pleasing faint aroma and taste and a quality of immediate support and
stimulus. He put down the vessel and looked about him.

The apartment lost none of its size and magnificence now that the
greenish transparency that had intervened was removed. The archway he saw
led to a flight of steps, going downward without the intermediation of a
door, to a spacious transverse passage. This passage ran between polished
pillars of some white-veined substance of deep ultramarine, and along it
came the sound of human movements, and voices and a deep undeviating
droning note. He sat, now fully awake, listening alertly, forgetting the
viands in his attention.

Then with a shock he remembered that he was naked, and casting about him
for covering, saw a long black robe thrown on one of the chairs beside
him. This he wrapped about him and sat down again, trembling.

His mind was still a surging perplexity. Clearly he had slept, and had
been removed in his sleep. But where? And who were those people, the
distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars? Boscastle? He poured out and
partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.

What was this place?--this place that to his senses seemed subtly
quivering like a thing alive? He looked about him at the clean and
beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that the
roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light, and, as
he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and passed, and came
again and passed. "Beat, beat," that sweeping shadow had a note of its
own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.

He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his throat.