Memories broke through indistinctly, fragmentarily. She had suffered—been fearfully ill: Something had been agonizedly sensible of that. How many beings were there in her to be aware? She had known things before her complete awakening—but had not known herself.
It was not an unpopulated world into which she had dropped: she knew now, somehow, that dim, fearful people were in it—she had heard and felt them ... their passing through the air ... and even the silences that fell dreadfully down upon them.
Over and over her dim, sickened wits repudiated her mind’s claim to this self ... denied that anything that was she could find lodgment in this ragged figurement. The personality offered for her acceptance was distorted out of the slightest semblance of credibility. Some time her real self would come back to her—all gathered together, and decently clad.
Thirst obsessed her every faculty!
She dragged herself up, and found that, though so weak she could not hold one idea long, she was not too ill to move. She felt that if she could get her mind wholly to come back and to grip hard, her limbs would not shake so.
She stared around her in astonishment, her mind fluctuating uncertainly before what she looked out upon. Another chimera! A toppling crazy world, patched together. She gave a mad little scream. How could one live in a world in which there were so many holes? One would be always falling out of them. What incredible kind of senses must one have to exist in those moon-struck huts?
She fled unsteadily out of the hovel where she had found herself. Before what confronted her, her mouth opened again to cry out, but closed gulpingly without a sound. That crooked coast, that retching mouth of a bay, those blood-red nets!
She pressed her hand across her head, as if to hold the recollections that came flitting disjointedly through it, trying fearfully but futilely to make coherent connections. A vision came suddenly shocking before her—revolving, ribald human groups, clawing and jeering about her, only to take flight.
It was indeed in an outrageous form and surroundings that she had found life. They had looted her dress, her shoes, stockings—her hair, which her groping fingers had been so long trying to find. Some one, in saturnine mercy, had flung a filthy rag over her, which automatically she clutched about her. Having picked her clean, it was inconceivable why they had let her live!
Too stupefied to be afraid, she moved about in the nightmare. Strange sounds came from the huts. She stopped and listened, and commenced to tremble in fresh terror. She stumbled quickly away across the sand.