his personality. He began to wonder “who he was.” I do 
not mean that he suffered from delusions. I mean that 
the problem of the true Ego took hold of his imagination. 
One perfect summer night at Contrexéville he was feel-
ing much better; the symptoms had (temporarily) disap-
peared almost entirely under the treatment of a very 
skilful doctor at that Spa, a Dr. Barbezieux, a most kind 
and thoughtful man.  
“I am going to try,” said Arthur, “to penetrate my-
self. Am I an animal, and is the world without a pur-
pose? Or am I a soul in a body? Or am I, one and indi-
visible in some incredible sense, a spark of the infinite 
light of God? I am going to think inwards: I shall possi-
bly go into some form of trance, unintelligible to myself. 
You may be able to interpret it.”  
The experiment had lasted about half an hour when 
he sat up gasping with effort.  
“I have seen nothing, heard nothing,” I said. “Not 
one thought has passed from you to me.”  
But at that very moment what had been in his mind 
flashed into mine.  
“It is a blind abyss,” I told him, “and there hangs in 
it a vulture vaster than the whole starry system.”  
“Yes,” he said, “that was it. But that was not all. I 
could not get beyond it. I shall try again.”  
He tried. Again I was cut off from his thought, al-
though his face was twitching so that one might have 
said that any one might read his mind.  
“I have been looking in the wrong place,” said he 
suddenly, but very quietly and without moving. “The 
thing I want lies at the base of the spine.”  
This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infi-
nite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, 
black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; 
held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing 
children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. 
Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of 
blood purulent with nameless forms—mangy dogs with