He then turned his attention to his solid environment.  He found the medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the green powder therein.  He put this in his pocket, and began to feel about him.  Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety moss.  The dark country about him he was unable to see, the faint, misty picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a feeling (due perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that a steep valley fell away beneath his feet.  The green glow along the edge of the sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity.  He stood up, rubbing his eyes.

It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and then stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to watch the dawn.  He became aware that the world about him was absolutely silent.  It was as still as it was dark, and though there was a cold wind blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing of the boughs that should have accompanied it, were absent.  He could hear, therefore, if he could not see, that the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and desolate.  The green grew brighter every moment, and as it did so a faint, transparent blood-red mingled with, but did not mitigate, the blackness of the sky overhead and the rocky desolations about him.  Having regard to what follows, I am inclined to think that that redness may have been an optical effect due to contrast.  Something black fluttered momentarily against the livid yellow-green of the lower sky, and then the thin and penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the black gulf below him.  An oppressive expectation grew with the growing light.

It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the strange green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading slowly, in flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith.  As it grew, the spectral vision of our world became relatively or absolutely fainter.  Probably both, for the time must have been about that of our earthly sunset.  So far as his vision of our world went, Plattner, by his few steps downhill, had passed through the floor of the class-room, and was now, it seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom downstairs.  He saw the boarders distinctly, but much more faintly than he had seen Lidgett.  They were preparing their evening tasks, and he noticed with interest that several were cheating with their Euclid riders by means of a crib, a compilation whose existence he had hitherto never suspected.  As the time passed, they faded steadily, as steadily as the light of the green dawn increased.