“Yes, here it is. Well what of it, let the pain be.”
“And death. Where is it?”
He looked for his old accustomed terror of death, and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no terror, because death was not either.
In the place of death there was light.
“So this is it!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud.
“What joy!”
To him all this passed in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change after. For those present his agony lasted another two hours. There was a rattle in his throat, a twitching in his wasted body. Then the rattle and the gasping came at longer and longer intervals.
“It is over!” someone said over him.
He caught those words and repeated them in his soul.
“Death is over,” he said to himself. “It’s no more.”
He drew in a breath, stopped midway in the breath, stretched and died.