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The Witness by Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
page 15 of 365 (04%)

Paul Courtland never knew how he had been saved from that perilous
position high up on a ledge in the top of the theater, with the burning,
fiery furnace below him. Whether his senses came back sufficiently to
guide him along the narrow footing that was left, to the door of the
fire-escape, where some one rescued him, or whether a friendly hand
risked all and reached out to draw him to safety.

He only knew that back there in that blank daze of suspended time,
before he grew to recognize the whiteness of the hospital walls and the
rattle of the nurse's starched skirt along the corridor, there was a
long period when he was shut in with four high walls of smoke. Smoke
that reached to heaven, roofing him away from it, and had its
foundations down in the burning fiery pit of hell where he could hear
lost souls struggling with smothered cries for help. Smoke that filled
his throat, eyes, brain, soul. Terrible, enfolding, imprisoning smoke;
thick, yellow, gray, menacing! Smoke that shut his soul away from all
the universe, as if he had been suddenly blotted out, and made him feel
how stark alone he had been born, and always would be evermore.

He seemed to have lain within those slowly approaching walls of smoke a
century or two ere he became aware that he was not alone, after all.
There was a Presence there beside him. Light, and a Presence! Blinding
light. He reasoned that other men, the men outside of the walls of
smoke, the firemen perhaps, and by-standers, might think that light came
from the fire down in the pit, but he knew it did not. It radiated from
the Presence beside him. And there was a Voice, calling his name. He
seemed to have heard the call years back in his life somewhere. There
was something about it, too, that made his heart leap in answer, and
brought that strange thrill he used to have as a boy in prep. school,
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