“The moment and the place,” she interrupted. “There is just time. Before the Souls return.... You have called upon the Powers.... Yet both cannot enter! ... he ... and they....”
There was a mighty, echoing cry.
She stopped abruptly. Her face darkened as with some great internal effort. I darkened too. My vision broke.... There was a sense of interval....
“And the channel——?” he asked below his breath.
She shook her head slowly to and fro. “It lies waiting still in the Iron Slumber.... You used it ... it is shattered.... The soul returning finds it not.... His soul ... whom I loved ...”
The voices ceased. A sudden darkness dropped. I had the sensation that I was rushing, flying, whirling. The hand I clasped seemed melted into air. I lost the final remnant of present things about me. The circle of my own sensations, my identity, the identity of my two companions vanished. A remarkable feeling of triumph came upon me, of joyful power that lifted me high above all injury and death, while something utterly gigantic asserted itself in the place of what had just been “me”—something that could never be maimed, subdued, held prisoner. The darkness then lifted, giving way before a hurricane of light that swept me, as it were, upon a pinnacle. Secure and strong I felt beyond all possible disaster, yet breathless amid things too long unfamiliar.... And then, abruptly, I knew searing pain, the pain of something broken in me, of spiritual incompleteness, disappointment.... I was called back to lesser life—before my time—before some high fulfilment due to me....
Julius and Mrs. LeVallon were no longer there beside me, but in their place I saw two solemn figures standing motionless and grave above a prostrate body. It lay upon a marble slab, and sunlight fell over the face and folded hands. The two moved forward. They knelt ... there was a sound of voices as in prayer, a powerful, drawn-out sound that produced intense vibrations, vibrations so immense that the motion in the air was felt as wind. I saw gestures ... the body half rose up upon its marble slab ... and then the blaze of some incredible effulgence descended before my eyes, so fiercely brilliant, and accompanied by such an intolerable, radiant heat ... that the entire scene went lost behind great shafts of light that splintered and destroyed it ... and an awful darkness followed, a darkness that again had pain and incompleteness at the heart of it....
One thing alone I understood—that body on the shining slab was mine. My absent soul, deprived of high glory elsewhere that was mine by right, returned into it unexpectedly, aware of danger. It had been used for the purposes of evocation. I had met the two Powers evoked by means of it midway: Fire and Wind....
The vision vanished. I was standing in the châlet room again, he and the woman by my side. There was a sense of enormous interval.