Dr. Martineau’s thoughts relaxed and passed into the picture land of dreams.  He saw the figure of Sir Richmond, going as it were away from him along a narrow path, a path that followed the crest of a ridge, between great darknesses, enormous cloudy darknesses, above him and below.  He was going along this path without looking back, without a thought for those he left behind, without a single word to cheer him on his way, walking as Dr. Martineau had sometimes watched him walking, without haste or avidity, walking as a man might along some great picture gallery with which he was perhaps even over familiar.  His hands would be in his pockets, his indifferent eyes upon the clouds about him.  And as he strolled along that path, the darkness closed in upon him.  His figure became dim and dimmer.

Whither did that figure go?  Did that enveloping darkness hide the beginnings of some strange long journey or would it just dissolve that figure into itself?

Was that indeed the end?

Dr. Martineau was one of that large class of people who can neither imagine nor disbelieve in immortality.  Dimmer and dimmer grew the figure but still it remained visible.  As one can continue to see a star at dawn until one turns away.  Or one blinks or nods and it is gone.

Vanished now are the beliefs that held our race for countless generations.  Where now was that Path of the Dead, mapped so clearly, faced with such certainty, in which the heliolithic peoples believed from Avebury to Polynesia?  Not always have we had to go alone and unprepared into uncharted darknesses.  For a time the dream artist used a palette of the doctor’s vague memories of things Egyptian, he painted a new roll of the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been looking a day or so before.  Sir Richmond became a brown naked figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream.  He came to the scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready if the judgment went against him.  The doctor’s attention concentrated upon the scales.  A memory of Swedengorg’s Heaven and Hell mingled with the Egyptian fantasy.  Now at last it was possible to know something real about this man’s soul, now at last one could look into the Secret Places of his Heart.  Anubis and Thoth, the god with the ibis head, were reading the heart as if it were a book, reading aloud from it to the supreme judge.

Suddenly the doctor found himself in his own dreams.  His anxiety to plead for his friend had brought him in.  He too had become a little painted figure and he was bearing a book in his hand.  He wanted to show that the laws of the new world could not be the same as those of the old, and the book he was bringing as evidence was his own Psychology of a New Age.

The clear thought of that book broke up his dream by releasing a train of waking troubles....  You have been six months on Chapter Ten; will it ever be ready for Osiris?... will it ever be ready for print?...