ppeal in the
name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke
him--himself his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was
nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself
loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to
pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood
on the ground or floated in the air. I've been telling you what we
said--repeating the phrases we pronounced,--but what's the good? They
were common everyday words,--the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on
every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my
mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases
spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul,
I am the man. And I wasn't arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me
or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear--concentrated, it is true,
upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only
chance--barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn't
so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being
alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I
tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through
the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so
withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
He struggled with himself, too. I saw it,--I heard it. I saw the
inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and
no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty well;
but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead,
while my legs shook under me as though I had carried half a ton on my
back down that hill. And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm
clasped round my neck--and he was not much heavier than a child.

"When next day we left at noon, the crowd, of whose presence behind the
curtain of trees I had been acutely conscious all the time, flowed out
of the woods again, filled the clearing, covered the slope with a mass
of naked, breathing, quivering, bronze bodies. I steamed up a bit, then
swung down-stream, and two thousand eyes followed the evolutions of
the splashing, thumping, fierce river-demon beating the water with its
terrible tail and breathing black smoke into the air. In front of the
first rank, along the river, three men, plastered with bright r