Again that unintelligible jargon, unhuman and shrill, fell upon their ears, and Arthur stepped forward.  Susie did not hesitate.  She was prepared to follow him anywhere.  He opened the door, and there was a sudden quiet.  Whatever made those sounds was there.  It was a larger room than any on the others and much higher, for it ran along the whole front of the house.  The powerful lamps showed every corner of it at once, but, above, the beams of the open ceiling were dark with shadow.  And here the nauseous odour, which had struck them before, was so overpowering that for a while they could not go in.  It was indescribably foul.  Even Arthur thought it would make him sick, and he looked at the windows to see if it was possible to open them; but it seemed they were hermetically closed.  The extreme warmth made the air more overpowering.  There were four furnaces here, and they were all alight.  In order to give out more heat and to burn slowly, the fronts of them were open, and one could see that they were filled with glowing coke.

The room was furnished no differently from the others, but to the various instruments for chemical operations on a large scale were added all manner of electrical appliances.  Several books were lying about, and one had been left open face downwards on the edge of a table.  But what immediately attracted their attention was a row of those large glass vessels like that which they had seen in the adjoining room.  Each was covered with a white cloth.  They hesitated a moment, for they knew that here they were face to face with the great enigma.  At last Arthur pulled away the cloth from one.  None of them spoke.  They stared with astonished eyes.  For here, too, was a strange mass of flesh, almost as large as a new-born child, but there was in it the beginnings of something ghastly human.  It was shaped vaguely like an infant, but the legs were joined together so that it looked like a mummy rolled up in its coverings.  There were neither feet nor knees.  The trunk was formless, but there was a curious thickening on each side; it was as if a modeller had meant to make a figure with the arms loosely bent, but had left the work unfinished so that they were still one with the body.  There was something that resembled a human head, covered with long golden hair, but it was horrible; it was an uncouth mass, without eyes or nose or mouth.  The colour was a kind of sickly pink, and it was almost transparent.  There was a very slight movement in it, rhythmical and slow.  It was living too.

Then quickly Arthur removed the covering from all the other jars but one; and in a flash of the eyes they saw abominations so awful that Susie had to clench her fists in order not to scream.  There was one monstrous thing in which the limbs approached nearly to the human.  It was extraordinarily heaped up, with fat tiny arms, little bloated legs, and an absurd squat body, so that it looked like a Chinese mandarin in porcelain.  In another the trunk was almost