“Don’t think about it,” said he. “It will pass. You have had a knock on the head. Just lean back against the tree, for I want to dress the wound.”
He undid the bandage, fetched some water from the pool, which was now clear, and set to work. The wound was healthy and seemed much less severe than it had seemed the night before. The dent in the bone seemed quite inconsiderable. The inner table of the skull might, after all, be not injured. One thing was certain: whatever mischief the cortex of the brain had suffered, the prime centres had escaped. Speech and movement were perfect and thought was rational.
“There,” said Adams, when he had finished his dressings and taken his seat, “you are all right now. But don’t talk or do any thinking. The mist, as you call it, in your head will pass away.”
“I can see,” said Berselius; then he stopped, hesitated, and went on—“I can see last night—I can see us all here by the camp fire, but beyond that I cannot see, for a great white mist hides everything. And still”—he burst out—“I seem to know everything hidden by that mist, but I can’t see, I can’t see. What is this thing that has happened to me?”
“You know your name?”
“Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. My mind is clear, my memory is clear, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp fire of last night, everything is a thick mist—I am afraid!”
He took Adams’s big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and the action.
The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a little child, and saying, “I am afraid!”
And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so different from the voices of common men.
“It will pass,” said Adams. “It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out. He had to learn his alphabet again.”