The Awakening

: When The Sleeper Wakes

But Warming was wrong in that. An awakening came.



What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity--the self!

Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the

flux and confluence of its countless factors interweaving, rebuilding,

the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of

the unconscious to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning

consci usness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it

happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at

the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a

cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent,

faint, but alive.



The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs,

to occupy epochs. Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the

time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange

scenery, as if from another planet. There was a distinct impression,

too, of a momentous conversation, of a name--he could not tell what

name--that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten

sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the

effort of a man near drowning in darkness. Then came a panorama of

dazzling unstable confluent scenes.



Graham became aware his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar

thing.



It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood. He

moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape. It went up

beyond the top of his eyes. He tried to think where he might be. Did it

matter, seeing he was so wretched? The colour of his thoughts was a dark

depression. He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes towards

the hour of dawn. He had an uncertain sense of whispers and footsteps

hastily receding.



The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical

weakness. He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the

valley--but he could not recall that white edge. He must have slept. He

remembered now that he had wanted to sleep. He recalled the cliff and

waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a

passer-by.



How long had he slept? What was that sound of pattering feet? And that

rise and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles? He put out a

languid hand to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his habit

to place it, and touched some smooth hard surface like glass. This was

so unexpected that it startled him extremely. Quite suddenly he rolled

over, stared for a moment, and struggled into a sitting position. The

effort was unexpectedly difficult, and it left him giddy and weak--and

amazed.



He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his

mind was quite clear--evidently his sleep had benefited him. He was not

in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very

soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress

was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a strange sense of

insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. About

his arm--and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and

yellow--was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that

it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this strange bed

was placed in a case of greenish coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a

bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention.

In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made

apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum

and minimum thermometer was recognisable.



The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which surrounded

him on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he perceived it was a

vast apartment of splendid appearance, and with a very large and simple

white archway facing him. Close to the walls of the cage were articles

of furniture, a table covered with a silvery cloth, silvery like the

side of a fish, a couple of graceful chairs, and on the table a number

of dishes with substances piled on them, a bottle and two glasses. He

realised that he was intensely hungry.



He could see no human being, and after a period of hesitation scrambled

off the translucent mattress and tried to stand on the clean white floor

of his little apartment. He had miscalculated his strength, however,

and staggered and put his hand against the glasslike pane before him to

steady himself. For a moment it resisted his hand, bending outward like

a distended bladder, then it broke with a slight report and vanished--a

pricked bubble. He reeled out into the general space of the hall,

greatly astonished. He caught at the table to save himself, knocking one

of the glasses to the floor--it rang but did not break--and sat down in

one of the armchairs.



When he had a little recovered he filled the remaining glass from the

bottle and drank--a colourless liquid it was, but not water, with a

pleasing faint aroma and taste and a quality of immediate support and

stimulus. He put down the vessel and looked about him.



The apartment lost none of its size and magnificence now that the

greenish transparency that had intervened was removed. The archway he

saw led to a flight of steps, going downward without the intermediation

of a door, to a spacious transverse passage. This passage ran between

polished pillars of some white-veined substance of deep ultramarine,

and along it came the sound of human movements and voices and a deep

undeviating droning note. He sat, now fully awake, listening alertly,

forgetting the viands in his attention.



Then with a shock he remembered that he was naked, and casting about him

for covering, saw a long black robe thrown on one of the chairs beside

him. This he wrapped about him and sat down again, trembling.



His mind was still a surging perplexity. Clearly he had slept, and had

been removed in his sleep. But here? And who were those people, the

distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars? Boscastle? He poured out and

partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.



What was this place?--this place that to his senses seemed subtly

quivering like a thing alive? He looked about him at the clean and

beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that the

roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light, and, as

he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and passed, and came

again and passed. "Beat, beat," that sweeping shadow had a note of its

own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.



He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his throat.

Then he stood up, and, with the uncertain steps of a drunkard, made his

way towards the archway. He staggered down the steps, tripped on the

corner of the black cloak he had wrapped about himself, and saved

himself by catching at one of the blue pillars.



The passage ran down a cool vista of blue and purple, and ended remotely

in a railed space like a balcony, brightly lit and projecting into a

space of haze, a space like the interior of some gigantic building.

Beyond and remote were vast and vague architectural forms. The tumult of

voices rose now loud and clear, and on the balcony and with their backs

to him, gesticulating and apparently in animated conversation, were

three figures, richly dressed in loose and easy garments of bright soft

colourings. The noise of a great multitude of people poured up over the

balcony, and once it seemed the top of a banner passed, and once some

brightly coloured object, a pale blue cap or garment thrown up into the

air perhaps, flashed athwart the space and fell. The shouts sounded like

English, there was a reiteration of "Wake!" He heard some indistinct

shrill cry, and abruptly the three men began laughing.





"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed one--a red-haired man in a short purple robe.

"When the Sleeper wakes--When!"



He turned his eyes full of merriment along the passage. His face

changed, the whole man changed, became rigid. The other two turned

swiftly at his exclamation and stood motionless. Their faces assumed an

expression of consternation, an expression that deepened into awe.



Suddenly Graham's knees bent beneath him, his arm against the pillar

collapsed limply, he staggered forward and fell upon his face.