While sailing in 1946 through the Caribbean toward Mobile, Alabama aboard a small freighter hauling bauxite ore for Alcoa, Neville retired early one night and, in the small hours of the morning, experienced a vision of his own resurrection: a heavenly chorus sang 'Neville is risen' as he felt himself wrenched from his skull and clothed in a body of living light. He then glided, without walking, above a vast crowd of the maimed and disfigured -- the blind, the limbless, the crippled -- perfecting each one simply by passing them, until the chorus proclaimed 'It is finished' and he found himself back in his body in the freighter's stateroom.