The relief was so immense that my sense of loyalty and 
duty had a hard fight to get me to resume the task. The 
mingling of horror, curiosity, and excitement must have 
aided.  
I threw away my fifth cigarette, and returned to the 
death chamber.  
 
 
VI 
 
Before I had sat at the table ten minutes a change 
burst out with startling suddenness. At one point in the 
void the blackness gathered, concentrated, sprang into 
an evil flame that gushed aimlessly forth from nowhere 
to nowhere.  
This was accompanied by the most noxious stench.  
It was gone before I could realize it. As lightning 
precedes thunder, it was followed by a hideous clamour 
that I can only describe as the cry of a machine in pain.  
This recurred constantly for an hour and five min-
utes, then ceased as suddenly as it began. Arthur still 
fell.  
It was succeeded after the lapse of five hours by 
another paroxysm of the same kind, but fiercer and 
more continuous. Another silence followed, age upon 
age of fear and loneliness and shame.  
About midnight there appeared a grey ocean of 
bowels below the falling soul. This ocean seemed to be 
limitless. It fell headlong into it, and the splash awak-
ened it to a new consciousness of things.  
This sea, though infinitely cold, was boiling like tu-
bercles. Itself a more or less homogeneous slime, the 
stench of which is beyond all human conception (human 
language is singularly deficient in words that describe 
smell and taste; we always refer our sensations to things 
generally known)2 it constantly budded into greenish 
boils with angry red craters, whose jagged edges were 
of a livid white; and from these issued pus formed of all