through empty air;
then--starry void; and remembering it all, the supposed funeral
ligatures took the form of a blanket, which, wrapped tightly round him,
impeded the use of his limbs. He was not dead, only dreaming, suffering
from a bad nightmare. The blanket--the rock overhead! What a blessed
relief! All the events, terrible and tragic, he had just gone through,
were parts of a dream. Nidia was not left alone in that savage
wilderness, but here, within a few yards of him. He was lying across
the entrance of her retreat, as usual, that none might imperil her save
by passing over him. Filled with an intense thankfulness, he lay and
revelled in the realisation that it had all been a dream. Still it
should act as a warning one. Never would he be so confiding in their
security again.

The light grew and spread. The grey rock above him became less shadowy,
more distinct. Whence the languor that seemed to attend his waking
hours, the drowsy disinclination to move? Yet there it was. Well, he
must combat it; and with this idea he suddenly sat up, only to fall back
with a cry of acute anguish. His head was splitting.

For some time he lay, unable to move, thinking the while whether his cry
had disturbed Nidia. No; she had not moved. At last an idea took hold
of his confused brain. Their camping-ground this time was not a cave.
It was in the open. Whence, then, this rock--this rock which somehow
seemed to weigh upon him like a tombstone? And--Heavens! What was that
over there? A table?

A table! Why, a railway engine would have been no more phenomenal at
that moment. A table! Was he dreaming? No. There it stood; a sturdy,
if unpretentious four-legged table, right up against a tolerably
perpendicular rock-wall.

He stared at it--stared wildly. Surely no such homely and commonplace
object had ever been the motive power for such consternation, such
despairing, sickening disappointment before. For it conveyed to him
that the events of the previous day had been no dream, but dire reality.
Where he now was he had no idea, but wherever it might be, it was
certainly not in the place where he had parted from Nidia and she would
still be undergoing all the horrors of utter solitude. Again he tried
to leap up; but this time an invisible hand seemed to press him down, an
unseen force to calm and hypnotise him, and in the result everything
faded into far-away dimness. Nothing seemed to matter. Once more he