The mixture no longer smoldered. Instead, a strange crystal formation was building itself up within the brazier. This object Edmond found impossible to describe; he could only say that it seemed a continuation of the warped lines of the room, carrying them beyond the point where they centered. Apparently unconscious of the insanity of such a concept, he goes on to say that his eyes began to ache as he watched the crystalline object, but he could not turn away his gaze.
The crystal drew him. He felt an abrupt and agonizing suction; there was a high-pitched thrumming in the air, and suddenly he was drifting with increasing velocity toward the thing in the brazier. It sucked him in—such is Edmond's inexplicable phrase; he felt a moment of incredible cold, and then a new vision rose up before him.
Gray fog, and instability. Edmond stressed this curious feeling of flux, which he declared existed within himself. He felt, he says oddly, like a cloud of smoke, wavering and drifting aimlessly. But when he glanced down he saw his own body, fully clothed and apparently quite substantial.
Now a dreadful feeling of uneasiness began to oppress his mind. The fog thickened and whirled; the nightmare, causeless fear familiar to the opium-taker clutched him in its grip. Something, he felt, was approaching, something utterly horrible and frightful in its potent menace. Then, quite suddenly, the fog was gone.
Far beneath him he saw what at first he took to be the sea. He was hanging unsupported in empty air, and a surging grayness shimmered and crawled from horizon to horizon. The fluctuating leaden surface was dotted and speckled with round dark blobs; these were innumerable. Without conscious volition he felt himself drawn down vertically, and as he approached the mysterious grayness he saw it more clearly.
He could not determine its nature. It seemed merely a sea of gray slime, protoplasmic and featureless. But the dark blobs became recognizable as heads.
Into Edmond's mind flashed the memory of a narrative he had once read, written in the Twelfth Century by the monk Alberico, and purporting to be the record of a descent into hell. Like Dante, Alberico had seen the torments of the damned; the blasphemers (he wrote in his stilted, pedantic Latin) had been immersed to their necks in a lake of molten metal. Edmond remembered Alberico's description now. Then he saw that the heads were not those of beings partly submerged in the gray slime; instead, they were homogenous with the grayness. They grew from it!
Edmond's fear had left him. With oddly detached curiosity he scanned the fantastic surface below. There were human heads bobbing and nodding from the gray sea, uncountable thousands of them, but by far the greater number of the heads were not human. Some of these latter bore traces of the anthropoid, but others were scarcely recognizable as living objects.
For the heads lived. Their eyes stared with awful agony; their lips writhed in soundless laments; tears coursed down the sunken cheeks of many. Even the horribly inhuman heads—bird-like, reptilian, monstrous things of living stone and metal and vegetable matter — showed traces of the unceasing torment that gnawed at them. Down toward the ghastly horde Edmond was drawn.
Again blackness enveloped him. It
