It was as if he thought intensely, violently, and yet could not think at all, as a man terrified may stare with wide open eyes and yet perceive nothing, lacking for a moment the faculty of perceiving.

So Valentine waited, like some blind man with glaring eyeballs.

And then, passing into another stage of sensation, he found himself vehemently and rapidly discussing possibilities of terror, forming mental pictures of all the things, of all the powers, that we cannot see.

He embodied, materialized, the wind, the voice of the sea, the angry, hot scent of certain flowers, of the white lily, the tuberose, the hyacinth.

He created figures for light, for darkness, for a wail, for a laugh, and set them in array all around him in the blackness.