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The day seemed to be passing, the evening was arriving, and I had not telephoned either James or the taxi man. I decided it was too late to decide to go early in the morning. I would ring the taxi man tomorrow and take the later train. What I would do when I got to London I did not consider. Arrange my flat, order curtains? Such things belonged to another world. Although the evening was warm I lit the fire for company in the little red room, thus consuming Rosemary’s and Angie’s letters and the photo of the intelligent diffident girl. I took my supper in to the fireside and sat for a while trying to start reading The Wings of the Dove, but its marvellous magisterial beginning failed to grab me. It was still daylight and I could see without the lamp. I sat for a while with glazed eyes, listening to the stomp of the sea and the beating of my heart. I began to feel slightly sleepy or comatose. That swim had certainly done something to me. I thought about Titus. Then I began to think about myself as a drowned man and I remembered how I had slept, on the night of my resurrection from Minn’s cauldron, upon the floor in this room, in front of the glowing fire, wondering gratefully why I was still alive. And I seemed to see myself lying there, moving my limbs gently in the warmth to make certain that I was whole.

My eyelids drooped a little and then I very clearly saw something concerning which I was not afterwards able to say whether it was a hallucination or a memory image. It certainly presented itself to me, quite suddenly, as a memory. I had been vaguely, driftingly, thinking of that awful fall into the churning pit of water, my ‘knowledge’ of my death, the way the water showed green above me even in the dim light. Then I remembered that, just before my head cracked against the rock and the blackness came upon me, I had seen something else. I had seen a strange small head near to mine, terrible teeth, a black arched neck. The monstrous sea serpent had actually been in the cauldron with me.

I opened my eyes wide and, now panting and with a violently pounding heart, looked around me. All was as usual, the fire blazing, the scattering of unopened letters upon the table, my half-drunk glass of wine. I was sure I had not been asleep. I had simply remembered something which I had for some reason totally forgotten. This was indeed the forgetting which the doctor had said I must expect, the result of the concussion, where memory traces are lost. But now I could recall the black coiling thing, very close, reared over me and quite unmistakable in the dim light, its head and neck for a moment outlined against the sky. I saw in memory its green luminous eyes. The sight had lasted for seconds, perhaps a second, but it had been clear and not to be doubted. Then after that second had come the blow on the head.

But no, there was something else to remember, something else had happened just before I lost consciousness. But what, what? Trembling with excitement and fear I sat holding my head and tormenting my memory. There was something there waiting agonizingly to be remembered, something very important and extraordinary, waiting just outside my range of vision, waiting for me to grasp it, only I could not. I groaned aloud, I got up and walked into the kitchen and back, I drank a little more wine, I closed my eyes, I opened them. I watched my mind, as if hardly daring to touch it in case it should shift or harden and destroy some perhaps momentary proximity. But the hidden thing would not come; and I had a terrified sense that if I did not catch it now it would disappear forever, sinking into the deep total darkness of the unconscious. Just now, for perhaps the last time, it heaved to touch the surface.

After a while I gave up straining, though I still hoped that the final, the somehow essential, memory would suddenly come. I sat down again at the table and began thinking about the sea serpent and going back over my earlier theories concerning LSD. I tried to remember