Insanity had seized me. Dimly conscious of the horrible truth, I longed
for release by death from the awful torture racking me.
The pain was excruciating. In my agony every nerve seemed lacerated,
every muscle paralysed, every joint dislocated. My brain was on fire.
My lips dry and cracking, my throat parched and contracted, my eyes
burning in their sockets, my tongue so swollen that my mouth seemed too
small to contain it, and my fevered forehead throbbing, as strange
scenes, grim and terrifying, flitted before me. Pursued by
hideously-distorted phantoms of the past, I seemed to have been plunged
into a veritable Hawiyat. Forms and faces, incidents and scenes that
were familiar rose shadowy and unreal before my pain-racked eyes, only
to dissolve in rapid succession. My closest friends mocked and jeered
at my discomforture, and those I had known in my brighter youthful days
renewed their acquaintance in a manner grotesquely chaotic. In this
awful nightmare of delirium scenes were conjured up before me vividly
tragical, sometimes actually revolting. Bereft of reason, I was
enduring an agony every horror of which still remains graven on the
tablets of my memory.
Over me blank despair had cast her sable pall, and, reviewing my career,
I saw my fond hopes, once so buoyant, crushed and shattered, and the
future only a grey, impenetrable mist. My skull seemed filled with
molten metal that boiled and bubbled, causing me the most frightful
nauseating torment which nothing could relieve, yet with appalling
vividness sights, strange and startling, passed in panorama before my
unbalanced vision. By turns I witnessed incidents picturesque,
grotesque, and ghastly, and struggled to articulate the aimless,
incoherent chatter of an idiot.
Once I had a vision of the green fields, the ploughed land, the tall
poplars and stately elms that surrounded my far-off English home. The
old Norman tower of the church, grey and lichen-covered, under the
shadow of which rested my ancestors, the old-fashioned windmill that
formed so prominent a feature in the landscape, the long, straggling
village street, with its ivy-covered parsonage and its homely cottages
with tiny dormer windows peeping forth from under the thatch, were all
before my eyes, and, notwithstanding the acute pain that racked me, I
became entranced by the rural peace of the typical English scene to
which I had, as if by magic, been transported. Years had passed since I
had last trodden that quaint old street; indeed, amid the Bohemian
gaieties of the Quartier Latin, the ease and idleness of life beyond the
Pyrenees, and the perpetual excitement consequent on "roughing it" among
the Arabs and Moors, its remembrance had become almost obliterated. Yet
in a few brief seconds I lived again my childhood days, days when that
ancient village constituted my world; a world in which Society was
represented by a jovial but occasionally-resident city merchant, an
energetic parson, a merry and popular doctor, and a tall, stately,
white-haired gentleman who lived in a house which somebody had nicknamed
"Spy-corner," and who, on account of his commanding presence, was known
to his intimates as "The Sultan."
I fancied myself moving again among friends I had known from my birth,
amid surroundings that were peaceful, refreshing, and altogether
charming. But the chimera faded all too quickly. Green fields were
succeeded by desolate stretches of shifting sand, where there was not a
blade of grass, not a tree, not a living thing, and where I stood alone
and unsheltered from the fierce, merciless rays of the African sun.
Fine sand whirled up by the hot, stifling wind filled my eyes, mouth,
and nostrils, and I was faint with hunger and consumed by an
unquenchable thirst. Abnormal incidents, full of horror, crowded
themselves upon my disordered intellect. I thought myself again in the
hands of the brutal Pirates of the Desert, condemned by Hadj Absalam to
all the frightful tortures his ingenious mind could devise. Black
writhing asps played before my face, scorpions were about me, and
vultures, hovering above, flapped their great wings impatient to devour
the carrion. I cried out, I shouted, I raved, in the hope that someone
would release me from the ever-increasing horrors, but I was alone in
that great barren wilderness, with life fast ebbing. The agonies were
awful! My brain was aflame, my head throbbed, feeling as if every
moment it must burst, and upon me hung a terrible weight that crushed my
senses, rendering me powerless.
Visions, confused and unintelligible, passed in rapid succession before
my aching eyes, and I became awestricken by their revolting hideousness.
The dark, villainous face of Labakan grinned at me exultingly, and the
scarred, sinister visage of Hadj Absalam, the mighty Ruler of the
Desert, regarded my agonies with a fierce, horrible expression, in which
the spirit of murder was vividly delineated. Suddenly despair gave
place to joy. Demented and rambling, I imagined that my hand was
grasping the Crescent of Glorious Wonders, the lost talisman that would
restore me to happiness with the woman I loved. But, alas! it was only
for a brief second, for next moment in a sudden pang of excruciating
pain a darkness fell, and everything, even my physical torment, suddenly
faded.