y sickness and ghastly confusion of thought. I
was just dimly conscious of the trim, bare room, the white bed, a figure
or two, but everything else was swallowed up in the pain, which filled
all my senses at once. Yet surely, I thought, it is all something
outside me? ... my brain began to wander, and the pain became a thing.
It was a tower of stone, high and blank, with a little sinister window
high up, from which something was every now and then waved above the
house-roofs.... The tower was gone in a moment, and there was a heap
piled up on the floor of a great room with open beams--a granary,
perhaps. The heap was of curved sharp steel things like sickles:
something moved and muttered underneath it, and blood ran out on the
floor. Then I was instantly myself, and the pain was with me again; and
then there fell on me a sense of faintness, so that the cold sweat-drops
ran suddenly out on my brow. There came a smell of drugs, sharp and
pungent, on the air. I heard a door open softly, and a voice said, "He
is sinking fast--they must be sent for at once." Then there were more
people in the room, people whom I thought I had known once, long ago;
but I was buried and crushed under the pain, like the thing beneath the
heap of sickles. There swept over me a dreadful fear; and I could see
that the fear was reflected in the faces above me; but now they were
strangely distorted and elongated, so that I could have laughed, if only
I had had the time; but I had to move the weight off me, which was
crushing me. Then a roaring sound began to come and go upon the air,
louder and louder, faster and faster; the strange pungent scent came
again; and then I was thrust down under the weight, monstrous,
insupportable; further and further down; and there came a sharp bright
streak, like a blade severing the strands of a rope drawn taut and
tense; another and another; one was left, and the blade drew near....

I fell suddenly out of the sound and scent and pain into the most
incredible and blessed peace and silence. It would have been like a
sleep, but I was still perfectly conscious, with a sense of unutterable
and blissful fatigue; a picture passed before me, of a calm sea, of vast
depth and clearness. There were cliffs at a little distance, great
headlands and rocky spires. I seemed to myself to have left them, to
have come down through them, to have embarked. There was a pale light
everywhere, flushed with rose-colour, like the light of a