H. G. Wells - "Under the Knife" - 1896

🌌✨ H.G. Wells - "Under the Knife" (1896) 🔮⚙️

A haunting meditation on mortality, consciousness, and the fragile line between life and death, set in the stark and sterile theater of a Victorian operating room. 🌌💉 In this profoundly introspective tale, H.G. Wells takes readers on a journey into the unknown, blending scientific precision with metaphysical wonder as one man confronts the edge of existence.🔪✨

As the protagonist prepares for a high-stakes surgical operation, he is gripped by a paralyzing fear of death. But as the anesthetic takes hold, his terror gives way to an extraordinary out-of-body experience. Freed from the confines of his physical form, his consciousness ascends, allowing him to witness the operation from above before being flung into a cosmic odyssey of unparalleled scope.

💫 Against a backdrop of swirling stars and infinite expanses, he contemplates the mysteries of the universe, the nature of the soul, and the boundaries of human understanding. This awe-inspiring vision contrasts starkly with the cold reality of the operating room below, where life hangs by a thread.🔥🔮 

"Under the Knife" explores the profound intersection of science, spirituality, and existential dread. Wells masterfully juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical procedure with the grandeur of cosmic revelation, crafting a narrative that is both intimate and boundless.The story leaves readers grappling with timeless questions: What lies beyond the veil of consciousness? Are we more than our mortal bodies? And how does such a glimpse into the infinite reshape our perception of the finite?With its vivid imagery and philosophical depth, "Under the Knife" remains a poignant exploration of human fragility and the boundless reach of imagination, a tale that lingers long after its final, breathtaking moments. 🌌✨💔

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H. G. Wells Under the Knife, published in eighteen ninety six.
What if I die under it? The thought recurred again
and again as I walked home from Hadden's. It was
a purely personal question. I was spared the deep anxieties

(00:20):
of a married man, and I knew there were few
of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome,
chiefly on account of their duty of regret. I was surprised, indeed,
and perhaps a little humiliated. As I turned the matter
over to think how few could possibly exceed the conventional requirement.
Things came before me, stripped of glamor in a clear,

(00:42):
dry light. During that walk from Haddon's House over Primrose Hill.
There were the friends of my youth. I perceived now
that our affection was a tradition which we foregathered rather
laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals and helpers of
my later career. I suppose I had been cold blooded
or undemonstrative. One perhaps implies the other. It may be

(01:05):
that even the capacity for friendship is a question of physique.
There had been a time in my own life when
I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of a friend.
But as I walked home that afternoon. The emotional side
of my imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself,
nor feel sorry for my friends, nor conceive of them
as grieving for me. I was interested in this deadness

(01:29):
of my emotional nature, no doubt, a concomitant of my
stagnating physiology, and my thoughts wandered off along the line
it suggested once before, in my hot youth, I had
suffered a sudden loss of blood and had been within
an ace of death. I remembered now that my affections
as well as my passions, had drained out of me,

(01:49):
leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a dreg of
self pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions
and tendernesses, and all the complex mons moral interplay of
a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that
the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual
slipping away from the pleasure pained guidance of the animal man.

(02:11):
It has been proven, I take it as thoroughly as
anything can be proven in this world, that the higher emotions,
the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love are
evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal.
They are the harness in which man's mental freedom goes.
And it may be that as death overshadows us, as

(02:33):
our possibility of acting diminishes, this complex growth of balanced impulse,
propensity and aversion whose interplay inspires our acts, goes with it,
leaving what I was suddenly brought back to reality by
an imminent collision with the butcher Boy's tray. I found
that I was crossing the bridge over the Regent's Park Canal,

(02:53):
which runs parallel with that in the Zoological Gardens. The
boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at
a black barge advancing slowly towed by a gaunt white horse.
In the gardens, a nurse was leading three happy little
children over the bridge. The trees were bright green, the
spring hopefulness was still unstained by the dusts of summer.

(03:16):
The sky in the water was bright and clear, but
broken by long waves by quivering bands of black. As
the barge drove through, the breeze was stirring, but it
did not stir me as the spring breeze used to do.
Was this dulness of feeling in itself an anticipation. It
was curious that I could reason and follow out a

(03:37):
network of suggestion as clearly as ever. So, at least
it seemed to me it was calmness, rather than dulness
that was coming upon me. Was there any ground for
the relief in the presentiment of death? Did a man
near to death begin instinctively to withdraw himself from the
meshes of matter and sense even before the cold hand

(03:58):
was laid upon his I felt strangely isolated, isolated without regret,
from the life and existence about me. The children playing
in the sun and gathering strength and experience for the
business of life. The park keeper gossiping with a nurse maid,
the nursing mother, the young couple intent upon each other
as they passed me, the trees by the wayside, spreading new,

(04:20):
pleading leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their branches.
I had been part of it all, but I had
nearly done with it. Now, some way down the broad walk,
I perceived that I was tired, and that my feet
were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned
aside and sat down on one of the green chairs
that lined the way. In a minute, I had dozed

(04:41):
into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed
up a vision of the resurrection. I was still sitting
in the chair, but I thought myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried.
One eye I saw pecked out by birds. Awake, cried
a voice, and in calm intently the dust of the
path and the mold under the grass became insurgent. I

(05:05):
had never before thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery,
but now through the trees, stretching as far as I
could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves
and healing tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble. The
rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward. They
bled in their struggles. The red flesh was torn away
from the white bones. Awake, cried a voice. But I

(05:31):
determined I would not rise to such horrors. Awake, they
would not let me alone. Wake up, said an angry voice,
a cockney angel. The man who sells the tickets was
shaking me, demanding my penny. I paid my penny, pocketed

(05:53):
my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and, feeling now rather
less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham Place.
I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of
thoughts about death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent
at the end of Langham Place, I had the narrowest
escape from the shaft of a cab and went on

(06:14):
my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder.
It struck me that it would have been curious if
my meditations on my death on the morrow had led
to my death that day. But I will not weary
you with more of my experiences. That day and the
next I knew more and more certainly that I should
die under the operation. At times I think I was

(06:36):
inclined to pose to myself. The doctors were coming at eleven,
and I did not get up. It seemed scarce worth
while to trouble about washing and dressing. And though I
read my newspapers and the letters that came by the
first post, I did not find them very interesting. There
was a friendly note from Addison, my old school friend,

(06:56):
calling my attention to two discrepancies and a printer's error
in my new book, with one from Language venting some
vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. I breakfasted
in bed, the glow of pain at my side seemed
more massive. I knew it was pain, and yet if

(07:17):
you can understand, I did not find it very painful.
I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night,
but in the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night
time I had lain thinking of things that were past.
In the morning, I dozed over the question of immortality.
Hadden came punctual to the minute with a neat black bag,

(07:38):
and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little.
I began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings.
Hadden moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside,
and with his broad back to me, began taking things
out of his bag. I heard the light click of
steel upon steel. I found was not altogether stagnant. Will

(08:05):
you hurt me much? I said, in an offhand tone.
Not a bit hadn't answered over his shoulder. We shall
chloroform you. Your heart's as sound as a bell, And
as he spoke I had a whiff of the pungent
sweetness of the anesthetic. They stretched me out with a

(08:26):
convenient exposure of my side, and almost before I realized
what was happening. The chloroform was being administered. It stings
the nostrils, and there is a suffocating sensation. At first
I knew I should die, that this was the end
of consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I
was not prepared for death. I had a vague sense

(08:48):
of a duty overlooked. I knew not what what was
it I had not done. I could think of nothing
more to do, nothing desirable left in life, and yet
I had the strangest disinclination to death, and the physical
sensation was painfully oppressive. Of course, the doctors did not
know they were going to kill me. Possibly I struggled.

(09:12):
Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous silence,
and an impenetrable blackness came upon me. There must have
been an interval of absolute unconsciousness seconds or minutes. Then
with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that I was
not yet dead. I was still in my body, but

(09:33):
all the multitudinous sensations that come sweeping from it to
make up the background of consciousness had gone, leaving me
free of it all. No, not free of it all,
for as yet something still held me to the poor
stark flesh upon the bed, held me, yet not so
closely that I did not feel myself external to it,
independent of it, straining away from it. I do not

(09:56):
think I saw. I do not think I heard, but
I perceived all that was going on, And it was
as if I both heard and saw. Hadden was bending
over me, Mowbray behind me. The scalpel, it was a
large scalpel, was cutting my flesh at the side, under
the flying ribs. It was interesting to see myself cut
like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm. The

(10:20):
interest was much of a quality with that one might
feel in a game of chest between strangers. Hadden's face
was firm and his hand steady. But I was surprised
to perceive, how I know not that he was feeling
the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the
conduct of the operation. Mowbray's thoughts, too, I could see

(10:41):
he was thinking that Hadden's manner showed too much of
the specialist. New suggestions came up like bubbles through a
stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after another in
the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not
help noticing and admiring Hadden's swift dexterity in spite of
his envious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw

(11:04):
my liver exposed. I was puzzled at my own condition.
I did not feel that I was dead, but I
was different in some way from my living self. The
gray depression that had weighed on me for a year
or more in colored all my thoughts was gone. I
perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all. I

(11:26):
wondered if every one perceived things in this way under
chloroform and forgot it again when he came out of it,
it would be inconvenient to look into some heads and
not forget. Although I did not think that I was dead,
I still perceived quite clearly that I was soon to die.
This brought me back to the consideration of Haddon's proceedings.

(11:48):
I looked into his mind and saw that he was
afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My
attention was distracted from details by the curious changes going
on in his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering
little spot of light which is thrown by the mirror
of a galvanometer. His thoughts ran under it like a stream,

(12:09):
some through the focus, bright and distinct, some shadowy in
the half light of the edge. Just now, the little
glow was steady, But the least movement on Mowbray's part,
the slightest sound from outside, even a faint difference in
the slow movement of the living flesh he was cutting,
set the light spot shivering and spinning. A new sense

(12:29):
impression came rushing up through the flow of thoughts, and
lo the light spot jerked away towards it, swifter than
a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon
that unstable, fitful thing depended all the complex motions of
the man, that for the next five minutes therefore my
life hung upon its movements. And he was growing more

(12:52):
and more nervous in his work. It was as if
a little picture of a cut vein grew brighter and
struggled to oust from his brain another piture of a
cut falling short of the mark. He was afraid. His
dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread
of cutting too far. Then, suddenly, like an escape of
water from under a lock gate, a great uprush of

(13:14):
horrible realization set all his thoughts swirling, and simultaneously I
perceived that the vein was cut. He started back with
a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown purple blood
gather in a swift bead and run trickling. He was horrified.
He pitched the red stained scalpel on to the octagonal table,

(13:35):
and instantly both doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty
and ill conceived efforts to remedy the disaster, Ice, said Mowbray, gasping.
But I knew that I was killed, though my body
still clung to me. I will not describe their belated
endeavors to save me, though I perceived every detail. My

(13:58):
perceptions were sharp and swifter than they had ever been
in life. My thoughts rushed through my mind with incredible swiftness,
but with perfect definition. I can only compare their crowded
clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose of opium.
In a moment, it would all be over and I
should be free. I knew I was immortal, but what

(14:19):
would happen? I did not know. Should I drift off presently,
like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some
kind of half material body, an attenuated version of my
material self. Should I find myself suddenly among the innumerable
hosts of the dead and know the world about me
for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed. Should I drift

(14:40):
to some spiritualistic seance and there make foolish incomprehensible attempts
to effect a purblind medium. It was a state of
unemotional curiosity, of colorless expectation. And then I realized a
growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge
human magnet was drawing me upwards out of my body.

(15:01):
The stress grew and grew. I seemed an atom for
which monstrous forces were fighting. For one brief, terrible moment,
sensation came back to me, that feeling of falling headlong,
which comes in nightmares, That feeling a thousand times intensified
that in a black horror, swept across my thoughts in

(15:22):
a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with
its cut side, the little room swept away from under
me and vanished as a speck of foam vanishes down
an eddy. I was in mid air. Far below was
the West end of London, receding rapidly. For I seemed
to be flying swiftly upward, and as it receded, passing

(15:44):
westward like a panorama, I could see through the faint
haze of smoke, the innumerable roof's chimney set, the narrow
roadways stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares,
and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric.
But it spun away as the earth rotated on its axis,

(16:04):
and in a few seconds, as it seemed, I was
over the scattered clumps of town about ealing the Little Thames,
a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern
Hills and the North Downs, coming up like the rim
of a basin far away, in faint with haze, up
I rushed, and at first I had not the faintest
conception what this headlong rush upward could mean. Every moment,

(16:27):
the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,
and the details of town and field, of hill and
valley got more and more hazy and pale and indistinct.
A luminous gray was mingled more and more with the
blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows,
and a little patch of cloud low and far to
the west shone ever more dazzlingly white above. As the

(16:50):
veil of atmosphere between myself and outer space grew thinner,
the sky, which had been a fair springtime blue at first,
grew deeper and richer in color, passing steadily through the
intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as the
blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the
blackness of a frosty starlight, And at last as black
as no blackness I had ever beheld. And first one star,

(17:15):
and then many, and at last an innumerable host broke
out upon the sky, more stars than anyone has ever
seen from the face of the Earth. For the blueness
of the sky in the light of the sun, and
stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly. There is diffused light
even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do
not see the stars by day, only because of the
dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I saw things

(17:40):
I know, not, how assuredly, with no mortal eyes, and
that defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun
was incredibly strange and wonderful. The body of it was
a disc of blinding white light, not yellowish as it
seems to those who live upon the earth, but livid white,
all streaked with sky arlet streaks, and rimmed about with

(18:01):
a fringe of writhing tongues of red fire, and shooting
half way across the heavens from either side of it,
and brighter than the milky way, were two pinions of
silver white, making it look more like those winged globes.
I have seen an Egyptian sculpture than anything else I
can remember upon Earth. These I knew for the solar Corona,
though I had never seen anything of it but a

(18:23):
picture during the days of my earthly life. When my
attention came back to the Earth again, I saw that
it had fallen very far away from me. Field and
town were long since indistinguishable, and all the varied hues
of the country were merging into a uniform, bright gray,
broken only by the brilliant white of the clouds that
lay scattered in floculent masses over Ireland and the west

(18:46):
of England. For now I could see the outlines of
the north of France and Ireland, and all this island
of Britain, save where Scotland passed over the horizon to
the north, or where the coast was blurred or obliterated
by the sea, was a dull gray and darker than
the land, and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards

(19:07):
the east. All this had happened so swiftly that until
I was some thousand miles or so from the earth,
I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived
I had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs,
and that I felt neither alarm nor pain all about me.
I perceived that the vacancy, for I had already left

(19:28):
the air behind, was cold beyond the imagination of man,
But it troubled me not. The sun's rays shot through
the void, powerless to light or heat until they should
strike on matter in their course. I saw things with
a serene self forgetfulness, even as if I were God.
And down below there, rushing away from me countless miles.

(19:50):
In a second, where a little dark spot on the
gray marked the position of London, two doctors were struggling
to restore life to the poor, hacked and outworn shell
I had abandoned. I felt then such release, such serenity
as I can compare to no mortal delight I have
ever known. It was only after I had perceived all
these things that the meaning of that headlong rush of

(20:13):
the Earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was so simple,
so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating
the thing that was happening to me, I had suddenly
been cut adrift from matter. All that was material of
me was thereupon Earth, whirling away through space, held to
the Earth by gravitation, partaking of the Earth inertia, moving

(20:34):
in its wreath of epicycles round the Sun, and with
the Sun and the planets on their vast march through space.
But the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the
pull of matter for matter. Where it parts from its
garment of flesh. There it remains, so far as space
concerns it, any longer, immovable in space. I was not

(20:55):
leaving the Earth. The Earth was leaving me. And not
only the Earth, but the whole Solar System was streaming
past and about me in space, invisible to me, scattered
in the wake of the Earth upon its journey. There
must be an innumerable multitude of souls stripped like myself
of the material, stripped like myself, of the passions of
the individual, and the generous emotions of the gregarious, brute

(21:18):
naked intelligences, things of newborn wonder and thought, marveling at
the strange release that had suddenly come on them. As
I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun
in the black heavens, and from the broad and shining
Earth upon which my being had begun, I seemed to
grow in some incredible manner, vast, vast as regards this

(21:39):
world I had left, vast as regards the moments and
periods of a human life. Very soon I saw the
full circle of the Earth, slightly gibbous, like the moon
when she nears her full but very large, and the
silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze,
wherein as it seemed, Little England had been basking but
a few minutes ago. At first, the Earth was large

(22:02):
and shone in the heavens, filling a great part of them.
But every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As
she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter, crept
into view over the rim of her disk. I looked
for the constellations, only that part of aries directly behind
the Sun, and the Lion, which the Earth covered, were hidden.

(22:25):
I recognized the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky Way,
with Vega very bright between Sun and Earth, and Sirius
and Orion shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the
opposite quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead,
and the Great Bear hung over the circle of the Earth.
And away beneath and beyond the shining corona of the

(22:47):
Sun were strange groupings of stars I had never seen
in my life, notably a dagger shaped group that I
knew for the Southern Cross. All these were no larger
than when they had shone on Earth. But the little
star cars that one scarce seas shone now against the
setting of black vacancy, as brightly as the first magnitudes
had done. While the larger worlds were points of indescribable

(23:09):
glory and color. Aldebaran was a spot of blood, red,
fire and serious, condensed to one point the light of
innumerable sapphires, and they shone steadily. They did not scintillate,
They were calmly glorious. My impressions had an adamantin hardness
and brightness. There was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing

(23:31):
but infinite darkness, set with the myriads of these acute
and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently, when I
looked again, the little Earth seemed no bigger than the Sun,
and it dwindled and turned as I looked, until in
a second space, as it seemed to me, it was halved.
And so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in

(23:51):
the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin's head of light,
shining steadily was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy,
and without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the
speck of cosmic dust we call the world fall away
from me. Presently, it dawned upon me that my sense
of duration had changed, that my mind was moving not faster,

(24:15):
but infinitely slower, that between each separate impression there was
a period of many days. The Moon spun once round
the Earth as I noted this, and I perceived clearly
the motion of Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared
as if the time between thought and thought grew steadily greater,
until at last a thousand years was but a moment

(24:36):
in my perception. At first the constellations had shown motionless
against the black background of infinite space. But presently it
seemed as though the group of stars about Hercules and
the Scorpion was contracting, while Orion and Eldebrion and their
neighbors were scattering apart flashing. Suddenly, out of the darkness

(24:56):
there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering
like dust specks in a sunbeam, and encompassed in a
faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about me and vanished
again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw
that a bright spot of light that shone a little
to one side of my path was growing very rapidly larger,

(25:18):
and perceived that it was the planet Saturn, rushing towards me.
Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up the heavens behind it,
and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of stars. I
perceived its flattened whirling body, its disc like belt, and
seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew till

(25:39):
it towered enormous, and then I plunged amid a streaming
multitude of clashing stones and dancing dust particles and gas eddies,
and saw for a moment the mighty triple belt, like
three concentric arches of moonlight above me, its shadow black
on the boiling tumult below. These things happened in one
tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The

(26:00):
planet went by like a flash of lightning. For a
few seconds, it blotted out the Sun, and there and
then became a mere, black, dwindling, winged patch against the light.
The Earth, the mother mote of my being, I could
no longer see, So with a stately swiftness, in the
profoundest silence, the Solar System fell from me, as it

(26:21):
had been a garment until the Sun was a mere
star amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of
planet specks lost in the confused glittering of the remoter light.
I was no longer a denizen of the Solar System.
I had come to the outer universe. I seemed to
grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly,

(26:41):
the stars closed in about the spot where Anteres and
Vega had vanished in a phosphorescent haze. Until that part
of the sky had the semblance of a whirling mass
of nebulae, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps of
vacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It
seemed as if I moved towards a point between Ryon's
belt and sword, and the void about that region opened

(27:03):
vaster and vaster every second, an incredible gulf of nothingness
into which I was falling faster and ever faster, the universe,
rushed by a hurry of whirling motes, at last, speeding
silently into the void, stars glowing brighter and brighter, with
their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion

(27:23):
as I neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence.
Faint comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter eddying
light points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of
miles or so from me at most, few nearer, traveling
with unimaginable rapidity, shooting constellations momentary darts of fire through

(27:44):
that black, enormous night. More than anything else, it was
like a dusty draft sunbeamlit broader and wider and deeper
grew the starless space. The vacant beyond into which I
was being drawn. At last a quarter of the heavens
was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of
stellar universe closed in behind me, like a veil of

(28:06):
light that is gathered together. It drove away from me
like a monstrous jack o' lantern, driven by the wind
I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever,
the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the
stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks, hurrying
away from me, inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness

(28:28):
and emptiness, was about me on every side. Soon the
little universe of matter, the cage of points, in which
I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a
whirling disc of luminous glittering, and now to one minute
disc of hazy light. In a little while it would
shrink to a point, and at last would vanish altogether. Suddenly,

(28:51):
feeling came back to me, feeling in the shape of
overwhelming terror, such a dread of those dark vastitudes as
no words can describe. A passionate resurgence of sympathy and
social desire. Were there other souls invisible to me as
I to them about me in the blackness? Or was I? Indeed,
even as I felt alone, had I passed out of

(29:13):
being into something that was neither being nor not being.
The covering of the body, the covering of matter had
been torn from me, and the hallucinations of companionship and security.
Everything was black and silent. I had ceased to be.
I was nothing. There was nothing save only that infinitesimal

(29:34):
dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained
myself to hear and see, and for a while there
was nought but infinite silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.
Then I saw that about the spot of light into
which the whole world of matter had shrunk, there was
a faint glow, and in a band on either side

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of that. The darkness was not absolute. I watched it
for ages, as it seemed to me, and through the
long waiting, the haze grew imperceptibly more distinct, and then
about the band appeared an irregular cloud of the faintest,
palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience. But the things
grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change.

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What was unfolding itself? What was this strange, reddish dawn
in the interminable night of space? The cloud's shape was grotesque.
It seemed to be looped along its lower side into
four projecting masses, and above it ended in a straight line.
What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen

(30:40):
that figure before, but I could not think what, nor where,
nor when it was. Then the realization rushed upon me.
It was a clenched hand. I was alone in space,
alone with this huge, shadowy hand, upon which the whole
universe of matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust.

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It seemed as though I watched it through vast periods
of time. On the forefinger glittered a ring, and the
universe from which I had come was but a spot
of light upon the ring's curvature, and the thing that
the hand gripped had the likeness of a black rod.
Through a long eternity, I watched this hand with the
ring and the rod, marveling and fearing and waiting helplessly

(31:23):
on what might follow. It seemed as though nothing could follow,
that I should watch forever, seeing only the hand and
the thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import
was the whole universe but a refracting speck upon some
greater being. Were our worlds, but the atoms of another universe,
and those again of another, and so on through an

(31:45):
endless progression. And what was I? Was? I indeed immaterial?
A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came
into my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the filled with
impalpable suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes. Then suddenly came a

(32:08):
sound like the sound of a tolling bell, faint, as
if infinitely far, muffled, as though heard through thick swathings
of darkness, a deep vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of
silence between each stroke. And the hand appeared to tighten
on the rod, and I saw far above the hand,
towards the apex of the darkness, a circle of dim phosphorescence,

(32:32):
a ghostly sphere. Whence these sounds came throbbing, and at
the last stroke, the hand vanished, for the hour had come,
and I heard a noise of many waters, but the
black rod remained as a great band across the sky.
And then a voice which seemed to run to the
uttermost parts of space, spoke saying, there will be no

(32:53):
more pain. At that, an almost intolerable gladness and radiance
rushed in upon me, and I saw the circle shining
white and bright, and the rod black and shining, and
many things else distinct and clear, and the circle was
the face of the clock, and the rod the rail
of my bed. Haddon was standing at the foot against

(33:14):
the rail with a small pair of scissors on his fingers,
and the hands of my clock, on the mantle over
his shoulder, were clasped together. Over the hour of twelve,
Mowbray was washing something in a basin at the octagonal table,
and at my side I felt a subdued feeling that
could scarce be spoken of as pain. The operation had

(33:34):
not killed me, and I perceived suddenly that the dull
melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind