. I was not
so crazed as not to know it; only a phantom, an illusion, yet more real
than reality--real as my crime and vain remorse and death to come. It
was, indeed, Rima returned to tell me that I that loved her had been
more cruel to her than her cruellest enemies; for they had but tortured
and destroyed her body with fire, while I had cast this shadow on
her soul--this sorrow transcending all sorrows, darker than death,
immitigable, eternal.

If I could only have faded gradually, painlessly, growing feebler in
body and dimmer in my senses each day, to sink at last into sleep! But
it could not be. Still the fever in my brain, the mocking voice by day,
the phantoms by night; and at last I became convinced that unless I
quitted the forest before long, death would come to me in some terrible
shape. But in the feeble condition I was now in, and without any
provisions, to escape from the neighbourhood of Parahuari was
impossible, seeing that it was necessary at starting to avoid the
villages where the Indians were of the same tribe as Runi, who would
recognize me as the white man who was once his guest and afterwards his
implacable enemy. I must wait, and in spite of a weakened body and a
mind diseased, struggle still to wrest a scanty subsistence from wild
nature.

One day I discovered an old prostrate tree, buried under a thick growth
of creeper and fern, the wood of which was nearly or quite rotten, as
I proved by thrusting my knife to the heft in it. No doubt it would
contain grubs--those huge, white wood-borers which now formed an
important item in my diet. On the following day I returned to the spot
with a chopper and a bundle of wedges to split the trunk up, but had
scarcely commenced operations when an animal, startled at my blows,
rushed or rather wriggled from its hiding-place under the dead wood at
a distance of a few yards from me. It was a robust, round-headed,
short-legged creature, about as big as a good-sized cat, and clothed
in a thick, greenish-brown fur. The ground all about was covered with
creepers, binding the ferns, bushes, and old dead branches together; and
in this confused tangle the animal scrambled and tore with a great show
of energy, but really made very little progress; and all at once it
flashed into my mind that it was a sloth--a common animal, but rarely
seen on the ground--with no tree near to take refuge in. The shock of
joy this discovery produced was great enough to unnerve me, and