winged reptiles of small size kept crossing the valley from hill to hill.  Swarms of flying insects clustered around him, threatening mischief, but in the end it turned out that his blood was disagreeable to them. for he was not bitten once.  Repulsive crawling creatures resembling centipedes, scorpions, snakes, and so forth were in myriads on the banks of the stream, but they also made no attempt to use their weapons on his bare legs and feet, as he passed through them into the water....  Presently however, he was confronted in midstream by a hideous monster, of the size of a pony, but resembling in shape—­if it resembled anything—­a sea crustacean; and then he came to a halt.  They stared at one another, the beast with wicked eyes, Maskull with cool and wary ones.  While he was staring, a singular thing happened to him.

His eyes blurred again.  But when in a minute or two this blurring passed away and he saw clearly once more, his vision had changed in character.  He was looking right through the animal’s body and could distinguish all its interior parts.  The outer crust, however, and all the hard tissues were misty and semi-transparent; through them a luminous network of blood-red veins and arteries stood out in startling distinctness.  The hard parts faded away to nothingness, and the blood system alone was left.  Not even the fleshy ducts remained.  The naked blood alone was visible, flowing this way and that like a fiery, liquid skeleton, in the shape of the monster.  Then this blood began to change too.  Instead of a continuous liquid stream, Maskull perceived that it was composed of a million individual points.  The red colour had been an illusion caused by the rapid motion of the points; he now saw clearly that they resembled minute suns in their scintillating brightness.  They seemed like a double drift of stars, streaming through space.  One drift was travelling toward a fixed point in the centre, while the other was moving away from it.  He recognised the former as the veins of the beast, the latter as the arteries, and the fixed point as the heart.

While he was still looking, lost in amazement, the starry network went out suddenly like an extinguished flame.  Where the crustacean had stood, there was nothing.  Yet through this “nothing” he could not see the landscape.  Something was standing there that intercepted the light, though it possessed neither shape, colour, nor substance.  And now the object, which could no longer be perceived by vision, began to be felt by emotion.  A delightful, springlike sense of rising sap, of quickening pulses of love, adventure, mystery, beauty, femininity—­took possession of his being, and, strangely enough, he identified it with the monster.  Why that invisible brute should cause him to feel young, sexual, and audacious, he did not ask himself, for he was fully occupied with the effect.  But it was as if flesh, bones, and blood had been discarded, and he were face to face with naked Life itself, which slowly passed into his own body.