, half
admiration.

Even as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness
began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth,
rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It stole up
from below--an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the
radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a
radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows, issued
a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us, and
from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and gather.
And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I recognised
as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced globes,
triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical
figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an
effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and fro through the
air, rising and falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood
of the Colonel, often gathering about his head and shoulders, and even
appearing to settle upon him like giant insects of flame. They were
accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of hissing--the same sound we
had heard that afternoon in the plantation.

"The fire-elementals that precede their master," the doctor said in an
undertone. "Be ready."

And while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed
and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters
overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of
the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I
cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences,
and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it
was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors of
stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of mountain
tombs.

"I have seen my divine Father, Osiris," thundered the great tones. "I
have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth,
and am one with the starry Deities!"

Something grand came into the soldier's face. He was staring fixedly
before him, as though seeing nothing.

"Watch," whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to come
from very far away.

Again the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.

"Thoth," it boomed, "has loosened the bandages of Set which fettered my
mouth. I have take