I rose carefully and carried this plan into execution.  I would have given much for a smoke, although my throat was parched; and almost any drink would have been nectar.  But although my hopes (or my fears) of an intruder had left me, I determined to stick to the rules of the game as laid down.  Therefore I neither smoked nor drank, but carefully extended my weary limbs upon the coverlet, and telling myself that I could guard our strange treasure as well from there as from elsewhere ... slipped off into a profound sleep.

Nothing approaching in acute and sustained horror to the moment when next I opened my eyes exists in all my memories of those days.

In the first place I was aroused by the shaking of the bed.  It was quivering beneath me as though an earthquake disturbed the very foundations of the building.  I sprang upright and into full consciousness of my lapse....  My hands clutching the coverlet on either side of me, I sat staring, staring, staring ... at that which peered at me over the foot of the bed.

I knew that I had slept at my post; I was convinced that I was now widely awake; yet I dared not admit to myself that what I saw was other than a product of my imagination.  I dared not admit the physical quivering of the bed, for I could not, with sanity, believe its cause to be anything human.  But what I saw, yet could not credit seeing, was this: 

A ghostly white face, which seemed to glisten in some faint reflected light from the sitting-room beyond, peered over the bedrail; gibbered at me demoniacally.  With quivering hands this night-mare horror, which had intruded where I believed human intrusion to be all but impossible, clutched the bed-posts so that the frame of the structure shook and faintly rattled....

My heart leapt wildly in my breast, then seemed to suspend its pulsations and to grow icily cold.  My whole body became chilled horrifically.  My scalp tingled:  I felt that I must either cry out or become stark, raving mad!

For this clammily white face, those staring eyes, that wordless gibbering, and the shaking, shaking, shaking of the bed in the clutch of the nameless visitant—­prevailed, refused to disperse like the evil dream I had hoped it all to be; manifested itself, indubitably, as something tangible—­objective....

Outraged reason deprived me of coherent speech.  Past the clammy white face I could see the sitting-room illuminated by a faint light; I could even see the Tulun-Nur box upon the table immediately opposite the door.

The thing which shook the bed was actual, existent—­to be counted with!

Further and further I drew myself away from it, until I crouched close up against the head of the bed.  Then, as the thing reeled aside, and—­ merciful Heaven!—­made as if to come around and approach me yet closer, I uttered a hoarse cry and hurled myself out upon the floor and on the side remote from that pallid horror which I thought was pursuing me.