When, three days afterward, Captain Traverse unclosed his eyes from a
dream of Gehenna and the place the smoke of whose torment goes up for
ever, a strange confusion crept like a haze across his mind, tired out and
tortured with delirium, and he dropped the aching lids and fell away into
slumber again; for he had thought himself vexed with the creak of cordage
and noise of feet, stived in his dark and narrow cabin, on a filthy bed in
a foul air, if any air at all were in that noisome place, reeking with
heat and the ferment of bilge-water and fever-smell; and here, unless a
new delirium chained him, a mattress lay upon the deck with the awning of
an old sail stretched above it and making soft shadow out of searching
sun, a gentle wind was blowing over him, a land-breeze full of sweet
scents from the gardens on the shore, from the meadows and the marshes.
Silence broken only by a soft wash of water surrounded him; a flake of ice
lay between his lips, that had lately been parched and withering, and
delicious coolness swathed his head, that had seemed to be a ball of
burning fire. The last that he remembered had been a hot, dry, aching
agony, and this was bliss: the sleep into which he fell when waking from
the stupor that had benumbed his power of suffering--a power that had
rioted till no more could be suffered--lasted during all the spell of that
fervid noon sun that hung above the harbor and the town like the unbroken
seal of the expected pestilence.
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