that like a fiery, liquid skeleton, in the shape of the monster.
Then this blood began to change too. Instead of a continuous liquid
stream, Maskull perceived that it was composed of a million
individual points. The red colour had been an illusion caused by the
rapid motion of the points; he now saw clearly that they resembled
minute suns in their scintillating brightness. They seemed like a
double drift of stars, streaming through space. One drift was
travelling toward a fixed point in the centre, while the other was
moving away from it. He recognised the former as the veins of the
beast, the latter as the arteries, and the fixed point as the heart.

While he was still looking, lost in amazement, the starry network
went out suddenly like an extinguished flame. Where the crustacean
had stood, there was nothing. Yet through this "nothing" he could
not see the landscape. Something was standing there that intercepted
the light, though it possessed neither shape, colour, nor substance.
And now the object, which could no longer be perceived by vision,
began to be felt by emotion. A delightful, springlike sense of
rising sap, of quickening pulses of love, adventure, mystery, beauty,
femininity--took possession of his being, and, strangely enough, he
identified it with the monster. Why that invisible brute should
cause him to feel young, sexual, and audacious, he did not ask
himself, for he was fully occupied with the effect. But it was as if
flesh, bones, and blood had been discarded, and he were face to face
with naked Life itself, which slowly passed into his own body.

The sensations died away. There was a brief interval, and then the
streaming, starlike skeleton rose up again out of space. It changed
to the red-blood system. The hard parts of the body reappeared, with
more and more distinctness, and at the same time the network of blood