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Stepping into the imu she was quickly covered with soil. The people had expected a cloud of smoke to appear, but were somewhat surprised to see the little there already was become even thinner and dwindle away to mere nothingness. Slowly the long days of waiting passed. The third day dawned. All morning the people watched for signs from the imu.
Were they, too, in danger of instant death? Or was she on this upper floor the only victim? The thin chintz curtains flamed and blazed into nothingness while she was looking at them. The wood-work round the windows crackled and blistered, but the flame died out into ashes. Only the intolerable smoke remained, and the ever-increasing glow of the fire below, more vivid with every moment.
But what would survive would not be the nothingness the void of which her grandmother had spoken; it would be the One the cold, ineffable, incomprehensible One! This world would perish with Serapis; but perhaps it might please that One to call another world into being out of his overflowing essence, peopled by other and different beings.
The month was over; the honeymoon to the newly-married; the exquisite convalescence to the "living mother of a living child"; "the first dark days of nothingness" to the widow and the child bereaved; the term of penance, of hard labour, and of solitary confinement, to the shrinking, shivering, hopeless prisoner. "Sick, and in prison, and ye visited me." Shall you, or I, receive such blessing?
"O, if you had heard the horrid yell of malignancy which arose, and echoed through the black chamber of that region of wickedness and misery, it would have made you shrink into nothingness with terror. They fairly gnashed on me with their teeth in impotent rage.
And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that, nothingness. Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content, but determined that upon the morrow he would watch the day being Sunday for the musician who had so moved and taught him.
Because a great man has opened up to them the treasures of his inmost being, and, by a supreme effort of his faculties, produced works which not only redound to their elevation and enlightenment, but will also benefit their posterity to the tenth and twentieth generation; because he has presented mankind with a matchless gift, these varlets think themselves justified in sitting in judgment upon his personal morality, and trying if they cannot discover here or there some spot in him which will soothe the pain they feel at the sight of so great a mind, compared with the overwhelming feeling of their own nothingness.
Messengers, one after another, were sent out from thence to command silence in the great halls, where the assembled youths and girls were kissing, singing, shouting and dancing to the shrill pipe of flutes and twang of lutes, clapping their hands, rattling tambourines in short, enjoying to the utmost the few hours that might yet be theirs before they must make the fatal leap into nothingness, or at least into the dim shades of death.
When I hear our Lord say, "Mine hour is not yet come," and wishing neither to advance nor retard, for a moment, the hour that his Father had appointed, I am plunged into my nothingness. We are only instruments in his hands, which he may lay aside, or use according to his good pleasure. We should be so dead to self, as to be indifferent, whether he makes use of us or not.
Even in the first glow of achievement, his heart turned instinctively to hers for sympathy and approval: and, could she have known it, her haunting fear that the mountains would prove too strong for her had crumbled into nothingness there and then. For if 'many waters cannot quench love, neither can many mountains dwarf it.
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