ght, the
glistening black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched by the
glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and branch, seemed like marine
foliage bathed in the watery light of a sea-cave.

Adams had lit a pipe, and he sat beside Berselius at the opening of the
tent, smoking. The glare of the match had shown him the face of Berselius
for a moment. Berselius, since his first outcry on finding the path gone,
had said little, and there was a patient and lost look on his face, sad
but most curious to see. Most curious, for it said fully what a hundred
little things had been hinting since their start from the scene of the
catastrophe--that the old Berselius had vanished and a new Berselius had
taken his place. Adams had at first put down the change in his companion
to weakness, but the weakness had passed, the man's great vitality had
reasserted itself, and the change was still there.

This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; this person might have
been a mild twin-brother of the redoubtable Captain of the Avenue
Malakoff, of Matadi and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it
bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, mild,
inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself burdened with the
tremendous past of the man he once had been?

Nothing is more true than that the human mind from accident, from grief,
or from that mysterious excitement, during which in half an hour a
blaspheming costermonger "gets religion" and becomes a saint of
God--nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a
flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the
bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this
state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a devil
incarnate.

Was Berselius under the influence of forced amendment of this sort?

Adams was not even considering the matter, he was lost in gloomy
thoughts.

He was smoking slowly, holding his index and middle fingers over the
pipe-bowl to prevent the tobacco burning too quickly, for he had only a
couple of pipefuls left. He was thinking that to-morrow evening the pouch
would be empty, when, from somewhere in the forest near by, there came a
sound which brought him to his feet and the two porters up on hands and
knees like listening dogs.

It was the sound of a human voice raised in a sort of chant, ghostly and
mournful as the sound of the falling dew.