The strange berries, mayhap they had robbed me of these years the berries that stupefied me and gave me pleasant dreams.
What then had the priestess bidden me forget . . . the path? Yes, the path; and truly my wanderings had been but as a confused dream, a long weary search it had seemed, hopeless and endless, yet it could have taken but a few months from that long total of years.
And the thought came to me that though I knew nothing of this way of my return, yet the spell had not been perfect, for I forgot little of that other path I had trod with Inyati, and after; and I could, and would, return!
For as my strength came back, and grew till it was the wonder of all, so did my longing to return increase.
The eyes the voice that had bidden me go, now seemed to call for me incessantly . . . all else was a weariness I must go back!
For long I fought it. I even went back to England with Gerard, my good friend the Consul, who, if he still thought me mad, at least respected my madness.
For he said nothing of my story to a soul, and he it was that piloted me as a child through the new conditions of life that I found on all sides in England; he helped me turn part of my diamonds into a large fortune, he helped me at length and with reluctance, for he would rather not have believed in the miracle of my long sleep to find proof of all I had told him.
There came a day when we stood before the graves of my father and mother, who had died years after I had left England died mourning me as dead and from the lips of an old greybeard, who had been my schoolmate, we heard how that scapegrace son of theirs had gone treasure-seeking and had never returned all those years ago.
Poor old garrulous fool; he little knew that the deformed, but strong and vigorous man that asked him of this companion of his youth was that very "scapegrace" himself transformed, and with age held back from him by a miracle.
And there came a day, too, when a sweet-voiced, silver-haired old lady, with her grandchildren playing about her, told these two strangers from Africa how her lover of long ago had gone there to win her a fortune, and had never returned, and how she had waited ten long years for him, till all hope of him had fled, before she married; and how even now she held his memory in dear regard.