Very faintly, from the parlour on the other side of the landing⁠—for the door was still wide open⁠—came the ticking of Christie’s clock.

His consciousness, like the man at watch on a ship that has been submerged in some terrific wave and rises to the surface cloudy with salt-foam, turned instinctively to his lost “mythology,” turned to it as to something lying dead on the floor of his soul. And it came over him, by slow degrees like a cold glimmer of morning upon a tossing sea, that the abiding continuity of his days lay, after all, in his body, in his skull, in his spine, in his legs, in his clutching anthropoid-ape arms! Yes! that was all he had left⁠ ⁠… his vegetable-animal identity, isolated, solitary⁠ ⁠… hovered over by the margins of strange thoughts!