ace; I knew they had not succeeded in deceiving her; I was
determined they should not succeed in deceiving me.

It was oftenest at this point, that my restless memory recoiled before
the impenetrable darkness which forbade it to see further--to see on
to the last evening, to the fatal night. It was oftenest at this point,
that I toiled and struggled back, over and over again, to seek once more
the lost events of the End, through the events of the Beginning. How
often my wandering thoughts thus incessantly and desperately traced and
retraced their way over their own fever track, I cannot tell: but there
came a time when they suddenly ceased to torment me; when the heavy
burden that was on my mind fell off; when a sudden strength and fury
possessed me, and I plunged down through a vast darkness into a world
whose daylight was all radiant flame. Giant phantoms mustered by
millions, flashing white as lightning in the ruddy air. They rushed on
me with hurricane speed; their wings fanned me with fiery breezes; and
the echo of their thunder-music was like the groaning and rending of an
earthquake, as they tore me away with them on their whirlwind course.

Away! to a City of Palaces, to measureless halls, and arches, and domes,
soaring one above another, till their flashing ruby summits are lost
in the burning void, high overhead. On! through and through these
mountain-piles, into countless, limitless corridors, reared on pillars
lurid and rosy as molten lava. Far down the corridors rise visions
of flying phantoms, ever at the same distance before us--their raving
voices clanging like the hammers of a thousand forges. Still on and
on; faster and faster, for days, years, centuries together, till there
comes, stealing slowly forward to meet us, a shadow--a vast, stealthy,
gliding shadow--the first darkness that has ever been shed over that
world of blazing light! It comes nearer--nearer and nearer softly, till
it touches the front ranks of our phantom troop. Then in an instant, our
rushing progress is checked: the thunder-music of our wild march stops;
the raving voices of the spectres ahead, cease; a horror of blank
stillness is all about us--and as the shadow creeps onward and onward,
until we are enveloped in it from front to rear, we shiver with icy cold
under the fiery air and amid the lurid lava pillars which hem us in on
either side.

A silence, like no silence ever known on earth; a darkening of the
shadow, blacker than