Chapter 7
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied
on - indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all
form parts of some daemonic dream or illusion born of delirium. A
fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind
of haze - sometimes only intermittently.
The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness,
bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and
carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a
tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber
over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged,
grotesquely stalactited roof.
It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the
blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar,
and
