The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.
He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all the country to the north.
“We came from there,” he said, indicating the north. “We struck the elephant spoor just here, and turned due west.”
“How on earth do you know?” asked Adams. “I can’t see any indication, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell where we turned or whether we came from there,” indicating the north, “or there,” pointing to the south. “How do you know?”
“How do I know?” replied Berselius. “Why, this place and everything we reach and pass is as vivid to me as if I had passed it only two minutes ago. It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me. It is that which I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born—every memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were gods, they would see as I see.”
A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it triumphantly.
Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come across.
This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for the past comes to a man from a hundred close points—a thousand familiar things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have been as lost as Adams.
They wheeled to the north, following in their leader’s footsteps.
That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool near which Berselius had shot the rhinos.