r, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp
fire of last night, everything is a thick mist--I am afraid!"

He took Adams's big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and
the action.

The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man
who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the
stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a
little child, and saying, "I am afraid!"

And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of
yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so
different from the voices of common men.

"It will pass," said Adams. "It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I
have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out.
He had to learn his alphabet again."

Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had
slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a
child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a
pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.

Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful.
It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in
London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and
purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have
ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past
life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment,
until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.

Berselius's case was a phase of this condition. He knew his
name--everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that,
he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use
his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.

If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great
photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.

Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other
words, he had lost his past.

CHAPTER XXIII

BEYOND THE SKYLINE

Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept
by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had
piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria
brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred
yards from the camp, and he lay by