The country, now, had a new population. The shadows. Nowhere else, perhaps, do shadows grow and live as here, where the atmosphere and the level light of evening combine to form the quaintest shadows on earth. The giraffe has for his counterpart a set of shadow legs ten yards long, and the elephant in his shadow state goes on stilts. A man is followed by a pair of black compasses, and a squat tent flings to the east the shadow of a sword.
Adams was sitting looking at the two porters whom he had set to hunt for firewood; he was watching their grotesque figures, and more than grotesque shadows, when a movement of the sick man under the tent-cloth caused him to turn.
Berselius had awakened. More than that, he was sitting up, and before Adams could put up a hand, the tent-cloth was flung back, and the head and shoulders of the sick man appeared.
His face was pale, his hair in disorder; but his consciousness had fully returned. He recognized Adams with a glance, and then, without speaking, struggled to free himself of the tent-cloth and get on his feet.
Adams helped him.
Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, looked around him, and then stood looking at the setting sun.
The glorious day was very near its end. The sun huge and half-shorn of his beams, was sinking slowly, inevitably; scarce two diameters divided his lower edge from the horizon that was thirsting for him as the grave thirsts for man. Thus fades, shorn of its dazzle and splendour, the intellect so triumphant at noon, the personality, the compelling will; the man himself when night has touched him.
“Are you better?” asked Adams.
Berselius made no reply.
Like a child, held by some glittering bauble, he seemed fascinated by the sun. The western sky was marked by a thin reef of cloud; dull gold, it momentarily brightened to burnished gold, and then to fire.