“Help, I am not sleeping!” But I cannot hear my cries for the jangling of the silver bells. To begin with, they are too far down under the sea, and now the sound of the bells is deafening, like great church bells chiming with a formidable din, and it is now I who plunge into the ocean of ether. Am I living, or am I not? I am a dead man who is conscious of being dead.... * * * * * Even more so.... * * * * * Nothingness!---- CHAPTER X THE CIRCEEAN OPERATION I opened my eyes on thick darkness in a place where there was neither noise nor smell. I wanted to say once more, “Do not begin, I am still awake,” but no word sounded. The delirium of the night was being prolonged. It seemed to me that the bellowing had got nearer, so much so, indeed, that I seemed to hear it in myself. I could not manage to master my ridiculous senses. I kept quiet. Then there grew in me the assurance that the mysterious business was at an end. Gradually the darkness lightened. Unconsciousness was coming to an end. As my blindness got better, smells and sounds, ever in greater number, were like a welcomed crowd coming towards me. “Oh, happiness, to remain thus--thus for ever!” But this inverse death struggle came ever on in spite of me, and life seized me once more. However, objects, though now distinct, remained shapeless, without perspective, and curiously colored. My vision embraced a wide space--a field vaster than before. I remembered that the influence of certain anesthetics on the dilatation of the pupil, a phenomenon which no doubt brought on these disturbances of sight. I noted, however, without very much difficulty, that they had lifted me from the table, and laid me on the ground, on the other side of the room, and in spite of my eye, which functioned like a distorting lens, I succeeded in recognizing the situation. The curtain was no longer drawn. Lerne and his assistants, grouped round the operating table, were busy about something which their grouping hid from me--probably the cleaning of instruments. Through the wide-opened door, one could see the park, and hardly twenty yards away, a corner of the paddock, where the cows were ruminating and lowing. _Only_, I might have imagined myself transported into the most revolutionary picture of the impressionist school. The azure of the sky, without losing its limpid depths, had changed into a fine orange dye. The paddocks--the trees--instead of being green seemed to me to be red. The buttercups of the meadow, starred vermilion grass with violets. Everything had changed color, except, however, the black and white things. The dark trousers of the four men obstinately remained as before, as also their overalls, but those white overalls were marked with _green_ stains.