Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol, by Sri Aurobindo, Book II The Book of the Traveller of the Worlds, Canto 7 The Descent into Night, pp. 216-219

0:01 A lone discoverer in these menacing realms, guarded like termite cities from the sun, oppressed mid crowd and tramp and noise and flare, passing from dusk to deeper dangerous dusk. He wrestled with powers that snatched from mind its light and smote from him their clinging influences. Soon he emerged in a dim wall, Less space for now. The peopled tracks were left behind. He walked between wide banks of failing Eve. Around him grew a gaunt spiritual blank, a threatening waste, a sinister loneliness that left mine bare to an unseen assault, an empty page on which all that willed could write stark monstrous messages without control. A travelling dot on downward roads of dusk, mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts and a few crooked and phantasmal trees.

1:07 He faced a sense of death and conscious void, but still a hostile life. Unseen was there, whose deathlike poise, resisting light and truth, made living a bleak gap in nullity. He heard the grisly voices that deny, assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes of prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom and terror approaching with its lethal mouth. Driven by a strange will down ever down the sky above, a communique of doom, he strove to shield his spirit from despair, but felt the horror of the growing night and the abyss rising to claim his soul.

1:58 Then ceased. The abodes of creatures and their forms and solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds. All vanished. Suddenly, like a thought expunged, his spirit became an empty listening gulf, void of the dead illusion of a world. Nothing was left, not even an evil face. He was alone with the grey Python night, a dense and nameless nothing conscious mute which seemed alive but without body or mind lusted all being to annihilate that it might be forever nude and soul as in a shapeless beast's intangible jaws gripped, strangled by that lusting viscous blot, attracted to some black and giant mouth and swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom.

2:57 His being from its own vision disappeared, drawn towards depth that hungered for its fall. A formless void oppressed his struggling brain, a darkness grim and cold be numbed his flesh. A whispered grey suggestion chilled his heart, hailed by a serpent force from its warm home and dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy. Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath. Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue. Existence smothered, travailed to survive.

3:37 Hope, strangled, perished in his empty soul. Belief and memory abolished, died, and all that helps the spirit in its course there crawled through every 10th and aching nerve, Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail a nameless and unutterable fear. As a sea nears a victim bound and still the approach alarmed, his mind forever dumb, Of an implacable eternity of pain inhuman and intolerable. This he must bear his hope of heaven. Estranged, he must ever exist without extinction's peace.

4:22 In a slow suffering time and tortured space and anguished nothingness. His endless state, a lifeless vacancy, was now his breast, and in the place where once was luminous thought only remained like a pale, motionless ghost, an incapacity for faith and hope, and the dread conviction of a vanquished soul, immortal still, but with its Godhead lost, self lost, and God and touch of happier worlds. But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore the smothering coils of agony and affright. Then peace returned, and the soul's sovereign gaze. To the blank horror, a calm light replied. Immutable, undying and unborn, mighty and mute. The Godhead in him woke and faced the pain and danger of the world.

5:29 He mastered the tides of nature. With a look he met with his bare spirit. Naked hell.