e put out a
languid hand to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his habit
to place it, and touched some smooth hard surface like glass. This was
so unexpected that it startled him extremely. Quite suddenly he rolled
over, stared for a moment, and struggled into a sitting position. The
effort was unexpectedly difficult, and it left him giddy and weak--and
amazed.

He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his
mind was quite clear--evidently his sleep had benefited him. He was not
in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very
soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress
was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a strange sense of
insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. About
his arm--and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and
yellow--was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that
it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this strange bed
was placed in a case of greenish coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a
bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention.
In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made
apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum
and minimum thermometer was recognisable.

The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which surrounded
him on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he perceived it was a
vast apartment of splendid appearance, and with a very large and simple
white archway facing him. Close to the walls of the cage were articles
of furniture, a table covered with a silvery cloth, silvery like the
side of a fish, a couple of graceful chairs, and on the table a number
of dishes with substances piled on them, a bottle and two glasses. He
realised that he was intensely hungry.

He could see no human being, and after a period of hesitation scrambled
off the translucent mattress and tried to stand on the clean white floor
of his little apartment. He had miscalculated his strength, however,
and staggered and put his hand against the glasslike pane before him to
steady himself. For a moment it resisted his hand, bending outward like
a distended bladder, then it broke with a slight report and vanished--a
pricked bubble. He reeled out into the general space of the hall,
greatly astonished. He caught at the table to save himself, knocking one
of the glasses to the