did not pass off; from now
on it persisted continually. Vandover began to feel strange. At first
the room looked unfamiliar to him, then his own daily life no longer
seemed recognizable, and, finally, all of a sudden, it was the whole
world, all the existing order of things, that appeared to draw off like
a refluent tide, leaving him alone, abandoned, cast upon some fearful,
mysterious shore.

Nothing seemed worth while; all the thousand little trivial things that
made up the course of his life and in which he found diversion and
amusement palled upon him. A fearful melancholia settled over him, a
despair, an abhorrence of living that could not be uttered. This only
was during the day. It was that night that Vandover went down into the
pit.

He went to bed early, his brain in a whirl, his frame worn out as if
from long physical exertion. He was just dropping into a grateful sleep
when his whole body twitched suddenly with a shock and a recoil of all
his nerves; in an instant he was broad awake, panting and exhausted as
if from a long run. Once more he settled himself upon the pillow, and
once more the same leap, the same sharp spasm of his nerves caught him
back to consciousness with the suddenness of a relaxed spring. At last
sleep was out of the question; his drowsiness of the early part of the
evening passed away, and he lay back, his hands clasped behind his head,
staring up into the darkness, his thoughts galloping incessantly through
his brain, suffering without pain as he had never imagined a human being
could suffer though racked with torture from head to heel.

From time to time a slow torsion and crisping of all his nerves,
beginning at his ankles, spread to every corner of his body till he had
to shut his fists and teeth against the blind impulse to leap from his
bed screaming. His hands felt light and, as he told himself, "jumpy."
All at once he felt a peculiar sensation in them: they seemed to swell,
the fingers puffing to an enormous size, the palms bulging, the whole
member from the wrist to the nails distended like a glove when one has
blown into it to straighten it out. Then he had a feeling that his head
was swelling in the same way. He had to rub his hands together, to pass
them again and again over his face to rid himself of the fancy.

But the strange numb feeling at the base of the skull did not keep him
from thinking--he would have been glad if it had--and now at last when
the terror overcame