An endless dream of wanderings in thick pathless forests, an endless search for something lost: an eternity of vague formless dreams. Searching searching, and finding nothing: an infinite sorrow for something I could never again find.
Eyes gleaming at me from the dark forest; a myriad eyes, coming and going in the vague shadows, and a voice calling; something I could not understand; and through all, the sorrow for something precious, lost beyond recall.
CHAPTER IX
FORTY YEARS! THE AWAKENING
And then voices in my own tongue, low voices in the tongue I had not heard for so long; and kind English faces coming and going beside my bed, and mingling with my dreams.
And there came a time when I awoke to full sanity again, a time when dreams no longer blended with reality.
I lay in a cool, green-shuttered room, and beside me sat a pleasant- faced man, dressed in white, who was looking at me intently, and who nodded vigorously as I looked back at him.
"Better, eh?" he asked "There, don't speak. I can see you are. Take this, and go to sleep; you have had a bad time, and must get stronger before you talk."
And strong I got rapidly, and in a few days he told me where I was, and how I came there.
He was the British Consul at Loanda in Portuguese West Africa, and one morning about two months before, some natives had brought me in to him slung in a machilla.