My God! but I
got such an awful dazed feeling; and I had a vague, bewildered notion
that, after all, it was the Irishmen who had got him in there, and were
taking it out of him. And then the call came again, and I burst the
window, and jumped in to help him. I had a confused idea that the call
had come from within the shadow of the great fireplace, and I raced
across to it; but there was no one there.
"'Tassoc!' I shouted, and my voice went empty-sounding 'round the great
apartment; and then, in a flash, _I knew that Tassoc had never called_. I
whirled 'round, sick with fear, toward the window, and as I did so, a
frightful, exultant whistling scream burst through the Room. On my left,
the end wall had bellied-in toward me, in a pair of gargantuan lips,
black and utterly monstrous, to within a yard of my face. I fumbled for a
mad instant at my revolver; not for _it_, but myself; for the danger was
a thousand times worse than death. And then, suddenly, the Unknown Last
Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was whispered quite audibly in the room.
Instantly, the thing happened that I have known once before. There came a
sense as of dust falling continually and monotonously, and I knew that my
life hung uncertain and suspended for a flash, in a brief, reeling
vertigo of unseeable things. Then _that_ ended, and I knew that I might
live. My soul and body blended again, and life and power came to me.
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