CONSCIOUSNESS UNDER CHLOROFORM. 695 



the struggle finished. There was a sense of comparative relief that, at 

 any rate, one force was victorious, and the distraction over ; the strange, 

 large fright that had seized me so entirely when I felt myself ensnared 

 into dark suffocation was now gone also, and there was only left the 

 huge thudding at my ears, and the terribly impetuous stroke of my 

 heart. The thudding gradually got less acutely painful, and less loud ; 

 I remember a recognition of satisfaction that one more fearful disturb- 

 ance was gone. But, while the thunder in my ear was thus growing 

 duller, all of a sudden my heart sprang out with a more vivid flash of 

 sensation than any of those previous ones. The force of an express- 

 engine was straining there, and like a burning ball it leaped from side 

 to side, faster and faster, hitting me with such a superhuman earnest- 

 ness that I felt each time as if the iron had entered my soul, and it 

 was all over with me forever. (Not that ' I ' was now any more than 

 this burning-hot heart and the walled space in which it was making its 

 strokes : the rest of 'me' had gone unobserved out of focus.) Every 

 stroke produced exquisite pain on the flesh against which it beat glow- 

 ing, and there was a radiation, as from a molten lump of metal be- 

 tween inclosures. Presently the unbearable heat got less, and there 

 was nothing remaining except a pendulous movement, slackening 

 speed, and not painful. Of nothing beyond was I conscious but this 

 warm body vibrating : not a single other part of me was left, and 

 there was not a single other movement of any sort to attract my at- 

 tention. A fading sense of infinite leisure at last, in a dreamy, inau- 

 dible air ; then all was hushed out of notice. 



" . . . . There was the breaking of a silence that might have been 

 going on forever in the utterly dark air. An undisturbed, empty quiet 

 was everywhere, except that a stupid presence lay like a heavy intru- 

 sion somewhere a blotch on the calm. This blotch became more in- 

 harmonious, more distinctly leaden ; it was a heavier pressure it is 

 actually intruding farther and, before almost there was time to won- 

 der feebly how disagreeable was this interruption of untroubled quiet, 

 it had loomed out as something unspeakably cruel and woful. For a 

 bit there was nothing more than this profoundly cruel presence, and 

 my recognition 1 of it. It seemed unutterably monstrous in its nature, 

 and I felt it like some superhuman injustice; but so entire had been 

 the still rest all round before its shadow troubled me, that I had no 

 notion of making the faintest remonstrance. ... It got worse. . . . 

 Just as the cruelty and injustice became so unbearable that I hardly 

 could take it in, suddenly it came out a massive, pulsating pain y and I 

 was all over one tender wound, with this dense pain probing me to 

 my deepest depths. I felt one sympathetic body of atoms, and at each 

 probe of the pain every single atom was forced by a tremendous press- 

 ure into all the rest, while every one of them was acutely tender, and 



1 If there were a noun belonging to the verb " To be aware of," like " recognition " 

 to " recognize," it would be the one to use here. 



