He remembered the last lines of a well-known song:
Could I think we’d meet again,
It would lighten half my pain,
At the place where the old horse died.
“Golly,” he thought, “I’ll never be unkind to a horse as long as I live, after this.”
After the stunned half hour, he picked himself up, to look round at where he was. He stood in a space of grass, ringed by trees, up which the creepers climbed in a fire of flowers. To his right were the reeds and the water, with the sun climbing above them; to his left was the dimness of the forest.
“I’m facing north,” he said. “Almost due north. I’m facing the plain as I stand. I’ve got about a day’s go in me. I must get to the plain this day, or I shall never get to it at all.”
The thought of Carlotta depending on him and Rosa thinking that he was on his way to fetch help came back in force. Again and again he went over in his mind the events which had delayed him. “It is just as if I were walking on a road which moves away from where I want to get to,” he said. “If I were to try to avoid Anselmo, I might get there. I’ve been four days and a bit. Or is it five days and a bit? If I get there now, I may be too late.”
As he went on into the north, he began to hear voices which spoke in his ears, bidding him to do this or that. So many voices spoke, that he began to feel that he was attended by a flock of things like birds, which had human voices and flew invisibly beside him. The going lay over miles of dead reed and broken brush which had been laid in a tornado of the August before. The dead reed having been laid in its prime, had not decayed, but had hardened to something like bamboo: the young reed growing through the old had then matted it into a cloth too high to trample down and too tough to thrust through. Much of this reed grew (at that season) in some inches of water. At the end of two hours of it Hi came to a growth of trees which had been uprooted in a line. For three hundred yards the line stretched like a wall in a succession of the shields of black, intertangled roots standing upright over the hollows whence they had been plucked. It looked like a wall of black snakes barring his way. When he had scrambled up the wall, he saw beyond it the lake amid her reeds, cruised over by white hawks. The beauty of the water in that light, reflecting so much other beauty of forest, flower and bird, each like an angel, could not be told. To Hi, it did not come like beauty; but as a shock. It stretched away, seemingly for miles, right across his path, to left and to right. He could see the sun in heaven, in this clear space; this gave him his compass points. He had come fairly truly to the north: now the lake stretched half a mile breadth of water in front of him. There was neither ford nor boat.
“I must just edge along to the west,” he thought. “This must be the water that stopped me yesterday when I was further to the east.”