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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 · Sri Aurobindo Studies

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  A lone discoverer in these menacing realms, guarded like
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  termite cities from the sun, oppressed mid crowd and tramp
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  and noise and flare, passing from dusk to deeper dangerous
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  dusk. He wrestled with powers that
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  snatched from mind its light and smote from him their clinging
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  influences. Soon he emerged in a dim wall,
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  Less space for now. The peopled tracks were left
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  behind. He walked between wide banks of
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  failing Eve. Around him grew a gaunt
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  spiritual blank, a threatening waste, a sinister loneliness
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  that left mine bare to an unseen assault, an empty page on which
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  all that willed could write stark monstrous messages without
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  control. A travelling dot on downward
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  roads of dusk, mid barren fields and barns and straggling huts
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  and a few crooked and phantasmal trees.
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  He faced a sense of death and conscious void, but still a
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  hostile life. Unseen was there, whose
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  deathlike poise, resisting light and truth, made living a bleak
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  gap in nullity. He heard the grisly voices that
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  deny, assailed by thoughts that swarmed like spectral hordes of
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  prey to the staring phantoms of the gloom and terror approaching
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  with its lethal mouth. Driven by a strange will down
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  ever down the sky above, a communique of doom, he strove to
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  shield his spirit from despair, but felt the horror of the
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  growing night and the abyss rising to claim his soul.
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  Then ceased. The abodes of creatures and
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  their forms and solitude wrapped him in its voiceless folds.
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  All vanished. Suddenly, like a thought
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  expunged, his spirit became an empty listening gulf, void of
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  the dead illusion of a world. Nothing was left, not even an
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  evil face. He was alone with the grey
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  Python night, a dense and nameless nothing conscious mute
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  which seemed alive but without body or mind lusted all being to
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  annihilate that it might be forever nude and soul as in a
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  shapeless beast's intangible jaws gripped, strangled by that
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  lusting viscous blot, attracted to some black and giant mouth
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  and swallowing throat and a huge belly of doom.
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  His being from its own vision disappeared, drawn towards depth
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  that hungered for its fall. A formless void oppressed his
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  struggling brain, a darkness grim and cold be numbed his
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  flesh. A whispered grey suggestion
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  chilled his heart, hailed by a serpent force from its warm home
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  and dragged to extinction in bleak vacancy.
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  Life clung to its seat with cords of gasping breath.
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  Lapped was his body by a tenebrous tongue.
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  Existence smothered, travailed to survive.
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  Hope, strangled, perished in his empty soul.
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  Belief and memory abolished, died, and all that helps the
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  spirit in its course there crawled through every 10th and
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  aching nerve, Leaving behind its poignant quaking trail a
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  nameless and unutterable fear. As a sea nears a victim bound
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  and still the approach alarmed, his mind forever dumb, Of an
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  implacable eternity of pain inhuman and intolerable.
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  This he must bear his hope of heaven.
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  Estranged, he must ever exist without extinction's peace.
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  In a slow suffering time and tortured space and anguished
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  nothingness. His endless state, a lifeless
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  vacancy, was now his breast, and in the place where once was
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  luminous thought only remained like a pale, motionless ghost,
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  an incapacity for faith and hope, and the dread conviction
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  of a vanquished soul, immortal still, but with its Godhead
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  lost, self lost, and God and touch of happier worlds.
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  But he endured, stilled the vain terror, bore the smothering
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  coils of agony and affright. Then peace returned, and the
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  soul's sovereign gaze. To the blank horror, a calm
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  light replied. Immutable, undying and unborn,
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  mighty and mute. The Godhead in him woke and
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  faced the pain and danger of the world.
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  He mastered the tides of nature. With a look he met with his bare
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  spirit. Naked hell.