stinctively that after a time,
when he had collected a certain number, the brain would gain strength, and
all at once the mist would vanish for ever, and he would be himself
again.

Three hours after the start they passed a broken-down tree.

Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had passed on the hunt,
shortly after turning from their path to follow the herd of elephants.

Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon they would come to the
crucial point--the spot where they had turned at right angles to follow
the elephants.

Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he get confused and go on in a
straight line?

The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.

He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all
the country to the north.

"We came from there," he said, indicating the north. "We struck the
elephant spoor just here, and turned due west."

"How on earth do you know?" asked Adams. "I can't see any indication, and
for the life of me I couldn't tell where we turned or whether we came from
there," indicating the north, "or there," pointing to the south. "How do
you know?"

"How do I know?" replied Berselius. "Why, this place and everything we
reach and pass is as vivid to me as if I had passed it only two minutes
ago. _It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me._ It is that which
I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily
vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born--every
memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there
were gods, they would see as I see."

A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it
triumphantly.

Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this
rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon,
was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come
across.

This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for
the past comes to a man from a hundred close points--a thousand familiar
things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to
them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing
was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius
had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have
been as lost as Adams.

They wheeled to the north, following in