being too large and heavy to carry; eventually I put the
fragments into a light sack; and in order to avert suspicion from

the people I would meet on the way, above the ashes I packed a
layer of roots and bulbs. These I would say contained medicinal

properties, known to the white doctors, to whom I would sell them
on my arrival at a Christian settlement, and with the money buy

myself clothes to start life afresh.
On the morrow I would bid a last farewell to that forest of many

memories. And my journey would be eastwards, over a wild savage
land of mountains, rivers, and forests, where every dozen miles

would be like a hundred of Europe; but a land inhabited by tribes
not unfriendly to the stranger. And perhaps it would be my good

fortune to meet with Indians travelling east who would know the
easiest routes; and from time to time some compassionate voyager

would let me share his wood-skin, and many leagues would be got
over without weariness, until some great river, flowing through

British or Dutch Guiana, would be reached; and so on, and on, by
slow or swift stages, with little to eat perhaps, with much

labour and pain, in hot sun and in storm, to the Atlantic at
last, and towns inhabited by Christian men.

In the evening of that day, after completing my preparations, I
supped on the remaining portions of the sloth, not suitable for

preservation, roasting bits of fat on the coals and boiling the
head and bones into a broth; and after swallowing the liquid I

crunched the bones and sucked the marrow, feeding like some
hungry carnivorous animal.

Glancing at the fragments scattered on the floor, I remembered
old Nuflo, and how I had surprised him at his feast of rank

coatimundi in his secret retreat. "Nuflo, old neighbour," said
I, "how quiet you are under your green coverlet, spangled just

now with yellow flowers! It is no sham sleep, old man, I know.
If any suspicion of these curious doings, this feast of flesh on

a spot once sacred, could flit like a small moth into your mouldy
hollow skull you would soon thrust out your old nose to sniff the

savour of roasting fat once more."
There was in me at that moment an inclination to laughter; it

came to nothing, but affected me strangely, like an impulse I had
not experienced since boyhood--familiar, yet novel. After the

good-night to my neighbour, I tumbled into my straw and slept
soundly, animal-like. No fancies and phantoms that night: the

lidless, white, implacable eyes of the serpent's severed head
were turned to dust at last; no sudden dream-glare lighted up old

Cla-cla's wrinkled dead face and white, blood-dabbled locks; old
Nuflo stayed beneath his green coverlet; nor did my mournful

spirit-bride come to me to make my heart faint at the thought of
immortality.

But when morning dawned again, it was bitter to rise up and go
away for ever from that spot where I had often talked with

Rima--the true and the visionary. The sky was cloudless and the
forest wet as if rain had fallen; it was only a heavy dew, and it

made the foliage look pale and hoary in the early light. And the
light grew, and a whispering wind sprung as I walked through the

wood; and the fast-evaporating moisture was like a bloom on the
feathery fronds and grass and rank herbage; but on the higher

foliage it was like a faint iridescent mist--a glory above the
trees. The everlasting beauty and freshness of nature was over

all again, as I had so often seen it with joy and adoration
before grief and dreadful passions had dimmed my vision. And now

as I walked, murmuring my last farewell, my eyes grew dim again
with the tears that gathered to them.

CHAPTER XXII
Before that well-nigh hopeless journey to the coast was half over

I became ill--so ill that anyone who had looked on me might well
have imagined that I had come to the end of my pilgrimage. That

was what I feared. For days I remained sunk in the deepest
despondence; then, in a happy moment, I remembered how, after

being bitten by the serpent, when death had seemed near and
inevitable, I had madly rushed away through the forest in search

of help, and wandered lost for hours in the storm and darkness,
and in the end escaped death, probably by means of these frantic

exertions. The recollection served to inspire me with a new
desperate courage. Bidding good-bye to the Indian village where

the fever had smitten me, I set out once more on that apparently
hopeless adventure. Hopeless, indeed, it seemed to one in my

weak condition. My legs trembled under me when I walked, while
hot sun and pelting rain were like flame and stinging ice to my

morbidly sensitive skin.
For many days my sufferings were excessive, so that I often

wished myself back in that milder purgatory of the forest, from
which I had been so anxious to escape. When I try to retrace my

route on the map, there occurs a break here--a space on the chart
where names of rivers and mountains call up no image to my mind,

although, in a few cases, they were names I seem to have heard in
a troubled dream. The impressions of nature received during that

sick period are blurred, or else so coloured and exaggerated by
perpetual torturing anxiety, mixed with half-delirious

night-fancies, that I can only think of that country as an
earthly inferno, where I fought against every imaginable

obstacle, alternately sweating and freezing, toiling as no man
ever toiled before. Hot and cold, cold and hot, and no medium.

Crystal waters; green shadows under coverture of broad, moist
leaves; and night with dewy fanning winds--these chilled but did

not refresh me; a region in which there was no sweet and pleasant
thing; where even the ita palm and mountain glory and airy

epiphyte starring the woodlandtwilight with pendent blossoms had
lost all grace and beauty; where all brilliant colours in earth

and heaven were like the unmitigated sun that blinded my sight
and burnt my brain. Doubtless I met with help from the natives,

otherwise I do not see how I could have continued my journey; yet
in my dim mental picture of that period I see myself incessantly

dogged by hostilesavages. They flit like ghosts through the
dark forest; they surround me and cut off all retreat, until I

burst through them, escaping out of their very hands, to fly over
some wide, naked savannah, hearing their shrill, pursuing yells

behind me, and feeling the sting of their poisoned arrows in my
flesh.

This I set down to the workings of remorse in a disordered mind
and to clouds of venomous insects perpetually shrilling in my

ears and stabbing me with their small, fiery needles.
Not only was I pursued by phantomsavages and pierced by phantom

arrows, but the creations of the Indian imagination had now
become as real to me as anything in nature. I was persecuted by

that superhuman man-eating monstersupposed to be the guardian of
the forest. In dark, silent places he is lying in wait for me:

hearing my slow, uncertain footsteps he starts up suddenly in my
path, outyelling the bearded aguaratos in the trees; and I stand

paralysed, my blood curdled in my veins. His huge, hairy arms
are round me; his foul, hot breath is on my skin; he will tear my

liver out with his great green teeth to satisfy his raging
hunger. Ah, no, he cannot harm me! For every ravening beast,

every cold-blooded, venomous thing, and even the frightful
Curupita, half brute and half devil, that shared the forest with

her, loved and worshipped Rima, and that mournful burden I
carried, her ashes, was a talisman to save me. He has left me,

the semi-human monster, uttering such wild, lamentable" target="_blank" title="a.可悲的">lamentable cries as
he hurries away into the deeper, darker woods that horror changes

to grief, and I, too, lament Rima for the first time: a memory of
all the mystic, unimaginable grace and loveliness and joy that

had vanished smites on my heart with such sudden, intense pain
that I cast myself prone on the earth and weep tears that are

like drops of blood.
Where in the rude savage heart of Guiana was this region where

the natural obstacles and pain and hunger and thirst and
everlastingweariness were terrible enough without the imaginary

monsters and legions of phantoms that peopled it, I cannot say.