“I’m coming,” said Macfarlane, stoutly.

But they did not get to the dak-bungalow, or anywhere near it.  Before they had covered twenty yards another frightful spasm of pain came upon Merryon, racking his whole being, depriving him of all his powers, wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering.  He went down into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him like devils in some inferno under the earth.

Of time and place and circumstance thereafter he became as completely unconscious as though they had ceased to be, though once or twice he was aware of a merciful hand that gave him opium to deaden—­or was it only to prolong?—­his suffering.  And aeons and eternities passed over him while he lay in the rigour of perpetual torments, not trying to escape, only writhing in futile anguish in the bitter dark of the prison-house.

Later, very much later, there came a time when the torture gradually ceased or became merged in a deathly coldness.  During that stage his understanding began to come back to him like the light of a dying day.  A vague and dreadful sense of loss began to oppress him, a feeling of nakedness as though the soul of him were already slipping free, passing into an appalling void, leaving an appalling void behind.  He lay quite helpless and sinking, sinking—­slowly, terribly sinking into an overwhelming sea of annihilation.

With all that was left of his failing strength he strove to cling to that dim light which he knew for his own individuality.  The silence and the darkness broke over him in long, soundless waves; but each time he emerged again, cold, cold as death, but still aware of self, aware of existence, albeit the world he knew had dwindled to an infinitesimal smallness, as an object very far away, and floating ever farther and farther from his ken.

Vague paroxysms of pain still seized him from time to time, but they no longer affected him in the same way.  The body alone agonized.  The soul stood apart on the edge of that dreadful sea, shrinking afraid from the black, black depths and the cruel cold of the eternal night.  He was terribly, crushingly alone.

Someone had once, twice, asked him a vital question about his belief in God.  Then he had been warmly alive.  He had held his wife close in his arms, and nothing else had mattered.  But now—­but now—­he was very far from warmth and life.  He was dying in loneliness.  He was perishing in the outer dark, where no hand might reach and no voice console.  He had believed—­or thought he believed—­in God.  But now his faith was wearing very thin.  Very soon it would crumble quite away, just as he himself was crumbling into the dreadful silence of the ages.  His life—­the brief passion called life—­was over.  Out of the dark it had come; into the dark it went.  And no one to care—­no one to cry farewell to him across that desolation of emptiness that was death!  No one to kneel beside him and pray for light in that awful, all-encompassing dark!