!

I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds, of
someone coughing in the yard below, and of a background of movement in
the landscape. And yet I remember that it was that absurd, emaciated,
superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze. Slowly and wheezily it was
climbing the slope. Then my eye traveled to the driver sitting hunched
up upon the box and finally to the young man who was leaning out of the
window in some excitement and shouting a direction. They were all
indubitably, aggressively alive!

Everybody was alive once more! Had it all been a delusion? Was it
conceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been an elaborate
dream? For an instant my startled brain was really ready to believe it.
Then I looked down, and there was the rising blister on my hand where it
was frayed by the rope of the city bell. It had really been so, then.
And yet here was the world resuscitated--here was life come back in an
instant full tide to the planet. Now, as my eyes wandered all over the
great landscape, I saw it in every direction--and moving, to my
amazement, in the very same groove in which it had halted. There were
the golfers. Was it possible that they were going on with their game?
Yes, there was a fellow driving off from a tee, and that other group upon
the green were surely putting for the hole. The reapers were slowly
trooping back to their work. The nurse-girl slapped one of her charges
and then began to push the perambulator up the hill. Everyone had
unconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they had
dropped it.

I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard the voices
of my companions, loud in astonishment and congratulation, in the yard.
How we all shook hands and laughed as we came together, and how Mrs.
Challenger kissed us all in her emotion, before she finally threw herself
into the bear-hug of her husband.

"But they could not have been asleep!" cried Lord John. "Dash it all,
Challenger, you don't mean to believe that those folk were asleep with
their staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful death grin on their
faces!"

"It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy," said
Challenger. "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past and has
constantly been mistaken for death. While it endures, the temperature
falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat is indistinguishable--in
fact, it _is_ death, save that it is eva