For a little while the two remained without speaking.
“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady—”
He paused. “Towards the gulf.”
“You must sleep,” said Isbister decisively, and with an air of a remedy discovered. “Certainly you must sleep.”
“My mind is perfectly lucid. It was never clearer. But I know I am drawing towards the vortex. Presently—”
“Yes?”
“You have seen things go down an eddy? Out of the light of the day, out of this sweet world of sanity—down—”
“But,” expostulated Isbister.
The man threw out a hand towards him, and his eyes were wild, and his voice suddenly high. “I shall kill myself. If in no other way—at the foot of yonder dark precipice there, where the waves are green, and the white surge lifts and falls, and that little thread of water trembles down. There at any rate is ... sleep.”
“That’s unreasonable,” said Isbister, startled at the man’s hysterical gust of emotion. “Drugs are better than that.”