* * * * * * * * *
The Man stopped suddenly.
The glow of sunrise had now climbed to the zenith. The whole landscape was bathed in a pale but brightening light. A clump of tall ferns appeared, masking the precipitous wall of a ravine.
The Man stopped, folded his arms, and leaned forward. I leaned forward with Him.
A precipice was there, the precipice on the brink of which I had earlier been moved to terror. I recognized it, as I had recognized the labyrinth of monoliths, the region of ravines and precipices, the thickets of juniper and briar. I recognized the same smooth wall of the chasm, the same white stones of the river bed over which the deep black water was rushing in a torrent.... And I recognized the same nauseating chill of vertigo.
In the strip of bright sky along the eastern horizon, a first splash of red, the color of blood, marked the oncoming of the sun....
I was striving to master that nausea, that vertigo, when an atrocious snap of all my muscles hurled me violently from my chair, hurled me into the air as a diver is tossed from a spring-board. Weak as I was, exhausted, prostrate, my muscles contracted with such desperate violence that I was thrown up up through the air, to fall two, three, four yards from my chair, which was thrown over backwards by the push I gave it.
I fell ... I fell ... my head and arms thrown forward ... and I lost consciousness again.
I lost consciousness again; but not before I had had time to see the Man likewise hurled headforemost into the abyss, where He fell, and fell, and fell, to be dashed to death on the white boulders under the black rushing water....