He moved close up to the edge of the water. He stood with both hands pressed hard upon the handle of his stick. He flung his consciousness, as if it were a heavy stone that all day long he had been carrying in his pocket, down into those silent depths. And then his body⁠—not his mind, but his body⁠—became acquainted with shivering dread. Was his mind going to issue the final mandate now, at this very moment? What was his body doing that it revolted like this? What was his body doing that its foot-soles clung to the mud as if they had been rooted there? It was not only his flesh that now turned sick with fear. The very bones within him began screaming⁠—a low, thin, wire-drawn scream⁠—before what his mind was contemplating. It was not that life⁠—merely to be alive⁠—had suddenly become so precious. It was not fear of Nothingness that made his body quake. It was Lenty Pond itself! Yes, what his flesh and his bones shrank from was not eternity. It was immersion in that localized, particular, cubic expanse of starlit oxygen-hydrogen!