idly
revisited and back at last to Prague, to the cold and the gray snow and
the black sky. It was not strange, he thought, that his recollections
of so many cities should be a little confused. A man would need a fine
memory to catalogue the myriad sights which such a trip offers to the
eye, the innumerable sounds, familiar and unfamiliar, which strike
the ear, the countless sensations of comfort, discomfort, pleasure,
annoyance and admiration, which occupy the nerves without intermission.
There was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the
retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka's, full of undeveloped
artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty,
animate and inanimate. The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other
in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had
been vaguely aware before beginning the journey. None of these lacked
reality, any more than Keyork himself, thought it seemed strange to the
young man that he should actually have seen so much in so short a time.

But Keyork and Unorna understood their art and knew how much more easy
it is to produce a fiction of continuity where an element of confusion
is introduced by the multitude and variety of the quickly succeeding
impressions and almost destitute of incident. One occurrence, indeed,
he remembered with extraordinary distinctness, and could have affirmed
under oath in all its details. It had taken place in Palermo. The heat
had seemed intense by contrast with the bitter north he had left behind.
Keyork had gone out and he had been alone in a strange hotel. His head
swam in the stifling scirocco. He had sent for a local physician, and
the old-fashioned doctor had then and there taken blood from his arm.
He had lost so much that he had fainted. The doctor had been gone when
Keyork returned, and the sage had been very angry, abusing in most
violent terms the ignorance which could still apply such methods. Israel
Kafka knew that the lancet had left a wound on his arm and that the
scar was still visible. He remembered, too, that he had often felt tired
since, and that Keyork had invariably reminded him of the circumstances,
attributing to it the weariness from which he suffered, and indulging
each time in fresh abuse of the benighted doctor.

Very skilfully had the whole story been put together in all its minutest
details, carefully thought out and written down in the form of a
journ