use him, and her eyes would look at him
without seeing him. She was crossing there to the other side. He stood
against a tree.

When at last he turned, looking down the long, bare grove whose flat bed
was already filling dark, he saw the mountains in a wonder-light, not
far away, and radiant. Behind the soft, grey ridge of the nearest range
the further mountains stood golden and pale grey, the snow all radiant
like pure, soft gold. So still, gleaming in the sky, fashioned pure out
of the ore of the sky, they shone in their silence. He stood and looked
at them, his face illuminated. And like the golden, lustrous gleaming
of the snow he felt his own thirst bright in him. He stood and gazed,
leaning against a tree. And then everything slid away into space.

During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole
sky white. He must have walked again. The world hung livid round him for
moments, fields a level sheen of grey-green light, trees in dark bulk,
and the range of clouds black across a white sky. Then the darkness
fell like a shutter, and the night was whole. A faint mutter of a
half-revealed world, that could not quite leap out of the
darkness!--Then there again stood a sweep of pallor for the land, dark
shapes looming, a range of clouds hanging overhead. The world was a
ghostly shadow, thrown for a moment upon the pure darkness, which
returned ever whole and complete.

And the mere delirium of sickness and fever went on inside him--his
brain opening and shutting like the night--then sometimes convulsions of
terror from something with great eyes that stared round a tree--then
the long agony of the march, and the sun decomposing his blood-then
the pang of hate for the Captain, followed, by a pang of tenderness and
ease. But everything was distorted born of an ache and resolving into an
ache.

In the morning he came definitely awake. Then his brain flamed with
the sole horror of thirstiness! The sun was on his face, the dew was
steaming from his wet clothes. Like one possessed, he got up. There,
straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains ranged
across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them--he wanted them
alone--he wanted to leave himself and be identified with them. They did
not move, they were still and soft, with white, gentle markings of snow.
He stood still, mad with suffering, his hands crisping and clutching.
Then he was twisting in a paroxysm on the grass.