securely on the slippery back of a giraffe, charging over rough ground
with a pack of lions at its heels. Away I went at a speed never perhaps
attained by any winner of the Derby, which made the shining hairs of my
horse's mane whistle in the still air; down valleys, up hills, flying
like a bird over roaring burns, rocks, and thorny bushes, never pausing
until I was far away among those hills where that strange accident had
befallen me, and from which I had recovered to find the earth so
changed. I then ascended a great green hill, the top of which must have
been over a thousand feet above the surrounding country. When I had at
length reached this elevation, which I did walking and climbing, my
steed docilely scrambling up after me, the richness and novelty of the
unimaginable and indescribable scene which opened before me affected me
in a strange way, smiting my heart with a pain intense and unfamiliar.
For the first time I experienced within myself that miraculous power the
mind possesses of reproducing instantaneously, and without perspective,
the events, feelings, and thoughts of long years--an experience which
sometimes comes to a person suddenly confronted with death, and in other
moments of supreme agitation. A thousand memories and a thousand
thoughts were stirring in me: I was conscious now, as I had not been
before, of the past and the present, and these two existed in my mind,
yet separated by a great gulf of time--a blank and a nothingness which
yet oppressed me with its horrible vastness. How aimless and solitary,
how awful my position seemed! It was like that of one beneath whose feet
the world suddenly crumbles into ashes and dust, and is scattered
throughout the illimitable void, while he survives, blown to some far
planet whose strange aspect, however beautiful, fills him with an
undefinable terror. And I knew, and the knowledge only intensified my
pain, that my agitation, the strugglings of my soul to recover that lost
life, were like the vain wing-beats of some woodland bird, blown away a
thousand miles over the sea, into which it must at last sink down and