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A few steps, feeling the walls, soon convinced me that there was indeed no door anywhere. I couldn’t even feel the outlines of one; the walls were smooth stone to my fingertips, with not a crevice or crack anywhere in evidence. Nor did the floor seem to be anything more than a single immense block of stone. I stamped on it, and the sound was dull, not hollow. It looked as though I were trapped.

But there had to be a way out, hadn’t there? All these things had to have come in somehow! But why should I imagine that a place like this had to obey the rules of the normal world? There was nothing normal about what had happened so far, was there?

Suddenly, I was overtaken with a sense that time was running out. The hourglass, when I looked, was almost half empty, and it felt to me that it was running faster all the while. I reached out to seize it and turn it over again, but try as I might, the level of sand in the upper chamber continued to shrink.

For a brief while, I believe I went temporarily insane. I couldn’t breathe, and my vision went dark. I may have fainted; I certainly screamed out loud and struck out at the walls, scraping the skin of my knuckles and drawing blood. I fell to my knees and tried to dig into the stone floor with my fingertips. I had a sense of the walls and ceiling closing on me, to crush me out of existence like a fly.

Sobbing loudly with terror, I rolled on the floor.

When I regained my faculties, the ruddy light outside had changed in some indefinable manner. I looked up at the slot in the wall for a few moments before deciding that it had a new, greenish hue, and was brighter. But then it came to me again that I couldn’t waste time thinking about things like the light. I knew I had to get out of the room. Wherever I was, that was imperative. And when I saw that the hourglass’ top chamber was all but empty, I knew that I had almost no time left.

Then I noticed something else. The large grey snail which had so startled me earlier had crawled towards the skull, and now sat sideways to it, the long slender eye-stalks turned towards me. As I watched, the stalks began to make a definite waving movement, both bending together in the direction of the skull.

"What about the skull?" I asked it aloud, my voice slurred in my own ears, as though it wasn’t my own. "What do you want me to do with the skull?"

In response, the snail’s eye-stalks twitched, as it seemed to me, impatiently, making the same movement. Tentatively, I prodded the skull. It was light, dry bone, so light that it rocked at the touch of my fingers. I hesitated a moment, turning to the hourglass. The last few grains trembled at the neck, about to slide down. Without any further pause I grabbed the skull and lifted it.

The wall behind me fell to dust. I know that seems like a melodramatic description, but that’s just what happened. The skull was so light and insubstantial in my hands as I picked it up that it might have been a thing of light and air, and broke to pieces with the pressure of my fingertips. At the same moment there was a rush of air and the light brightened suddenly. I whirled round to find the wall gone. All that was left of it was long low mound of dust on the ground.

Ahead of me stretched a land so barren, so desolate, that it seared me to my innermost being. Far away, as far as I could see, lay an undulating landscape of bare earth, littered with rocks large and small. There was not a trace of vegetation, not a single moving thing. The only thing that broke the monotony was a thin white spire that rose in the extreme distance, and the top of which was truncated, as though snapped off short. And all of it was bathed in that horrible greenish light, which came from the sun, which hung low over the horizon.

I looked at this awful landscape, and my heart seemed to shrivel within me. But there was nothing for it. I had to go out there, because I couldn’t remain where I was. Indeed, the walls around me seemed to be growing hazy and insubstantial, as though they, and all that they contained, would crumble like blown dust in the wind. But the wind, if it had ever blown, had stopped. I could not even hear the moaning.

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