The two nickel-plated spheres on their supports, showed round, like divers’ helmets. A spirit lamp was burning under them. I nearly fainted with horror. At the side behind the curtain something was going on. A penetrating odor of ether came from it. The secret, the secret always! “What’s behind that?” I cried. From between the wall and the curtain Karl and Wilhelm appeared, leaving the room which had thus been contrived on the other side of the compartment. They also had put on white overalls, though they were only assistants, but Lerne had seized something, and I felt, on the back of my neck, the chill touch of steel. I uttered a cry. “Idiot!” said my uncle, “it’s a clipper.” He cut my hair, and shaved my hairy scalp close. At every touch of the razor I thought I felt the edge in my flesh. After that, they soaked my skull again, dried it, and the Professor, by means of a soft pencil and calipers, covered my baldness with cabalistic lines. “Take off your shirt,” he said to me. “Take care, do not spoil my diagrams.” “Stretch yourself out on that, now.” They helped me to haul myself up on the table, to which they bound me fast, with my arms under the bier. Where was Johann? Karl, without any warning, put a sort of muzzle over me. An odor of ether penetrated my lungs. “Why not chloroform?” I said to myself. Lerne recommended as follows: “Breathe deeply and regularly--it is for your own good. Breathe!” I obeyed. There is a syringe with a sharp-pointed nozzle in my uncle’s hand. Hallo! he has pricked my neck with it! I moved my jaws, my tongue and lips feeling like lead. “Wait, I am not sleeping yet. What is this virus?” “Morphia,” said the Professor simply. The anesthetic was gaining on me. Another prick, on the shoulder--this time very sharp. “I am not sleeping! Good heavens, wait! I am not sleeping.” “That is what I wanted to know,” growled my executioner. For some moments a consolation had been assuaging my torture. Did not the cranial preparations seem to show that they were going to slaughter me without delay? And yet Macbeth had survived his trepanning. I seemed to get far away inside myself. Silvery bells gayly rang a celestial chime, which I have never been able to remember, though it seemed to me unforgettable. Another prick on the shoulder, which I hardly felt. I wished to say again that I was not sleeping. Vain effort! My words sounded dully submerged in the depths of an invading sea. They were held lifeless, and I alone could make them out. The rings glide along the curtain rod, and without suffering, on the threshold of this artificial Nirvana, this is what I seemed to perceive. Lerne makes a long incision from the right temple to the left, round the occiput--an incomplete scalping, and he brings down all the strips of flesh in front of my face, making my forehead like a shambles. From in front, one must see me with the bleeding and jumbled head which I remembered on the monkey.