" And watching her closely, Victor permitted himself a smile of
satisfaction as he noted the rapidity with which she yielded to the
hypnogenic spell of the translucent quartz; how her breathing quickened,
then took on a measured tempo like that of a sleeper; how a faint flush
warmed the unnatural pallor of her cheeks, how her dilate eyes grew fixed
in an unwinking stare, and slightly glassed....
Under her regard the goblin sphere took on with bewildering rapidity
changing guises. Its rotundity was first lost, it assumed the semblance of
a featureless disk of pallid light, which swiftly widened till it obscured
all else, then seemed to advance upon and envelope her bodily, so that she
became spiritually a part of it, an atom of identity engulfed in a limpid
world of glareless light, light that had had no rays and issued from no
source but was circumambient and universal. Then in its remote heart a
weird glow of rose began to burn and grow, pulsing through all the colours
of the spectrum and beyond. Toward this she felt herself being drawn
swiftly, attracted by an irresistible magnetism, riding the wings of a
great wind, whose voice boomed without ceasing, like a heavy surf
thunderously reiterating one syllable, "_Sleep!_" ... And in this flight
through illimitable space toward a goal unattainable, consciousness grew
faint and flickered out like a candle in the wind.
Behind her chair the placid yellow face of Shaik Tsin appeared, as if
materialized bodily out of the shadows.
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