While the bombardment is patching the sky with continents of flame, it is drawing still nearer.  Volleys of flashes are plunging in here and there and devouring the other lights.  The supernatural army is arriving!  All the highways of space are crowded.  Nearer still, a shell bursts with all its might and glows; and among us all whom chance defends goes frightfully in quest of flesh.  Shells are following each other into that cavity there.  Again I see, among the things of earth, a resurrected man, and he is dragging himself towards that hole!  He is wrapped in white, and the under-side of his body, which rubs the ground, is black.  Hooking the ground with his stiffened arms he crawls, long and flat as a boat.  He still hears the cry “Forward!” He is finding his way to the hole; he does not know, and he is trailing exactly toward its monstrous ambush.  The shell will succeed!  At any second now the frenzied fangs of space will strike his side and go in as into a fruit.  I have not the strength to shout to him to fly elsewhere with all his slowness; I can only open my mouth and become a sort of prayer in face of the man’s divinity.  And yet, he is the survivor; and along with the sleeper, to whom a dream was whispering just now, he is the only one left to me.

A hiss—­the final blow reaches him; and in a flash I see the piebald maggot crushing under the weight of the sibilance and turning wild eyes towards me.

No!  It is not he!  A blow of light—­of all light—­fills my eyes.  I am lifted up, I am brandished by an unknown blade in the middle of a globe of extraordinary light.  The shell——­I!  And I am falling, I fall continually, fantastically.  I fall out of this world; and in that fractured flash I saw myself again—­I thought of my bowels and my heart hurled to the winds—­and I heard voices saying again and again—­far, far away—­“Simon Paulin died at the age of thirty-six.”

CHAPTER XVI

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI

I am dead.  I fall, I roll like a broken bird into bewilderments of light, into canyons of darkness.  Vertigo presses on my entrails, strangles me, plunges into me.  I drop sheer into the void, and my gaze falls faster than I.

Through the wanton breath of the depths that assail me I see, far below, the seashore dawning.  The ghostly strand that I glimpse while I cling to my own body is bare, endless, rain-drowned, and supernaturally mournful.  Through the long, heavy and concentric mists that the clouds make, my eyes go searching.  On the shore I see a being who wanders alone, veiled to the feet.  It is a woman.  Ah, I am one with that woman!  She is weeping.  Her tears are dropping on the sand where the waves are breaking!  While I am reeling to infinity, I hold out my two heavy arms to her.  She fades away as I look.

For a long time there is nothing, nothing but invisible time, and the immense futility of rain on the sea.