Don't come with me, Macfarlane! I'll take an orderly." "I'm coming," said Macfarlane, stoutly.
But they did not get to the _dak-bungalow_, or anywhere near it.

Before they had covered twenty yards another frightful spasm of pain came upon Merryon, racking his whole being, depriving him of all his powers, wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering.

He went down into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him like devils in some inferno under the earth.
Of time and place and circumstance thereafter he became as completely unconscious as though they had ceased to be, though once or twice he was aware of a merciful hand that gave him opium to deaden--or was it only to prolong ?--his suffering.

And aeons and eternities passed over him while he lay in the rigour of perpetual torments, not trying to escape, only writhing in futile anguish in the bitter dark of the prison-house.
Later, very much later, there came a time when the torture gradually ceased or became merged in a deathly coldness.

During that stage his understanding began to come back to him like the light of a dying day.