The Stratagem and Other Stories

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