“ That is what it is,” he thought. Jason has deliberately stripped himself of every consolatory self-protective skin. He must see life continually as we others only see it when our life-illusions are broken through. The point is, “ is life what Jason sees, or is it what we see?”

Trailing his oak-stick now, instead of prodding the ground with it, Wolf lurched forward in that fluid grey-coloured darkness, as if he’d been some forlorn Homeric ghost whose body had been left unburied.

“It can’t be as he sees it,” he thought, “except to him⁠ ⁠… except to him!”

He now stood stock-still, his stick just held, but no more than just held, from falling to the ground.