Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog. The monster crawled by day and rested by night; strengthened, the man could have left it then, but somehow night after night he did not. It wasn't, he argued with himself sometimes in the days when he lay torpidly drowsing, lulled by the long sway, arms over his head to protect him from the sun's baking, merely that he was chained to the only source of food he knew in all the world—not just that he was developing a flea's psychology. He was a man and a scientist, and he was conducting an experiment.... His life on the monster's back was proving something, something of vast importance for man, the extinct animal—but for increasingly longer periods of time he could not remember what it was....
There came a morning, though, when he remembered.
Thus began for him a weird existence—the life of a parasite, of a flea on a dog.
He woke with the sun's warmth on his body and the realization of something amiss trickling through his head. It was a little while before he recognized the wrongness, and when he did he sat bolt upright.
The sun was already up, and the monster should have begun once more its steady, ravenous march to the east. But there was no motion; the great living expanse lay still around him. He wondered wildly if it was dead.
Presently, though, he felt a faint shuddering and lift beneath his feet, and heard far stifled mutterings and sighs.
Westover's mind was beginning to function again; it was as though the cessation of the rock and sway had exorcised the lethargy that had lain upon him. He knew now that he had been almost insane for the time he had passed here, touched by the madness that takes hermits and men lost in deserts or oceans. And his was a stranger solitude than any of those.