I cannot say when it began, but now I was conscious of a sound in my
ears, distinct and near, a steady sound of splashing, or fluttering,
resembling the noising of a cascade or brook: and it grew. Forty more
steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)--perhaps
sixty--perhaps eighty: and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a
circular clean-cut lake.

One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood: and then I dropped
down flat in swoon.

* * * * *

In a hundred years, I suppose, I should never succeed in analysing
_why_ I swooned: but my consciousness still retains the impression of
that horrid thrill. I saw nothing distinctly, for my whole being reeled
and toppled drunken, like a spinning-top in desperate death-struggle at
the moment when it flags, and wobbles dissolutely to fall; but the very
instant that my eyes met what was before me, I knew, I knew, that here
was the Sanctity of Sanctities, the old eternal inner secret of the Life
of this Earth, which it was a most burning shame for a man to see. The
lake, I fancy, must be a mile across, and in its middle is a pillar of
ice, very low and broad; and I had the clear impression, or dream, or
notion, that there was a name, or word, graven all round in the ice of
the pillar in characters which I could never read; and under the name a
long date; and the fluid of the lake seemed to me to be wheeling with a
shivering ecstasy, splashing and fluttering, round the pillar, always
from west to east, in the direction of the spinning of the earth; and it
was borne in upon me--I can't at all say how--that this fluid was the
substance of a living creature; and I had the distinct fancy, as my
senses failed, that it was a creature with many dull and anguished eyes,