Was there blood on his face? Was hot blood flowing? Or was it dry blood
congealing down his cheek? It took him hours even to ask the question:
time being no more than an agony in darkness, without measurement.
A long time after he had opened his eyes he realized he was seeing
something--something, something, but the effort to recall what was too
great. No, no; no recall!
Were they the stars in the dark sky? Was it possible it was stars in the
dark sky? Stars? The world? Ah, no, he could not know it! Stars and the
world were gone for him, he closed his eyes. No stars, no sky, no world.
No, No! The thick darkness of blood alone. It should be one great lapse
into the thick darkness of blood in agony.
Death, oh, death! The world all blood, and the blood all writhing with
death. The soul like the tiniest little light out on a dark sea, the sea
of blood. And the light guttering, beating, pulsing in a windless storm,
wishing it could go out, yet unable.
There had been life. There had been Winifred and his children. But the
frail death-agony effort to catch at straws of memory, straws of life
from the past, brought on too great a nausea. No, No! No Winifred, no
children. No world, no people. Better the agony of dissolution ahead than
the nausea of the effort backwards. Better the terrible work should go
forward, the dissolving into the black sea of death, in the extremity of
dissolution, than that there should be any reaching back towards life.
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