“Do you remember?” cried Adams.
But Berselius did not speak. He was making noises as if strangling, and suddenly his hands flew up to the neck of his hunting shirt, and tore at it till he tore it open.
“Steady, man, steady,” cried Adams catching the other’s arm. “Hi, you’ll be in a fit if you don’t mind—steady, I say.”
But Berselius heard nothing, knew nothing but the scene before him, and Adams, who was running now after the afflicted man, who had broken away and was making straight for the trees beneath which the village had once been, heard and knew nothing of what lay before and around Berselius.
Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent man, and behold! memory had suddenly fronted him with a hell in which he was the chief demon.
He had no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a blow in the face.
Under that m’bina tree two soldiers, one with the haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains.
Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole. The remains of the miserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, and the trees blew their golden trumpets over all.
As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries was running about as a frantic woman runs about, to the bones on the ground, he guessed the tragedy of Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the torrid eloquence of madness.