Life, the wild train of his reasoning ran on continually. "Life filling one body--the body doubles in size--then the life is half as strong. Now my body is three times as big--life is three times as weak--now five times--six times--now a hundred times. Oh, this numbness is reaching my heart! Oh, this horrible, horrible death!" and his frame shook and his muscles were drawn up in hard knots, and great beads of sweat rolled down his agonised features. * * * * * Then a hand that waited on him unseen took a cup in which some white crystals had been dissolved and placed it to his lips. As his teeth rattled against it, he drank the draught fiercely, as if for life, though he knew not what he did. * * * * * His delusions then became softer, even happy, as of one under the influence of opium. He saw around him an immense landscape--plains and rivers and hills spreading for hundreds of leagues beneath a blue sky--a nature bathed in a pellucid atmosphere that lent all a beauty beyond earth. Scattered over the plain were many cities, and by merely willing it he found himself walking within any of them--strange, beautiful cities of bright colour, whose banner-hung streets were thronged with processions of people clad in a medieval costume. The quaintness of an olden time was over all. All these processions tripped on to one tune, a tune to which they sang a song in an unknown language--a song low, monotonous, sweet; and the church bells rang out the same tune perpetually, and the very air shook to it, and the trees waved to it, and so did the banners that hung from the houses; and all his own words and thoughts ran on ever to the same jingle without his power to prevent it. Then he turned off from the main into the side streets, tempted by the glance of a white-faced woman with a face of marvellous beauty, fascinating, yet ominous, with immovable, inscrutable expression of features.