d, changing the image, imagination could hear the sea of
light bursting against the far edge of the horizon, even as you watched
the spindrift of it surging up to heaven and the waves of it breaking over
ridge and tree and plain of waving grass.

Noon was the hour of silence. Under the pyramid of light the land lay
speechless, without a shadow except the shadow of the flying bird, or a
sound except the sigh of the grass, touched and bent by the wind, if it
blew.

Evening brought with it a new country. There was no dusk here, no beauties
of twilight, but the level light of sunset brought a beauty of its own.
Distance stood over the land, casting trees farther away, and spreading
the prairies of grass with her magic.

The country, now, had a new population. The shadows. Nowhere else,
perhaps, do shadows grow and live as here, where the atmosphere and the
level light of evening combine to form the quaintest shadows on earth. The
giraffe has for his counterpart a set of shadow legs ten yards long, and
the elephant in his shadow state goes on stilts. A man is followed by a
pair of black compasses, and a squat tent flings to the east the shadow of
a sword.

Adams was sitting looking at the two porters whom he had set to hunt for
firewood; he was watching their grotesque figures, and more than grotesque
shadows, when a movement of the sick man under the tent-cloth caused him
to turn.

Berselius had awakened. More than that, he was sitting up, and before
Adams could put up a hand, the tent-cloth was flung back, and the head and
shoulders of the sick man appeared.

His face was pale, his hair in disorder; but his consciousness had fully
returned. He recognized Adams with a glance, and then, without speaking,
struggled to free himself of the tent-cloth and get on his feet.

Adams helped him.

Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, looked around him, and
then stood looking at the setting sun.

The glorious day was very near its end. The sun huge and half-shorn of his
beams, was sinking slowly, inevitably; scarce two diameters divided his
lower edge from the horizon that was thirsting for him as the grave
thirsts for man. Thus fades, shorn of its dazzle and splendour, the
intellect so triumphant at noon, the personality, the compelling will; the
man himself when night has touched him.

"Are you better?" asked Adams.

Berselius made no reply.

Like a child, held by some glittering bauble, he seemed fascinated