"Not much doubt of that," I murmured. "Why, I'm half asleep already!" And I turned round, tired and yet soothed by the massage, and soon fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
Several hours must have passed, when I woke up, trembling and terror-struck, after passing through an experience which seems as vivid to me to-day as on that February night or early morning. My heart was beating, my limbs trembling, beads of perspiration covered my face, as I discovered later.
No wonder! I had been through an experience from which few, I imagine, return to tell the tale. For I had passed through every detail of dying, and dying a very hard and difficult death.
Body and soul were being literally _torn apart_, in spite of the desperate effort to cling together, and my spirit seemed to be launched into unknown depths of darkness and possible horror. It was the feeling that _I did not know where I was going nor what awaited me_ that seemed so terrible--this and the horrible fight for mastery between my poor body and soul and some unknown force that was inexorably set upon dividing them.
This, so far as I can express it, exactly describes the experience I had just gone through, and from which I had awakened in such abject terror.
As the beating of my heart subsided, and I could think more calmly, I remembered with startling distinctness that in the very worst of the struggle I had been vainly endeavouring to say that text in the twenty-third Psalm which begins:
"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me: _Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me._" I could say the first part of it quite easily, but some fiendish enemy seemed bent upon preventing my saying the last sentence, and in my terrible dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of the text. I tried again and again, always to be driven back in despair before the crucial words were uttered. At last, with a desperate effort, I seemed to shake off the incubus which was weighing me down, and I finished the words triumphantly, and so loud that I had positively wakened myself up _by shouting them out_. With returning memory I knew this had happened, and hearing a door open and shut on the half landing below my room, I thought for the moment that someone must have heard me, and must be coming to see what was the matter. I looked at my watch--just two-thirty A.M. No one appeared; and to my relief I remembered that this was just the hour when either Miss Hunter or my friend went round to the invalids, giving them milk or bovril, in the night.