ad
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 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 red earth
from head to foot, strutted to and fro restlessly. When we came abreast
again, they faced the river, stamped their feet, nodded their horned
heads, swayed their scarlet bodies; they shook towards the fierce
river-demon a bunch of black feathers, a mangy skin wi