le joy,
their long talon-like nails outstretched to rend me fearful horrifying!

At a word, and just as they had almost reached me, the priestess stayed
them; but now their hot breath beat close upon me, and in deadly fear I
stretched out my hand and took the berry. "Eat eat, and be safe, no
harm shall come thee eat and forget eat and forget!" and with the
clarion accents ringing in my ears, and with those unfathomable eyes
gazing steadily into my own, I crushed the berry between my teeth and
swallowed it. A strange, acrid taste, similar but vastly stronger than
the berries I had eaten before . . . a rush of blood to my head, a
tingling through all my veins, and then a blackness surging up and
hiding all, even blotting out the star-like eyes before me, till all,
all was black.

An endless dream of wanderings in thick pathless forests, an endless
search for something lost: an eternity of vague formless dreams.
Searching searching, and finding nothing: an infinite sorrow for
something I could never again find.

Eyes gleaming at me from the dark forest; a myriad eyes, coming and
going in the vague shadows, and a voice calling; something I could not
understand; and through all, the sorrow for something precious, lost
beyond recall.

CHAPTER IX

FORTY YEARS! THE AWAKENING

And then voices in my own tongue, low voices in the tongue I had not
heard for so long; and kind English faces coming and going beside my
bed, and mingling with my dreams.

And there came a time when I awoke to full sanity again, a time when
dreams no longer blended with reality.

I lay in a cool, green-shuttered room, and beside me sat a pleasant-
faced man, dressed in white, who was looking at me intently, and who
nodded vigorously as I looked back at him.

"Better, eh?" he asked "There, don't speak. I can see you are. Take
this, and go to sleep; you have had a bad time, and must get stronger
before you talk."

And strong I got rapidly, and in a few days he told me where I was, and
how I came there.

He was the British Consul at Loanda in Portuguese West Africa, and one
morning about two months before, some natives had brought me in to him
slung in a machilla.

They said they had been paid to bring me in, and that I was sick, and
before he had had time to question them closely they had disappeared,
without anyone finding out where they came from.

Sick and delirious, the Consul had been on the point of sending me to
the Portug