Unpublished.

Attribution: Signed manuscript in RK's hand.

Text: Manuscript.

Notes: This unfinished story is a manuscript of twelve pages now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The story is set in 1884, and that has usually been taken to be the date of its composition as well. But the use, from ‘poverty of inspiration’, of the name ‘Duncan Parrenness’, establishes that it must come after ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, originally published in the CMG, 25 December 1884, and collected in Life's Handicap, 1891. An entry in RK's diary for 11 February 1885 shows that RK was then at work on ‘At the Pit's Mouth’: ‘(Mem. To make the narrators of “At the Pit's Mouth” tell their tale at a spiritualist séance in the heart of Lahore City. Happy thought’ (Something of Myself, 1990, pp. 204–5).

The manuscript has long been known but has not, until now, been published; it has, therefore, often been confused with another story of the same title, not published separately but included in Under the Deodars, January 1889. That story shares with the unpublished story a guilty pair planning an elopement, but it is a much simplified, conventional treatment of the situation. Another treatment, also much simplified, of the basic situation is the story in dramatic dialogue called ‘The Hill of Illusion’, originally published in the supplement to the Pioneer called The Week's News, 21 April 1888 and collected in Under the Deodars. The two published stories are sometimes described as ‘versions’ of the story in the unpublished MS, but that is misleading. The two published stories belong entirely to waking life; the MS story is a complex mixture of waking life and dream.

Editorial comments and additions are between square brackets in italic type, [thus].

The so-called ‘Digressions’ are an especially interesting part of the MS story.