Then, it was, came the
opaque blackness which could be felt, and his voice calling in despair:
"Blind! I am blind!"
He did not know that he had taken an opiate, that his friend had
mercifully atrophied his rebellious nerves. These visions he was seeing
were terribly true, but they somehow gave him no physical torture. It
was as though one saw an operation performed upon one's body with the
nerves stilled and deadened by ether. Yet he was cruelly conscious of
the disaster which had come to him. For a time at least. Then his mind
seemed less acute, the visions came, then without seeing them go, they
went. And others came in broken patches, shreds, and dreams,
phantasmagoria of the brain, and at last all were mingled and confused;
but as they passed they seemed to burn his sight. How he longed for a
cool bandage over his eyes, for a soft linen which would shut out the
cumuli of broken hopes and designs, life's goals obliterated! He had had
enough of the black procession of futile things.
His longing was not denied, for even as he roused himself from the
oblivion coming on him, as though by a last effort to remember his dire
misfortune, maybe his everlasting tragedy, something soothing and soft
like linen dipped in dew was laid upon his forehead.
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