Then Anubis speaks again:

“You know every shadow in the House of the Dead. You have looked through all the hidden eyes.”

“Yes.”

“Now see what lies beyond.”

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels’ eyes, and they pass near, pass far, in the eternity through which he seems to move. There is no sense of real time or real movement, only a changing of the field. A great blue Tophet Box of a sun seems to soar beside him for a moment, and then again comes black, all about him, and more small lights that pass, distantly.

And he comes at last to a world that is not a world, citrine and azure and green, green, green. A green corona hangs about it, at thrice its own diameter, and it seems to pulsate with a pleasant rhythm.

“Behold the House of Life,” says Anubis, from somewhere.

And he does. It is warm and glowing and alive. He has a feeling of aliveness. “Osiris rules the House of Life,” says Anubis. And he beholds a great bird-head atop human shoulders, bright yellow eyes within it, alive, alive-oh; and the creature stands before him on an endless plain of living green which is superimposed upon his view of the world, and he holds the Staff of Life in his one hand and the Book of Life in his other. He seems to be the source of the radiant warmth.

Wakim then hears the voice of Anubis again:

“The House of Life and the House of the Dead contain the Middle Worlds.”

And there is a falling, swirling sensation, and Wakim looks upon stars once more, but stars separated and held from other stars by bonds of force that are visible, then invisible, then visible again, fading, coming, going, white, glowing lines, fluctuating.

“You now perceive the Middle Worlds of Life,” says Anubis.



10 из 136