Now occasionally there comes a time when the Western eye sees something that it can’t touch or smell exactly, and it is easier to disbelieve its own senses than to change its point of view for an Eastern one. Accordingly it says, “I was crazy with the heat,” or as Bellair was prone to explain away the visitation of this day, “The thirst and the hunger had got to me.”
There follows, without further peroration, an unheated narrative of what appeared to take place on that fourth day:
As was expected from drinking the brine, Stackhouse went mad. The look of the great creature, his very identity, changed, went out from him, and something else came in. This happens when a dog goes mad. We have had to reckon with it in our own families. If that which we knew passes, without something foreign taking its place, the result would be a mere inert mass waiting for death. The alienists have given us the word obsession to explain that which comes instead, making an obscenity and violence of that which we knew. In the olden days these Enterers were known as demons. A man named Legion was beset with them, and Another with a strong will came and, according to the story, freed Legion. That which had defiled him entered a herd of swine, the bars of which were somehow down at the time....
They had ceased to hate Stackhouse. The old Master was gone into who knows what long feeding dream? This was merely his body that they watched for an hour or two in the forenoon. In fact, Bellair had studied the departure with some detachment. He was sitting as usual in the centre of the boat, glad that the Stackhouse agony was done. There was a moment in which it appeared that death was stealing in rapidly, and another in which a new kind of life entered the body—as vandals enter to despoil a house after the tenant has moved away.
The hunched body had suddenly reached for him like a great ape. Bellair had felt the crippling force of the touch, and an almost equal force from the thought that flashed in his mind—to use the pistol.... The boat had rocked beneath them. The blackness of much blood was in Bellair’s brain. The struggle was brief. Through it all, Bellair heard the cries of the child. Just as he was ready to fail, the monster sat back, his teeth snapping in his beard—the huge hands feeling for him, as one blinded.
“Change places with me, Bellair.”
This was from Fleury—midforenoon that fourth day. Bellair obeyed because he was afraid of the pistol at hand.
“I don’t want to kill him,” he panted.
“It will not come to that,” Fleury answered.
It was then that the transfer of seats was made. Bellair relied vaguely upon the preacher’s greater strength which was not of limb and shoulder. The monster dropped to his knees to renew the fight.