Leyden turned to me insistently, claiming my corroboration of all this that he had worked out through hypertrophied recollection. “Is it not true, Doctor, that logic supplants instinct; that as soon as we learned how to tell by deduction where the person we sought had gone we were no longer able to lay our noses to the ground and decide the matter?” He began to maunder again—his auto-philosophy which was so hard to follow. “There are plenty of plants in nature which would poison the animals of the section if instinct did not prompt them to avoid these; a man will often eat of something and subsequently wonder at the cause of his derangement; the animal will know and avoid this thing. At that time I was conscious of a morbid physical condition, but was unable to trace its source. Vinckers, lacking imagination, knew at once. ‘Heaven,’ I heard him mutter, ‘was there ever such a mockery! We come to look for gold and we land in—quarantine!’ It struck me as a new idea and I almost laughed. Gold and death, sickness and disease! How appropriate that they should be unichromatic! But it was Vinckers’ next words which struck me. ‘It is that accursed corpse-wax!’ he muttered, ‘that greasy stuff that we have been growing fat on!’ Ugh! You see, Doctor, he was able to link physically cause and effect.
“MacFarlane began to mutter. Tomba brought him some water and he drank thirstily, swallowing with the audible gulps of a horse.
“‘I’m feverish,’ he said, panting from the long draught, ‘verra nervous and feverish. ’Tis a feverish place, this.’
“‘It’s rotten with fever!’ growled Vinckers, who, like myself, spoke English better than the Scotchman. ‘It stinks of fever—smell it! We were fools to stay here so long.’
“‘We are a pack of lotus-eaters,’ said I. ‘You are right, Vinckers; it is this accursed stuff we have been eating—this adiposcere! We will get out of here to-morrow.’
“‘Do you feel as if your inside was filled with lead, Leyden?’ asked Vinckers.
“‘It is worse than that,’ said I—‘molten lead.’
“You see, Doctor, we had been living on this rich, fatty stuff, which certainly contained a great deal of oil and I do not know what else besides—narcotics, no doubt. You know the richness of an avocado? They will tell you in some places that this fruit produces biliousness, but I have never heard that it had a soporific effect, as undoubtedly had the myela fruit. Then we had taken no exercise.
“I think that night was hotter than most; we could not sleep, so up we got and smoked and discussed our plans for the future—at least, we started to discuss them, but even as we argued a lethargy came over us, and one by one we fell asleep, though dreading to do so and striving to keep awake through fear of another nightmare. An odd condition, Doctor, this drowsy fearsomeness; no doubt like a patient narcotized before an operation; dread fighting a drug until the latter triumphs and the patient whimpers off into fear-filled somnolence.
“The sun came to suck away the fever-mist and with it much of our dread. We laughed at the fears of the night and awaited the coming of the Papuans, but awaited in vain. I think, Doctor, that Tomba’s scream had floated across the valley, telephonic beneath the mist to reach the listeners in the hills. At any rate, no human thing came near us that day. Later, when the shadows began to lengthen again, we wandered out, Vinckers and I, prospecting towards the native camp—I with a rifle, watchful for game, Vinckers humming to himself an old Dutch tune, careless in the full force of the sunlight, wandering behind me and clicking on the rocks with his little hammer.