and semi-transparent; through them a luminous network of
blood-red veins and arteries stood out in startling distinctness. The
hard parts faded away to nothingness, and the blood system alone was
left. Not even the fleshy ducts remained. The naked blood alone was
visible, flowing this way and that like a fiery, liquid skeleton, in the
shape of the monster. Then this blood began to change too. Instead of
a continuous liquid stream, Maskull perceived that it was composed of a
million individual points. The red colour had been an illusion caused by
the rapid motion of the points; he now saw clearly that they resembled
minute suns in their scintillating brightness. They seemed like a double
drift of stars, streaming through space. One drift was travelling toward
a fixed point in the centre, while the other was moving away from it.
He recognised the former as the veins of the beast, the latter as the
arteries, and the fixed point as the heart.

While he was still looking, lost in amazement, the starry network went
out suddenly like an extinguished flame. Where the crustacean had stood,
there was nothing. Yet through this "nothing" he could not see the
landscape. Something was standing there that intercepted the light,
though it possessed neither shape, colour, nor substance. And now the
object, which could no longer be perceived by vision, began to be felt
by emotion. A delightful, springlike sense of rising sap, of quickening
pulses of love, adventure, mystery, beauty, femininity--took possession
of his being, and, strangely enough, he identified it with the monster.
Why that invisible brute should cause him to feel young, sexual, and
audacious, he did not ask himself, for he was fully occupied with the
effect. But it was as if flesh, bones, and blood had been discarded, and
he were face to face with naked Life itself, which slowly passed into
his own body.

The sensations died away. There was a brief interval, and then the
streaming, starlike skeleton rose up again out of space. It changed to
the red-blood system. The hard parts of the body reappeared, with more
and more distinctness, and at the same time the network of blood grew
fainter. Presently the interior parts were entirely concealed by
the crust--the creature stood opposite Maskull in its old formidable
ugliness, hard, painted, and concrete.

Disliking something about him, the crustacean turned aside and stumbled
awkwardly away on its six legs, with laborious a