“That’s what I can’t remember, only it was ’way up North,—somewhere.”
“If you had a map, now, and looked at all the Northern countries, it might recall itself to you,—the place where you entered,—where you began your journey.”
“I thought so, but the nurse brought me an atlas and I couldn’t find the place. I wish I had a globe.”
Poor chap. I wondered what had given him this strange hallucination. But as he talked on, I became interested in his own personality.
He was as sane as I was in all respects, save his insistence that he had fallen through the earth.
As a child, an ambition of mine had been to dig down to China, and many times I had started the task. Perhaps his childhood had known a similar ambition, and now, his memory gone, his distorted mind harked back to that idea. I changed the subject, and found him remarkably well informed, fairly well educated, and of a curiously analytical temperament, but of his identity or his personality he had no knowledge.
He appreciated this, and it made the thing more pathetic.
“It will come back to me,” he said, cheerfully. “The doctors have explained all about this aphasic-amnesia, and though mine is the worst case they have ever seen, it will go away some time, and I’ll recover my memory and know who I am.”
“You can reason and understand everything said to you?”
“Oh, yes; I’m my own man in every respect except in a knowledge of who or what I was before that journey through the earth.”