Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.
Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful. It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment, until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.
Berselius’s case was a phase of this condition. He knew his name—everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that, he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.
If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.
Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other words, he had lost his past.
CHAPTER XXIII
BEYOND THE SKYLINE
Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred yards from the camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling and flickering beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark that made the camping place determinable many miles away.