job ordered by the examining magistrate will give us the key of the
enigma and it will not be long before we learn by what natural trap, or by what secret door, the old fellow was able to slip in and out, and return immediately to the laboratory to Monsieur Stangerson, without his absence being noticed.
Unmoved is my depth: but it sparkleth with swimming
enigmas and laughters.
"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, "you speak
enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief.
Heraclitus saith well in one of his
enigmas, Dry light is ever the best.
