the head swim. All its
lethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and from
its human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams. Sleep has
gloomy associates beyond this life: the decomposed thoughts of the
sleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life,
and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power of
thought, as it floats in space. Hence arise entanglements. Dreams, those
clouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies over that star,
the mind. Above those closed eyelids, where vision has taken the place
of sight, a sepulchral disintegration of outlines and appearances
dilates itself into impalpability. Mysterious, diffused existences
amalgamate themselves with life on that border of death, which sleep is.
Those larvae and souls mingle in the air. Even he who sleeps not feels a
medium press upon him full of sinister life. The surrounding chimera,
in which he suspects a reality, impedes him. The waking man, wending his
way amidst the sleep phantoms of others, unconsciously pushes back
passing shadows, has, or imagines that he has, a vague fear of adverse
contact with the invisible, and feels at every moment the obscure
pressure of a hostile encounter which immediately dissolves. There is
something of the effect of a forest in the nocturnal diffusion of
dreams.

This is what is called being afraid without reason.

What a man feels a child feels still more.

The uneasiness of nocturnal fear, increased by the spectral houses,
increased the weight of the sad burden under which he was struggling.

He entered Conycar Lane, and perceived at the end of that passage the
Backwater, which he took for the ocean. He no longer knew in what
direction the sea lay. He retraced his steps, struck to the left by
Maiden Street, and returned as far as St. Alban's Row.

There, by chance and without selection, he knocked violently at any
house that he happened to pass. His blows, on which he was expending his
last energies, were jerky and without aim; now ceasing altogether for a
time, now renewed as if in irritation. It was the violence of his fever
striking against the doors.

One voice answered.

That of Time.

Three o'clock tolled slowly behind him from the old belfry of St.
Nicholas.

Then all sank into silence again.

That no inhabitant should have opened a lattice may appear surprising.
Nevertheless that silence is in a great measure to be explain