Mercaptan refuses to allow the rest to come into the laboratory, in case something should go wrong. He straps the machine on his shoulders, makes a final connection; his life processes begin to work faster, faster, ever faster. The first effect of course was a change of colour. The blue oblong of the window became green--yellow--orange--red. Meanwhile each wave-length of the ultra-violet became blue, and itself ran down the gamut of colour. Then came the turn of the X-rays--by their dim light he groped about, till they too became relatively too slow for his retina. That ought to make him blind, of course--but no! Mr. Wells had thought that all out; and he came into a state of nearly maximum speed where he perceived a brilliant, phosphorescent light given out by all objects, generated by disturbances of a wave-length unimaginably, undiscoverably small. Meanwhile he had passed through an amazing experience--he had heard the veritable music of the spheres! That had happened when in his acceleration he had, so to speak, caught up with the light-waves, until they were tuned to his ear’s organ of Corti: and all that had been visible in his ordinary life was now to be appreciated by hearing. Unfortunately, as his ears possessed no lens, this universal music was to him of course merely a hideous babel of sound. At last, as the workings of his body approached the rapidity of light’s own oscillations, he entered on a new phase--surrounded on every side by an ocean of waves which lapped softly against his body--waves, waves, and still more waves.... He was in that region not unlike that from which life has escaped when it ceased to be infinitely little, a region in which none of the events that make up our ordinary life, none of the bodies that are our normal environment, have existence any more--all reduced to a chaos of billows ceaselessly and meaninglessly buffeting his being. “Mi ritrovai in una selva oscura.” Life is a wood, dark and trackless enough to be sure; but Mercaptan could not even see that it was a wood--for the trees. Yet it was soothing: the very meaninglessness of the wave-rocking released one of responsibility, and it was delicious to float upon this strange etheric sea. Then his scientific mind reasserted itself. He realized that he had magnified his rate of life and was consuming his precious days at an appalling speed. The lever was thrown into reverse, and he passed gradually back to what he had been accustomed to think of as reality.