“I should put on the cap,” he said, and fitted it.
He must have touched some mechanism that I had not seen, for instantly the cap began to whir on the screw. Through the glass face I caught a last glimpse of Esther’s terrified eyes. The image blurred and vanished as my breath dimmed the glass and frosted it. I heard the swift jar of the cap mechanism end in a jarring click. I gasped for air; there was none. My head swam, my throat was closed; the blackness was pricked into flecks of fire. I groped for memory through unconsciousness—and ceased.
CHAPTER III
IN THE CELLAR
I have heard patients, emerging from the chloroform swoon, describe how, before awakening, they had seemed to view themselves lying unconscious upon their beds, detailing the posture of their motionless bodies and inert limbs. In this way, now, I seemed to see myself.
I am sure that was no dream of the vague borderland between death and life. I saw the pallid face, so shrunken that the skin clung to the edged bones, and the dry hair, the pinched lips and waxen hands. I saw myself as if from some non-spatial point, and with singular indifference, except that one fragment of knowledge, detached from my serene omniscience, troubled me. I had to return within that physical envelope; and behind me lay dim memories, quite untranslatable, but ineffably rapturous, which made that projected incarnation an event of dread.
Vague images of earthly things began to float upward out of the dark, as it were, symbols of physical life whose meaning remained obscure. I pictured a spring-board, on which a swimmer stood poised, waiting to dive into the sea and set the plank behind him quivering, and a large roll of some material, like a carpet, blocking a cellar door.
Gradually, through an alternation of dreams and blankness, I began to be aware of the parched and withered body that cloaked me. The point of consciousness had shrunk within its earthly envelope. Soon it diffused itself throughout my members. Now I could translate my symbols into ideas. That coiled-up substance that blocked the door was my tongue, fallen back into the throat. And the spring-board on which the swimmer stood—that was my heart, waiting to beat. And unless and until the swimmer—I—made that plunge into life’s ocean, it could not. Slowly the need of physical resurrection urged me onward.
A thousand darts were stabbing in my flesh, like purgatorial fire. No motor nerve had yet awakened, but the capillaries, opening, pricked me like red-hot needles. Faint memories of the past flashed through my mind, and, though I recalled no intervening period, I was sensible that those events had happened infinitely long before.
Suddenly I plunged. I felt as if a sword had pierced my body. I felt the waters of that living ocean close over my face, and gasped. I breathed. Simultaneously, with a loud click, the cap of the cylinder flew off, air rushed in, a stabbing light broke through my closed eyelids; I fainted.
It was, of course, the gradual unscrewing of the cylinder cap as the mechanism ran down, and the consequent admission of minute quantities of oxygen, that had begun to restore me. I must have passed several days in semi-consciousness before the cylinder opened. When the last thread of the screw was traversed, the inrush of air caused the respiration to begin.