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Yes, I thought I was about to die.
The strange tingling, now the only sensation which I could isolate with any distinctness, was running through my whole body, from the tips of my toes to the tips of my hair. It was no longer like the first symptoms of a cramp, as it had been at the beginning. No, it was something more regular in beat, more enthralling in power. It caused my mind to revert to Madeleine and the morning rides we used to take together; to our picnics in the forest clearings, to a fondness she had for burying her naked arms in the ground so that I could compare the feeling of the smooth warm sand with that of her smooth warm skin. Through my half-opened fingers I would strain the minute grains and as they fell they made a faint continuous sound that I remember for its peculiarity. Such a sound I was hearing now; but it came not from between my fingers, but from under my skin, from inside my flesh—the murmur of an invisible sand which my veins and nerves were sweeping along their channels in a full, regular, unbroken flow, from my heart and my other internal organs toward my hands and toward my feet. This strange flood became a rushing torrent about my wrists and ankles, and around the joints of my fingers—narrow passages which confined, condensed, cramped the current. But it went beyond my own extremities, far beyond! How far I could not say. I know simply that my fingers and toes were at once moist and chilled, like vessels of unglazed pottery which give off water drop by drop and become ice-cold from evaporation....
And all the time, on the back of my head and between my shoulders, I could feel blow after blow in furious succession, blows which I know came from the all-powerful eyes of the old marquis, who stood there relentlessly raining them upon me.
I grew weaker still. A few moments before I had tried vainly to look at the clock against the wall. Now even my eyelids were paralyzed. I could not close my eyes nor could I turn them. They were glued inexorably upon the objects directly in front of them—the translucent lens (the golden glints in its substance glowing now mysteriously); the armchair where, for a second, I had glimpsed the seated image of myself; beyond, a bit of white-washed wall—all blending in a blurred whirling confusion.
As second followed on second I thought I could feel more and more of my life flowing silently out of my wasting body....
Then suddenly, something extraordinary occurred; and I was so shocked by it that I managed, calling on I know not what reserves of energy, to open my eyes a little wider and to clear their vision by winking my eyelids several times.
In the chair where I had before seen my own image seated, now I could see, clearly, distinctly, beyond any possible doubt whatever, beyond any chance of its being an hallucination—I could see with an unspeakable overwhelming certitude—another image, likewise seated, another image also made of light, but of a different kind of light—a sort of fluctuating phosphorescent shadow which was gradually taking form ... out of nothing....