ry above. Even the intent dog was not
wanting, as poor Wanda, conscious of disaster to the being she
worshipped, whimpered and shivered, her back curved in an arch of
distress, by the head of the bed.

CHAPTER VII

THE HEART OF THE CYCLONE

There are times in life when our affairs are at some high crest, when
all emotion and the processes of thought become intensified and
crystallised: the slightest incident makes a deep-bitten impression; the
most momentary effect of colour or lighting, or the tones of a voice,
remain in the memory indissolubly connected with the phase the mind is
passing through. Every sense is hung upon a hair-trigger, and even
irrelevant things touch more sharply than usual, in the same way that a
magnifying glass reveals the minutest pores and hairs on the hand
holding whatever the primary object to be looked at may be. They are
mercifully few, those periods of intense clarity, for they leave a mind
and heart deadened and surfeited, that slowly awake to the dull
consciousness of pain, even as the body, numbed by a severe accident,
only after a while awakes to sentient aching. Ishmael passed into this
phase in the first days after the scene in the wood, before physically
he was conscious of much beyond a dull throbbing in his head.

He lay and stared from out his bandages, feigning more stupor than he
felt in his passionate craving to keep off all discussion and inquiry.
He lay and watched the spring sunlight creep over the whitewashed wall
opposite, and every slow black fly that crawled across the patch of
warmth might have been crawling over his raw nerves. He almost expected
the surface of the wall to contract like a skin and twitch them off, as
he felt his own skin doing out of sympathy.

In the night, when the wall was filmed with shadow save for the faint
flickering of a rushlight that made great rounds of light upon the
dimness, then he saw all his life at Cloom passing in a shadow show
across the wall, crawling like the flies.... He was never delirious;
physically his fine and sane constitution was recovering well from a
nasty blow--it was merely as though all his mind had been set a little
faster, like a newly-regulated clock, a clock set to work backwards; and
he could hear its ticking through all the sounds of everyday life that,
hushed as much as might be, came into his room.

He felt sick of it all, sick of the striving at Cloom, of the quarrels
with Archelaus, of Tom's c