live. Your hand is clutching my arm, lightly it feels as a butterfly resting there. Your chest is heaving, your tongue protruding, your skin turning dark, your eyes swimming. `To live! To live! To live!' you are crying; and you are crying to live here and now, not hereafter. You doubt your immortality, eh? Ha! Ha! You are not sure of it. You won't chance it. This life only you are certain is real. Ah, it is growing dark and darker. It is the darkness of death, the ceasing to be, the ceasing to feel, the ceasing to move, that is gathering about you, descending upon you, rising around you. Your eyes are becoming set. They are glazing. My voice sounds faint and far. You cannot see my face. And still you struggle in my grip. You kick with your legs. Your body draws itself up in knots like a snake's. Your chest heaves and strains. To live! To live! To live - "
I heard no more. Consciousness was blotted out by the darkness he had so graphically described, and when I came to myself I was lying on the floor and he was smoking a cigar and regarding me thoughtfully with that old familiar light of curiosity in his eyes.
"Well, have I convinced you?" he demanded. "Here, take a drink of this. I want to ask you some questions."
I rolled my head negatively on the floor. "Your arguments are too - er - forcible," I managed to articulate, at cost of great pain to my aching throat.
"You'll be all right in half an hour," he assured me. "And promise I won't use any more physical demonstrations. Get up now. You can sit on a chair."
And, toy that I was of this monster, the discussion of Omar and the Preacher was resumed. And half the night we sat up over it.
