the last drop.  It was tasteless, but sparkling and warm on the tongue.  Scarcely had I swallowed it, when a curiously light, dizzy sensation overcame me, and the figure of Heliobas standing before me seemed to assume gigantic proportions.  I saw his hands extend—­his eyes, like lamps of electric flame, burned through and through me—­and like a distant echo, I heard the deep vibrating tones of his voice uttering the following words: 

“Azul!  Azul!  Lift up this light and daring spirit unto thyself; be its pioneer upon the path it must pursue; suffer it to float untrammelled through the wide and glorious Continents of Air; give it form and force to alight on any of the vast and beautiful spheres it may desire to behold; and if worthy, permit it to gaze, if only for a brief interval, upon the supreme vision of the First and Last of worlds.  By the force thou givest unto me, I free this soul; do thou, Azul, quickly receive it!”

A dense darkness now grew thickly around me—–­I lost all power over my limbs—­I felt myself being lifted up forcibly and rapidly, up, up, into some illimitable, terrible space of blackness and nothingness.  I could not think, move, or cry out—­I could only feel that I was rising, rising, steadily, swiftly, breathlessly ... when suddenly a long quivering flash of radiance, like the fragment of a rainbow, struck dazzlingly across my sight.  Darkness?  What had I to do with darkness?  I knew not the word—­I was only conscious of light—­light exquisitely pure and brilliant—­light through which I stepped as easily as a bird flies in air.  Perfectly awake to my sensations, I felt somehow that there was nothing remarkable in them—­I seemed to be at home in some familiar element.  Delicate hands held mine—­a face far lovelier than the loveliest face of woman ever dreamed by poet or painter, smiled radiantly at me, and I smiled back again.  A voice whispered in strange musical murmurs, such as I well seemed to know and comprehend: 

“Gaze behind thee ere the picture fades.”

I obeyed, half reluctantly, and saw as a passing shadow in a glass, or a sort of blurred miniature painting, the room where Heliobas stood, watching some strange imperfect shape, which I seemed faintly to recognise.  It looked like a small cast in clay, very badly executed, of the shape I at present wore; but it was incomplete, as though the sculptor had given it up as a failure and gone away, leaving it unfinished.

“Did I dwell in that body?” I mused to myself, as I felt the perfection of my then state of being.  “How came I shut in such a prison?  How poor a form—­how destitute of faculties—­how full of infirmities—­how limited in capabilities—­how narrow in all intelligence—­how ignorant—­how mean!”