Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/112

 Why must I lie there as the weary moments dragged by, tossing uneasily upon the k’ang?

Not that I expected to sleep when I lay down; on the contrary, what surprised me was the way the Doctor and  Maurice went off and the soundness with which they were  sleeping now.

Then I fell to dreaming—waking dreams I mean, for I am ready to make a solemn affidavit that I never closed my  eyes that night.

I must talk about these dreams for a moment. I can remember each thought of the many which flitted through my brain, with a distinctness so vivid that it sometimes seems  as though some occult influence had photographed them  upon the page of memory. I had little belief in the occult then—it is different now.

It appeared to me somehow as if the room was filled with shadow forms—phantoms, if you will—certainly not  seen with my natural eyes; yet see them I most assuredly  did.

How?

God knows! Let those who can fathom the mysteries of the super-sense explain.

I only tell what happened, I am simply a recorder, and I write my record truly. Make what you like out of it—explain it in whatever way suits you best.

Dreams, dreams, and yet surely it was not all a dream.

I was standing near on the k’ang listening to Maurice’s steady breathing and the Doctor’s occasional snorts, when  all at once I saw a form in white flit past me and approach  the corpse.

Was I startled?

No! I declare solemnly I was not; and when I tried to move and found that a power over which I had no control  held me down, I never made another effort. I could not disturb myself—I tried it and failed; a strange calmness  seemed to have taken possession of my soul.

Not like the shadows I had been seeing was this. Oh, no! It was something altogether of a different sort.

It was the form of a woman of tall, stately figure. Her dress was marvellous in its whiteness—“shining exceeding  white as snow so as no fuller on earth can white them,” I  found myself involuntarily murmuring, quoting from that  sacred book which I had ever regarded with contempt.