At the beginning of Chapter 2, Humphrey uses heightened imagery to describe what he sees during his near-death experience. He nearly drowns after the sinking of the Martinez, but the crew of the Ghost brings him aboard and revives him:
I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm through orbit vastness. Sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me. They were stars, I knew, and flaring comets, that peopled my flight among the suns. As I reached the limit of my swing and prepared to rush back on the counter swing, a great gong struck and thundered. For an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries, I enjoyed and pondered my tremendous flight.
But a change grew over the face of the dream, for a dream I told myself it must be […] I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes.
Humphrey’s near-death experience represents the death of his old, intellectual, sedentary self and the birth of a new version of Humphrey who is self-reliant and in touch with his physical body. He feels himself to be floating amongst the cosmos while he is dead, seeing stars, comets, and suns glittering in the endless black sky.
The alliteration of the "s" sound in the second sentence—“sparkling points of light spluttered and shot past me”—adds to the sparkling, star-spattered imagery of the scene and gives the passage a steady, rhythmic quality, adding to the “mighty rhythm” that Humphrey feels himself to be a part of while dead. This rhythm could be the rhythm of life itself, or the heartbeat of the universe, revealing that Humphrey feels connected to all other living things in this moment, and to his own life force as well. The rhythmic, heartbeat-like quality of the passage could also represent a return to the womb, with Humphrey as a baby listening to his mother's heartbeat. When Humphrey is abruptly brought back by the crew, he catches his breath painfully and opens his eyes, a sudden discomfort reminiscent of a baby experiencing the harsh lights and sounds of the world outside his mother for the first time.
It is also significant that Humphrey feels as though he is floating in space for “an immeasurable period, lapped in the rippling of placid centuries.” This suggests that he has not only been reborn as a new man but he has also returned to the dawn of the universe at the beginning of time. This connects with the novel’s themes of “primordial” and “primal” humanity, as well as evolution and the origins of life. By returning to the dawn of the universe, Humphrey has, in a sense, returned to humanity’s original, primal state. This represents the transformation he makes on board the Ghost toward connecting with his primal self and animal nature.
