“Abruptly, they bulged out to a vast, pouting mound of force and sound, stiffened and swollen, and hugely massive and clean-cut in the moon-beams.  And a great sweat lay heavy on the vast upper-lip.  In the same moment of time, the whistling had burst into a mad screaming note, that seemed to stun me, even where I stood, outside of the window.  And then, the following moment, I was staring blankly at the solid, undisturbed floor of the room—­smooth, polished stone flooring, from wall to wall; and there was an absolute silence.

“You can picture me staring into the quiet Room, and knowing what I knew.  I felt like a sick, frightened kid, and wanted to slide quietly down the ladder, and run away.  But in that very instant, I heard Tassoc’s voice calling to me from within the Room, for help, help.  My God! but I got such an awful dazed feeling; and I had a vague, bewildered notion that, after all, it was the Irishmen who had got him in there, and were taking it out of him.  And then the call came again, and I burst the window, and jumped in to help him.  I had a confused idea that the call had come from within the shadow of the great fireplace, and I raced across to it; but there was no one there.

“‘Tassoc!’ I shouted, and my voice went empty-sounding ’round the great apartment; and then, in a flash, I knew that Tassoc had never called.  I whirled ’round, sick with fear, toward the window, and as I did so, a frightful, exultant whistling scream burst through the Room.  On my left, the end wall had bellied-in toward me, in a pair of gargantuan lips, black and utterly monstrous, to within a yard of my face.  I fumbled for a mad instant at my revolver; not for it, but myself; for the danger was a thousand times worse than death.  And then, suddenly, the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was whispered quite audibly in the room.  Instantly, the thing happened that I have known once before.  There came a sense as of dust falling continually and monotonously, and I knew that my life hung uncertain and suspended for a flash, in a brief, reeling vertigo of unseeable things.  Then that ended, and I knew that I might live.  My soul and body blended again, and life and power came to me.  I dashed furiously at the window, and hurled myself out head-foremost; for I can tell you that I had stopped being afraid of death.  I crashed down on to the ladder, and slithered, grabbing and grabbing; and so came some way or other alive to the bottom.  And there I sat in the soft, wet grass, with the moonlight all about me; and far above, through the broken window of the Room, there was a low whistling.

“That is the chief of it.  I was not hurt, and I went ’round to the front, and knocked Tassoc up.  When they let me in, we had a long yarn, over some good whisky—­for I was shaken to pieces—­and I explained things as much as I could, I told Tassoc that the room would have to come down, and every fragment of it burned in a blast-furnace, erected within a pentacle.  He nodded.  There was nothing to say.  Then I went to bed.