"I wonder if I'm
dead?" he thought irritably, "or is it only delirium? And if I am dead,
it really doesn't matter--an idiot could see through anything so thin as
this."
Again the cloud closed over him, and again just as suddenly it lifted
and the joyous surprise awoke in his mind. He remembered feeling the
same sensation in his boyhood, when he had walked one morning at sunrise
on a strange road, and had wondered what would happen when he turned a
long curve he was approaching. And it seemed to him now as then, that a
trackless, a virgin waste of experience surrounded him--that he was in
the midst of an incalculable vastness of wonder and delight. It was
a nuisance to have this web of flesh wrapping about him, binding his
limbs, hindering his efforts, stifling his breath.
And then, as in the brain of a fevered and delirious man, this
impression vanished as inexplicably as it had come. His ideas were
perfectly independent of his will. He could neither recover one that
he had lost nor summon a fresh one from the border of obscurity that
surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his
mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber.
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