Every second seemed as if it had brought me at last to a darkness which was actually tangible.
All at once, and with no heed of sequence or order, I was conscious of all around me, the knowledge or perception of which--or even speculation on the subject--had never entered my mind.

They furnished the darkness with which I was encompassed with all the crowded phases of a dream.

I knew that all around me were memorials of the dead--that in the Crypt deep-wrought in the rock below my feet lay the dead themselves.

Some of them, perhaps--one of them I knew--had even passed the grim portals of time Unknown, and had, by some mysterious power or agency, come back again to material earth.

There was no resting-place for thought when I knew that the very air which I breathed might be full of denizens of the spirit-world.