I cannot say when it began, but now I was conscious of a sound in my ears, distinct and near, a steady sound of splashing, or fluttering, resembling the noising of a cascade or brook:  and it grew.  Forty more steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)—­perhaps sixty—­perhaps eighty:  and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a circular clean-cut lake.

One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood:  and then I dropped down flat in swoon.

* * * * *

In a hundred years, I suppose, I should never succeed in analysing why I swooned:  but my consciousness still retains the impression of that horrid thrill.  I saw nothing distinctly, for my whole being reeled and toppled drunken, like a spinning-top in desperate death-struggle at the moment when it flags, and wobbles dissolutely to fall; but the very instant that my eyes met what was before me, I knew, I knew, that here was the Sanctity of Sanctities, the old eternal inner secret of the Life of this Earth, which it was a most burning shame for a man to see.  The lake, I fancy, must be a mile across, and in its middle is a pillar of ice, very low and broad; and I had the clear impression, or dream, or notion, that there was a name, or word, graven all round in the ice of the pillar in characters which I could never read; and under the name a long date; and the fluid of the lake seemed to me to be wheeling with a shivering ecstasy, splashing and fluttering, round the pillar, always from west to east, in the direction of the spinning of the earth; and it was borne in upon me—­I can’t at all say how—­that this fluid was the substance of a living creature; and I had the distinct fancy, as my senses failed, that it was a creature with many dull and anguished eyes, and that, as it wheeled for ever round in fluttering lust, it kept its eyes always turned upon the name and the date graven in the pillar.  But this must be my madness....

* * * * *

It must have been not less than an hour before a sense of life returned to me; and when the thought stabbed my brain that a long, long time I had lain there in the presence of those gloomy orbs, my spirit seemed to groan and die within me.

In some minutes, however, I had scrambled to my feet, clutched at a dog’s harness, and without one backward glance, was flying from that place.

Half-way to the halting-place, I waited Clark and Mew, being very sick and doddering, and unable to advance.  But they did not come.

Later on, when I gathered force to go further, I found that they had perished in the upheaval of the ice.  One only of the sledges, half buried, I saw near the spot of our bivouac.

* * * * *

Alone that same day I began my way southward, and for five days made good progress.  On the eighth day I noticed, stretched right across the south-eastern horizon, a region of purple vapour which luridly obscured the face of the sun:  and day after day I saw it steadily brooding there.  But what it could be I did not understand.