Berselius awoke from sleep at noon, but he was so weak that he could scarcely move his lips. Fortunately there were some goats at the fort, and Adams fed him with goats’ milk from a spoon, just as one feeds an infant. Then the sick man fell asleep and the rain came down again—not in a thunder shower this time, but steadily, mournfully, playing a tattoo on the zinc roof of the veranda, filling the place with drizzling sounds, dreary beyond expression. With the rain came gloom so deep that Adams had to light the paraffin lamp. There were no books, no means of recreation, nothing to read but the old official letters and the half-written report which the dead man had left on the table before leaving earth to make his report elsewhere. Adams having glanced at this, tore it in pieces, then he sat smoking and thinking and listening to the rain.
Toward night a thunderstorm livened things up a little, and a howling wind came over the forest on the heels of the storm.
Adams came out on the veranda to listen.
He could have sworn that a great sea was roaring below in the darkness. He could hear the waves, the boom and burst of them, the suck-back of the billows tearing the shrieking shale to their hearts, the profound and sonorous roar of leagues of coast. Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.
This was a new phase of the forest, which since the day Adams entered it first, had steadily been explaining to him the endlessness of its mystery, its wonder, and its terror.
CHAPTER XXXII
MOONLIGHT ON THE POOLS
Now began for Adams a time of trial, enough to break the nerve of any ordinary man. Day followed day and week followed week, Berselius gaining strength so slowly that his companion began to despair at last, fancying that the main fountain and source of life had been injured, and that the stream would never flow again but in a trickle, to be stopped at the least shock or obstruction.