Then he gasped for life; drank the difficult thick air and rose again to the surface; with each expiration sinking, with each inspiration rising to the lighter air of the surface.

There was present to him all the agony of the drowning with a horror such as no death can give. But when he rose, he was not able to stay above the pit long; for he could not hold his breath—after a few minutes he was forced to breathe out—breathe out and sink down—down into that unutterable horror.

And the whole mouth of the pit was domed with a gigantic dome of millions of human heads, grinning, laughing, jeering at the wretch; mocking him that he could not stay on the surface but must breathe out and sink again—the heads of beautiful, bad women, some that he recognised as erst the companions of his orgies, the hideous heads too of satyr-like old men, that shook with palsy as they grinned with lust, in which he seemed to recognize his own distorted likeness; and heads of horrible things not describable in the language of the sane world.

So up and down he rose and fell between the grinning faces and the suffocating darkness, each time weaker, more unable to fight upwards to life, each time sinking deeper, staying longer in the stifling depths.

Once more the hand that ministered unseen, placed the glass to his chattering teeth; the crystals again did their blessed work, and his delirious fancy changed. He was in an old ivy-grown parsonage in a pleasant, western village among hills and apple-orchards; a child once more in his old home. He wandered up the valley, by the crystal trout-streams, between the heathery hills; a child so glad, so pure, and he wept bitterly for the very delight of the flowers and all the beauty of the land, wept, though so simple and innocent; with a foreboding of future sin and misery and vain, vain, regrets.

Then the clouds darkened and gathered, and a girl walked towards him by the river bank, a beautiful girl with golden hair and purple eyes, with a great sorrow in her young face—and she passed, seeing him not, turning not aside, though he stretched out his hands in passionate yearning and pleading—but he could not step one step towards her, nor could he cry out to her to stay, though he knew that she alone could save him.

Then another woman followed, beautiful also, but with the eyes of a snake; and she saw him and looked into him till his heart chilled and his veins tingled, but with a terrible fascination. To look at her, to love her was death; but he would look and love notwithstanding, and die with a laugh of joy on his lips.