He fell silent again, and I was about to prompt him with another question--I could not afford to let the time run out in long silences--but abruptly the muscles about his eyes tightened and subtly a new aspect replaced their hopeless dejection. Now they expressed a black, bottomless terror. For a moment I marveled that so small a portion of a facial anatomy could express such horror. "There is something coming toward me," he said. "A--beast--of brutish foulness! Beast is too inadequate a term to describe it, but I know no words to tell its form. It is an intangible and evasive--thing--but very real. And it is coming closer! It has no organs of sight as I know them, but I feel that it can see me. Or rather that it is aware of me with a sense sharper than vision itself. It is very near now. Oh God, the malevolence, the hate--the potentiality of awful, fearsome destructiveness that is its very essence! And still I cannot move!" The expression of terrified anticipation, centered in his eyes, lessened slightly, and was replaced, instantly, by its former deep, deep despair. "I am no longer afraid," he said. "Why?" I interjected. "Why?" I was impatient to learn all that I could before the end came. "Because ..." He paused. "Because it holds no threat for me. Somehow, someday, I understand--I know--that it too is seeking that for which I wait." "What is it doing now?" I asked. "It has stopped beside me and we stand together, gazing across the stark, empty plain. Now a second awful entity, with the same leashed virulence about it, moves up and stands at my other side. We all three wait, myself with a dark fear of this dismal universe, my unnatural companions with patient, malicious menace. "Bits of ..." He faltered. "Of ... I can name it only _aura_, go out from the beasts like an acid stream, and touch me, and the hate, and the venom chill my body like a wave of intense cold. "Now there are others of the awful breed behind me. We stand, waiting, waiting for that which will come. What it is I do not know." I could see the pallor of death creeping steadily into the last corners of his lips, and I knew that the end was not far away. Suddenly a black frustration built up within me. "What are you waiting for?" I screamed, the tenseness, and the importance of this moment forcing me to lose the iron self-control upon which I have always prided myself. I knew that the answer held the secret of what I must know. If I could learn that, my experiment would not be in vain, and I could make whatever preparations were necessary for my own death. I had to know that answer. "Think! Think!" I pleaded. "What are you waiting for?" "I do not know!" The dreary despair in his eyes, sightless as they met mine, chilled me with a coldness that I felt in the marrow of my being. "I do not know," he repeated. "I ... Yes, I do know!"