Accompanying this was an indescribable sense, which I have sometimes
had in dreams, of an overwhelming intense vastness—space-immensity
rushing over one with a terrible power; and at the same time the
feeling of _numbers_, as if I was in the presence of a multitude
of people. All this quite momentary; in an instant I was conscious
of the tall avenues of red stems, with their dark background, and
the heavy silence of the underwood, and nothing more.

"I went as if dazed through the wood, yet unconsciously obeying the
tacit order of my determination, down a steep fully clad with pine
trees, the needles very soft under my feet, till I suddenly came out
of the stifling wood on to golden sands and blue water, and a great
restful wash of air and sunlight.

"I fired my gun as a signal, and wandering on, as if only half awake,
I came out upon another point, and saw the boat lying close below me,
whereupon I fired again, and was taken on board.

"My sensation was one of strange languor and fatigue; certainly no
fright, and very little wonder; rather as if I had been stunned or
charmed by opiates into a kind of waking slumber. I have never felt
anything like it before or since.

"But by morning I was shivering in an ague caught in that
pestilential fever-swamp, and then the fever fiend himself came and
took up his abode with me, and I am now only just convalescent, and
can sun myself on the deck, and read and write a little; but the
illness and the unconsciousness have done as such things often
do—interposed a sort of blank between me and my past life—have
deadened it, as one deadens sound by wool, so that memories no longer