A dim memory, faint and misty, came to Joseph of his recent illness. Lluellyn had sat in this position before, the touch of his fingers was familiar somehow or other, the stooping form awoke a chord of memory.
"Why," he said, "since I have been ill you have been doing this many times. It is all coming back to me. What are you doing?"
Lluellyn smiled faintly.
"I am giving you strength for the work God intends you to do," he said. "Do not talk, Joseph. Lie very still, and fix your thoughts on God."
Already the Teacher's voice seemed thin and far away to Joseph. It was as though he was moving rapidly away from Lluellyn, carried by a strange force, a vital fluid which was pouring into his veins.
He experienced exactly the same sensation as when he had first climbed the mountain-top to meet Lluellyn—that of receiving power, of being a vessel into which life itself was flowing.
At some time or another most people have been under the influence of an anæsthetic, if only for the extraction of a tooth. Joseph now began to lose consciousness in exactly the same way, rapidly, with a sense of falling and a roaring noise in the ears.
The falling motion seemed to stop, the noise ceased, everything was dark.
Then the black swayed like a curtain. Light came swiftly and silently, and in one single moment Joseph saw stretched before him and below him a vast panorama.
It was London that he saw, but in a way that no human eye has ever beheld the modern Babylon. Nor does the word "saw" accurately express the nature of the vision.