e
they had covered twenty yards another frightful spasm of pain came upon
Merryon, racking his whole being, depriving him of all his powers,
wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering. He went down
into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all
finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as
it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of
existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him
like devils in some inferno under the earth.

Of time and place and circumstance thereafter he became as completely
unconscious as though they had ceased to be, though once or twice he was
aware of a merciful hand that gave him opium to deaden--or was it only
to prolong?--his suffering. And aeons and eternities passed over him
while he lay in the rigour of perpetual torments, not trying to escape,
only writhing in futile anguish in the bitter dark of the prison-house.

Later, very much later, there came a time when the torture gradually
ceased or became merged in a deathly coldness. During that stage his
understanding began to come back to him like the light of a dying day. A
vague and dreadful sense of loss began to oppress him, a feeling of
nakedness as though the soul of him were already slipping free, passing
into an appalling void, leaving an appalling void behind. He lay quite
helpless and sinking, sinking--slowly, terribly sinking into an
overwhelming sea of annihilation.

With all that was left of his failing strength he strove to cling to
that dim light which he knew for his own individuality. The silence and
the darkness broke over him in long, soundless waves; but each time he
emerged again, cold, cold as death, but still aware of self, aware of
existence, albeit the world he knew had dwindled to an infinitesimal
smallness, as an object very far away, and floating ever farther and
farther from his ken.

Vague paroxysms of pain still seized him from time to time, but they no
longer affected him in the same way. The body alone agonized. The soul
stood apart on the edge of that dreadful sea, shrinking afraid from the
black, black depths and the cruel cold of the eternal night. He was
terribly, crushingly alone.

Someone had once, twice, asked him a vital question about his belief in
God. Then he had been warmly alive. He had held his wife close in his
arms, and nothing else had mattered. But now--but now--he was very far
from warm