I looked in the mirror and saw the perspiration pouring down my face.

How had I got into this extraordinary condition? I looked as though I had been pouring sweat for hours. I was conscious of a wild singing noise in my ears, and felt like one in a delirious dream. Was I dreaming? Worse still (the thought suddenly struck me), had I been dreaming? Had I been asleep? A wave of uncontrollable fear and claustrophobia swept over me as it dawned upon me that this was precisely what had happened’. I had been asleep—I had been incarcerated in this hellish contrivance for hours and hours! The horrible thing was that it was exactly six o’clock in the evening! I knew the hour in the world outside with a passionate lucidity and assurance which no man-made timepiece could have ever given me. Outside, all London was going home, taking trains, climbing on to buses…. And to me, only a moment ago, it had been ten o’clock in the morning!

I could not breathe, and I was going to die. Certainly I was going to die—the victim of a crude experiment. My heart could never withstand this heat and this noise—above all the noise—that was worse than the heat. There was a droning roar in my ears like that of twenty-thousand tube-trains crashing into tunnels….

There had been some horrible accident or miscalculation on Crowmarsh’s part, but how could I ever get out? Even if I yelled, how could I be heard now above this noise? Besides which, it paralysed my every faculty. I could not move a finger, an eyelid, let alone raise my voice.

I looked at myself again in the steel mirror, to see what manner of thing it was, this thing that had lived, and now was going to die. For a moment I saw my sodden and agonized face in that excruciating glare (the light itself seemed almost as heartbreaking as the noise and heat)—and then something else happened. I became aware that I was not looking at myself in the mirror. I occupied the space a moment ago occupied by the mirror, and I was looking at myself, noting every detail of my streaming face.

The relief was instantaneous and enormous. The noise, the light, the heat persisted—but some form of extemporized logic informed me that it was beyond their power to hurt the mere reflection of a man. I disowned that wretch sitting there fighting for breath. I wanted nothing but to go to sleep. I believe I went to sleep.

Whether I slept or not my next experience was one of floating in the infinite dark of an infinite void of noise. The noise for a moment had been dimmed, but now it was coming back—or rather it had been going on all the time, and now I was forced to hear it once more.

What followed I can never describe in words. To compare what I now experienced, with what I had experienced before I seemed to sleep, would be to compare the falling of a pin on a piece of cotton-wool with the explosion of a munition works. It seemed that my being had become attuned to every sound that had been made, would be made, could be made by motion and power since time failed to begin! A man goes down to the engine-room of a ship and hears its driving-power throbbing through him. I was down in the engine-room of the Universe! Believe me, there is something of a roar down there.

I do not care to dwell upon what I suffered in the next few ‘minutes’—for along with this terrible noise surging in upon me, there surged in upon me something worse—an even more horrible Knowledge! And the Knowledge was the Noise, and the Noise was the Knowledge—one and the same thing, and equally emphatic!

‘You’re wrong!—you’re wrong!—you’re wrong!’ In some way my soul was screaming these words in the rhythm of what I was hearing. And another part of me was aware that I was addressing Abel Crowmarsh himself.

That Crowmarsh had made a ghastly mistake, a hideous miscalculation of realities—that he had, as a puny and ignorant mortal, intruded upon forces of inconceivable vastness and menace—this was the thought that obsessed me, which I felt I must somehow remember and take back with me, if ever I got back! No one must suffer again what I was suffering now. I knew all—he knew nothing.

And then somehow even this madly urgent truth seemed to be losing its significance—remained a truth, but was being submerged in another and even vaster truth.

‘It’s two—it’s two—it’s two!’ I can remember screaming. And it was the Universe I was alluding to, and I had unravelled all its mysteries. But behind all mysteries, it seems, there is the mystery of oblivion, and oblivion came upon me then.

 

I need hardly say that Crowmarsh has since awarded not a jot of objectivity to these experiences of mine on my journey through the wastes of space, and has pointed out their similarity to countless other painful experiences undergone by people under common anæsthesia, which was a condition he actually predicted as being almost certainly attendant upon the undertaking. I myself have neither the requisite knowledge, nor the requisite inner conviction, to dispute the matter with him. Certainly (and here again I resemble innumerable other returned wanderers from the land of anæsthesia) I have no inkling now of that infinite ‘Knowledge’ which took the form of infinite sound, and which I was so desperately anxious to bring back with me to this world. As for that final cry and conviction of the ‘twoness’ implicit in all things, I really have no notion of what I meant. I have no doubt it is susceptible to hundreds of objective or subjective explanations—each equally satisfying to its propounder—the mystic, the brain-specialist, the heart-specialist, the nerve-specialist, the anæsthetist, even, it seems to me, the Hegelian or dialectical materialist!2—but I myself am unable to contribute to the discussion.

As regards the pain, the sense of a mistake having been made, the terrible assurance I had that no man must again suffer what I had been set to suffer, well, I am not so sure of that now. How many women, in the pangs of childbirth, have not sworn to themselves that such an experience must never be renewed by themselves? We all know the fate of that determination—and am I not in like case? I can only tell you that I, for one, would make the journey again—will make it again, if I have the chance.

Notes

1.