of me that were
sensitive beyond expression. Though I was a mere blob,
boneless and quivering, the ray was foreign and I knew what
it was to cringe.

"And now I find the difficulty of interpreting the dream
exactly from the point of the Cell. These things that I write
I could not know then, except in smallest measure. As our
greater forces are diminished by passing through the brain,
these little affairs are increased by adjustment to man's
waking faculties. From now, I shall give the picture as it
appears to me from this distance:

"As the light increased, I contracted and sank slowly into
the depths. The bottom was not far. I descended in a flowing,
undulating fashion and settled softly on the water-bed,
beside a large, up-jutting fang of rock. It was black in the
depths. The cold penetrated all. Torpid and prone, I lay
there numbed into absolute quiescence. It seemed that a
torpid inertia, doomed to be everlasting, had settled upon
me. I knew no want, no desire, had not the slightest will to
move, to rest, to sleep, to eat, even to exist, just the
dimmest sense of watchfulness and fear. It was perfect
hibernation. I had descended into too low a degree of
temperature and vibration to feel the need even of
nourishment. I was becoming dead to the cold; everything was
a pulseless void. I should never have generated an impulse to
move again had not extraneous influences affected me after
seeming ages had passed.

"The bottom on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about
me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of
grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it,
or rather feel it--a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings
of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were
festooned with waving green fringes of growths, which trailed
out into the water. Long, snakelike fronds and stems of
whitish green, half-vegetable, half-animal, grew on the
bottom. They were stationary at their bases, but were lithe
and a-crawl with life in their stems, extending and
contracting into the water at intervals, in a spiral, snakey
manner. Their heads were like white-bleached flowers, with
hairy lips, which contracted and opened constantly, engulfing
the myriads of floating, microscopic forms.

"Upon