A mortal cold struck to the Englishman's heart, and his blood froze.

He stood rooted to the spot; and as his eyes strained involuntarily through the vapour, he fancied (for he could not be sure that it was not the trick of his imagination) that he saw dim, spectre-like, but gigantic forms floating through the mist; or was it not rather the mist itself that formed its vapours fantastically into those moving, impalpable, and bodiless apparitions?
A great painter of antiquity is said, in a picture of Hades, to have represented the monsters that glide through the ghostly River of the Dead, so artfully, that the eye perceived at once that the river itself was but a spectre, and the bloodless things that tenanted it had no life, their forms blending with the dead waters till, as the eye continued to gaze, it ceased to discern them from the preternatural element they were supposed to inhabit.

Such were the moving outlines that coiled and floated through the mist; but before Glyndon had even drawn breath in this atmosphere--for his life itself seemed arrested or changed into a kind of horrid trance--he felt his hand seized, and he was led from that room into the outer one.

He heard the door close,--his blood rushed again through his veins, and he saw Mejnour by his side.

Strong convulsions then suddenly seized his whole frame,--he fell to the ground insensible.
When he recovered, he found himself in the open air in a rude balcony of stone that jutted from the chamber, the stars shining serenely over the dark abyss below, and resting calmly upon the face of the mystic, who stood beside him with folded arms.
"Young man," said Mejnour, "judge by what you have just felt, how dangerous it is to seek knowledge until prepared to receive it.