“I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming and seeks to awaken—­to escape.  But a nightmare-like oppression held me.  So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up the lip like the lip of a snarling cur.  I could look into the malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the distorted mouth—­ whispering that seemed to counsel something—­something evil.  That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive.  Then the wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became as a pin’s head in the darkness far above me—­ almost like a glutinous, liquid thing.

“Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did—­God knows where dreaming ended and reality began.  Gentlemen maybe you’ll conclude I went mad last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller.  I started laughing.  The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake the echoes of the whole block.  I thought myself I was going mad, and I tried to command my will—­ to break the power of the chloral—­for I concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose.

“Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll’s cot, in the middle of a room like Trafalgar Square!  That window yonder was such a long way off I could scarcely see it, but I could just detect a Chinaman—­the owner of the evil yellow face—­creeping through it.  He was followed by another, who was enormously tall—­so tall that, as they came towards me (and it seemed to take them something like half-an-hour to cross this incredible apartment in my dream), the second Chinaman seemed to tower over me like a cypress-tree.

“I looked up to his face—­his wicked, hairless face.  Mr. Smith, whatever age I live to, I’ll never forget that face I saw last night—­or did I see it?  God knows!  The pointed chin, the great dome of a forehead, and the eyes—­ heavens above, the huge green eyes!”

He shook like a sick man, and I glanced at Smith significantly.  Inspector Weymouth was stroking his mustache, and his mingled expression of incredulity and curiosity was singular to behold.

“The pumping of my blood,” continued West, “seemed to be bursting my body; the room kept expanding and contracting.  One time the ceiling would be pressing down on my head, and the Chinamen—­sometimes I thought there were two of them, sometimes twenty—­became dwarfs; the next instant it shot up like the roof of a cathedral.

“`Can I be awake,’ I whispered, `or am I dreaming?’

“My whisper went sweeping in windy echoes about the walls, and was lost in the shadowy distances up under the invisible roof.