under his breath. "Yes, all right, major, you'd better go," he said.
"Good-bye."

Merryon essayed a grim smile, but his ashen face only twisted
convulsively, showing his set teeth. He hung on Macfarlane's shoulder
while the first black cloud of agony possessed him and slowly passed.

Then, white and shaking, he stood up. "I'll get round to the _dâk_ now,
before I'm any worse. Don't come with me, Macfarlane! I'll take an
orderly."

"I'm coming," said Macfarlane, stoutly.

But they did not get to the _dâk-bungalow_, or anywhere near it. Before
they had covered twenty yards another frightful spasm of pain came upon
Merryon, racking his whole being, depriving him of all his powers,
wresting from him every faculty save that of suffering. He went down
into a darkness that swallowed him, soul and body, blotting out all
finite things, loosening his frantic clutch on life, sucking him down as
it were into a frightful emptiness, where his only certainty of
existence lay in the excruciating agonies that tore and convulsed him
like devils in some inferno under the earth.

Of time and place and circumstance thereafter he became as completely
unconscious as though they had ceased to be, though once or twice he was
aware of a merciful hand that gave him opium to deaden--or was it only
to prolong?--his suffering. And æons and eternities passed over him
while he lay in the rigour of perpetual torments, not trying to escape,
only writhing in futile anguish in the bitter dark of the prison-house.