doration before grief and
dreadful passions had dimmed my vision. And now as I walked, murmuring
my last farewell, my eyes grew dim again with the tears that gathered to
them.

CHAPTER XXII

Before that well-nigh hopeless journey to the coast was half over I
became ill--so ill that anyone who had looked on me might well have
imagined that I had come to the end of my pilgrimage. That was what I
feared. For days I remained sunk in the deepest despondence; then, in a
happy moment, I remembered how, after being bitten by the serpent, when
death had seemed near and inevitable, I had madly rushed away through
the forest in search of help, and wandered lost for hours in the storm
and darkness, and in the end escaped death, probably by means of these
frantic exertions. The recollection served to inspire me with a new
desperate courage. Bidding good-bye to the Indian village where the
fever had smitten me, I set out once more on that apparently hopeless
adventure. Hopeless, indeed, it seemed to one in my weak condition. My
legs trembled under me when I walked, while hot sun and pelting rain
were like flame and stinging ice to my morbidly sensitive skin.

For many days my sufferings were excessive, so that I often wished
myself back in that milder purgatory of the forest, from which I had
been so anxious to escape. When I try to retrace my route on the map,
there occurs a break here--a space on the chart where names of rivers
and mountains call up no image to my mind, although, in a few
cases, they were names I seem to have heard in a troubled dream. The
impressions of nature received during that sick period are blurred, or
else so coloured and exaggerated by perpetual torturing anxiety, mixed
with half-delirious night-fancies, that I can only think of that country
as an earthly inferno, where I fought against every imaginable obstacle,
alternately sweating and freezing, toiling as no man ever toiled before.
Hot and cold, cold and hot, and no medium. Crystal waters; green shadows
under coverture of broad, moist leaves; and night with dewy fanning
winds--these chilled but did not refresh me; a region in which there was
no sweet and pleasant thing; where even the ita palm and mountain glory
and airy epiphyte starring the woodland twilight with pendent blossoms
had lost all grace and beauty; where all brilliant colours in earth and
heaven were like the unmitigated sun that blinded my sight and burnt my
brain. Doubtless I met