He was
remembering the frightful, dizzying plunge down the black pit into the
steaming waters of the River of Night--waters which, had they been but
a few degrees hotter, would incontinently have ended everything on the
instant.
He was recalling, as in a nightmare, his frenzied battle for life,
clinging to the inflated goat-skin--the whirl and thunder of
unseen cataracts in the blind dark--the confusion of deafening,
incomprehensible violences.
He was bringing back to mind the long, swift, smooth rushing of mighty
waters through midnight caverns where echoes had told of a rock-roof
close above; then, after an indeterminate time of horror that might
have been minutes or hours, a weltering maelstrom of leaping waters--a
graying of light on swift-fleeing walls; a sudden up-boiling gush of
the strangling flood that whelmed him--and all at once a glare of
sun, a river broadening out through palm-groves far beyond the Iron
Mountains.
All these things, blurred, unreal, heartshaking as evil visions of
fever, the Master was remembering. Then came other happenings: a
long drift with resistless currents, the strange phenomenon of the
lessening stream that dwindled as thirsty sands absorbed it, and the
ceasing of the palms.
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