yet he had only carried the enemy's outposts. Then, for a second
time, and for no outward reason, he came to a dead halt. He felt as if
some elusive influence, some unnamable force, was holding and barring
him back. Again he struck a match, recklessly, and again he saw
nothing but the burnished metal railing and the dark mass of the vault.

It was with almost a touch of exasperation that he stood there in his
tracks, and slowly, methodically, thoroughly, surveyed the four
quarters of the lightless room in which he found himself. He
scrutinized the heavy, enmuffling gloom with straining eyes, first in
one direction and then in another.

There was nothing to be seen, and not a sound reached his ears. He had
been in the room perhaps not three minutes, yet it seemed to him as
many hours. Then he peered about him still again, wondering, for the
first time, by what psychological accident his eyes turned in one
particular direction, slightly above and before him, to the right of
the direction in which he was advancing.

To rid himself of this new idea, and to decentralize the illusion, he
shifted his position. But still his gaze, almost against his will,
turned back toward the former point, as though the blanketing blackness
held some core, some discernible central point, toward which he was
compelled to look, as the magnetic needle is compelled to swing toward
the North. Surrendering to this impulse, he gaped through the darkness
at it, with a little oath of impatience.

As he did so he began to feel stir at the base of his spine a tiny
tremor of apprehension. This tremor seemed suddenly to explode into a
mounting shudder of fear, flashing and leaping through his body until
the very hair of his head was stirred and moved with it.

The next moment the startled body responded to clamoring volition, and
he turned and fled blindly back into the outer passageway, with a
ludicrous and half-articulate little howl of terror.

For growing out of the utter blackness he had seen two vague points of
light, two luminous spots, side by side, taking on, as he faced them,
all the mysteries of all the primeval night which man ever faced. He
felt like a hunter, in some jungled midnight, a midnight breathless and
soundless, who looks before him, and slowly discerns two glowing and
motionless balls of fire--who can see nothing else, in all his
world--but from those two phosphorescent points of light knows that he
is being watched