I staggered to my feet and felt for the door. The weight of my clothes caused the sweat to pour from my body; the rumbling in my ears was indescribably confusing, like the crash of heavy drays upon cobbled streets. Panting, my brain awhirl, I fumbled my way dizzily down the dusty stairs—I remember the dust on the banisters felt like the clinkers of burned-out range coal—and scuttled out into the soft, warm night.
Did I say night? I clung to the brownstone balustrade, trying to adjust myself to the scene about me. It was quite bright, with a soft light as of early morning, and the stars blazed in a burning roof across the sky. like a ceiling studded with a myriad electric lights. The heavens were a seething mass of constellations in which the moon rode like a huge, slightly-dimmed sun. An unearthly uproar filled the air—a bellowing and shrieking as of a thousand contending monsters. a reverberating roar as of oncoming trains. the piercing whistles of factories, a pandemonium of hideous sound. I pressed my hands to my ears and felt them huge and callous like fists of mail or the horned hoofs of a beast. An indescribably-strange combination of odors pierced my nostrils. The stench of offal, the harsh reek of tobacco, wild and delirious perfumes mingled with the smell of smoke and of cooking, half suffocated and sickened me. But what horrifified me beyond measure was the fact that the air was filled with great clouds of variously-colored swarms of motes and insects, that settled here and there like mist, only to swirl away in streams and currents like dust storms sweeping across a desert. They poured down upon me like sand. striking against my face and eyeballs; I breathed them in and felt them in my nose and lungs. And all around me I saw red—red eddying from doors and windows, rising like smoke from the pavement and gathering in clouds around the manholes in the street. I saw a policeman slowly pacing along the opposite sidewalk, enveloped in a blur of red and peering at me through the slowly-descending blanket of motes. I felt that I must inevitably choke, but I continued to breathe with surprising ease. A terrible fear came upon me that I was going mad or that I was overborne by some rapid form of death and that my dissolution was taking place. To this horror was added a dread that Migraine might find and play some other dreadful trick upon me. I started stealthily to run and found that I could do so in spite of the apparent weight of my clothes.
Presently I reached the avenue that bounds Central Park upon the west. The theaters were just out and the street was filled with motors and carriages wheeling northward. The din here was beyond words, like the roar of an iron foundry. I paused, still holding my hands to my ears. And now I noticed a curious thing. The wheels of the automobiles seemed hardly to be moving, and yet the vehicles passed with all their usual velocity. I could see each separate spoke go slowly round and round. The legs of fast-galloping horses moved with similar deliberation and the pedestrians seemed only sauntering, although their attitudes betokened haste and energy. As I stood for a moment wondering what this could mean I became conscious of a continuous rattling, like that of a million castanets, which rose and fell in an overwhelming volume of sound. It came from the park. Could it be the rustling of the leaves? The demon wail of an automobile horn drove thought from my mind, piercing my head with an agony of pain. The lights, also, along the park wall burned with so fierce a glare that I had to close my eyes. I longed for darkness, for quiet; I would have given my immortal soul for only five minutes of entire peace—for an instant's cessation of this overwhelming din. I staggered across the street, shielding my eyes as best I could from the electric lights, and sheltered myself in the shadow of the trees. I had always rather fancied the idea that many apparently inanimate objects possessed life, and now, as I leaned against an elm by the park wall and felt its tremors, the giant stretching of its huge arms and the metallic clash of its foliage, I knew it to be endowed with superhuman power. There was something overwhelmingly terrifying in the constant groaning that went on inside the trunk and the vibrating crashes among its branches. I crept back to the street again. Oh, for an instant's peace in a world of diabolic noise and overpowering confusion! I knew that I was acting like a maniac, and every instant expected to find myself in the custody of some minion of the law, yet the mere thought of being touched by a human hand in my supersensitive condition was enough to fill me with horror.
Across the way a motor slowly approached and stopped in front of a handsome private house. Even at the distance of a hundred yards the fumes of its gases sickened me. Yet the hurlyburly of the city night was such that my one idea was escape—escape from the uproar about me, the blaze of the light, the constant sifting upon me of the particles that filled the air, the stenches that almost dazed me, so overpowering were they. A man jumped down from the driver's seat and, leaving the machine still throbbing at the curb, darted into the house. An instant resolve came to me—here was my chance.
I ran to the machine. leaped in and threw on the levers. The car jumped forward into the night-or rather the day, as it seemed to me. Its force was such as almost to hurl me from my seat. The missiles in the air rained like bullets upon my face. The lamps of the city blurred in one long, sideways streak of lightning. But the uproar of the night was drowned in the noise of the car. Quickly I put the machine at its top speed and darted like a demon through the night. I shall never forget that ride—roaring through the town at sixty miles an hour, yet seeming hardly to move. A policeman on a motor bicycle tried to stop me, but I raced him three miles and left him far behind. Out through the country I sped, tearing through quiet villages whose lights seemed like the halo around a lantern on a misty night, across bridges whose rumbling under the onslaught of the car sounded like the crash of artillery, through woodlands, over wide plains, around the shores of lakes sleeping in the blaze of the stars I whirled, until my jaded senses ceased to feel and weariness like a heavy hand descended upon me. My brain was numb. The desire to sleep overpowered all else.
I ran the car into a field, staggered through the grass to a clump of trees and, finding a moss-grown hollow between some high rocks, threw myself upon my face and found oblivion.
A piercing cry awoke me, shivering with terror. Day had come—the real day; for the burning rays of the rising sun broke incandescent through the trees and beat pitilessly upon my eyes. The cry was repeated. I started to my feet, and a crow, which had been sitting upon a bough above my head, flapped its wings and flew lazily away. Covering my eyes with my hands to exclude the light. I threw myself upon the earth again. The air was filled with the chorus of millions of insects, deep tones like the bassoons of an orchestra mingling with the sound of a thousand violins, in which were interspersed strange shrieks and cries of an unearthly character. For the first time, mortal ear recorded the pandemonium of insect life. To this nerve—varying accompaniment were added the bellowing of cattle and the organ-like notes of the birds which circled through the wood. The confusion of sound produced violent pain in my ears and, tearing my handkerchief in pieces, I plugged them as best I could.
Soon, curiosity led me to remove my hands from my eyes and half closing them to keep out the light, I peered about me. To my astonishment, I saw that every inch of the atmosphere was crowded with flying insectivora of the most extraordinary shapes, like the "troubles" from Pandora's box; flies, beetles, insects of every conceivable variety that I had never seen before hovered and darted above me. The air was filled so thickly with them that there seemed hardly room for the other myriad atoms that floated beside them and swirled in the eddying haze. Out of this confusion of life came shrieks and cries as the insectivora preyed upon one another.
Throwing my coat over my head to keep out as much as I could of light and sound I stumbled through the grove and out upon a hillside. A motor—going, I knew, at sixty miles an hour—moved along a distant highway. I could see every spoke of the lazily-turning wheels. I found that my eyesight had been so intensified that I could read the number of the car and distinguish a patch upon its tire.
In place of the noisome stenches of the night before, however, I breathed the pungent odors of the fields and herbs, and this afforded me the only relief that I experienced throughout this awful period of time, for my clothes still seemed heavy as chain mail and my shirt chafed me as if made of horsehair.
At last, after I had staggered around the hill for what seemed to me to be two or three days at least, I found, about noon, a little pool of water, and, kneeling beside it, I drank like one bereft, as indeed I was, of ordinary senses. As I raised my head I beheld in its placid surface the
