I remember remarking at the time my serenity of mind.  The customary pain of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I was no more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the walls around me.  Never was a man in better mental and spiritual condition for such an experiment.  Of course, this was largely due to my extreme weakness.  But there was more to it.  I had long schooled myself to be oblivious to pain.  I had neither doubts nor fears.  All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the over-lordship of the mind.  This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.

I began my concentration of will.  Even then my body was numbing and prickling through the loss of circulation.  I directed my will to the little toe of my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to be alive in my consciousness.  I willed that toe to die—­to die so far as I, its lord, and a different thing entirely from it, was concerned.  There was the hard struggle.  Morrell had warned me that it would be so.  But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith.  I knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead.  Joint by joint it had died under the compulsion of my will.

The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit.  Joint by joint, toe by toe, all the toes of both my feet ceased to be.  And joint by joint, the process went on.  Came the time when my flesh below the ankles had ceased.  Came the time when all below my knees had ceased.

Such was the pitch of my perfect exaltation, that I knew not the slightest prod of rejoicing at my success.  I knew nothing save that I was making my body die.  All that was I was devoted to that sole task.  I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason regard his work.

At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the hips up, joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.

It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring and dizzying of my consciousness’ occurred.  For fear that I should lose consciousness, I willed to hold the death I had gained, and shifted my concentration to my fingers.  My brain cleared again, and the death of my arms to the shoulders was most rapidly accomplished.

At this stage my body was all dead, so far as I was concerned, save my head and a little patch of my chest.  No longer did the pound and smash of my compressed heart echo in my brain.  My heart was beating steadily but feebly.  The joy of it, had I dared joy at such a moment, would have been the cessation of sensations.

At this point my experience differs from Morrell’s.  Still willing automatically, I began to grow dreamy, as one does in that borderland between sleeping and waking.  Also, it seemed as if a prodigious enlargement of my brain was taking place within the skull itself that did not enlarge.  There were occasional glintings and flashings of light as if even I, the overlord, had ceased for a moment and the next moment was again myself, still the tenant of the fleshly tenement that I was making to die.