"Herbert George Wells. When the Sleeper Wakes" - читать интересную книгу автора

At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He bent down
until the two heads were ear to ear.

Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He started
violently and uttered an exclamation. The eyes were void spaces of white.

He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled
under the lids. He was suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of the
man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are you
asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, "Are you
asleep?"

A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He
suddenly became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering
against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.

"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage. "There is something
wrong with my friend."

Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder,
shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his
astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he turned
blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at once," he said. "It is
either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is a doctor
to be found? "

THE TRANCE

The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for
an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid
state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his
eyes could be closed.

He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the
surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every attempt
at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear later, these
attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in that strange
condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as it were,
suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His was a
darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless inanition,
a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled and risen to an
abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is any man when
insensibility takes hold of him?

"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as though it
happened yesterdayclearer perhaps, than if it had happened yesterday."

It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a young man.
The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the fashionable
length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that had been pink