ee trunk, he had heard. Yes! One would do. One tree
to cut down . . . He rushed forward, and suddenly stood still as if
rooted in the ground. He had a pocket-knife.

And he would throw himself down on the ground by the riverside. He
was tired, exhausted; as if that raft had been made, the voyage
accomplished, the fortune attained. A glaze came over his staring eyes,
over his eyes that gazed hopelessly at the rising river where big logs
and uprooted trees drifted in the shine of mid-stream: a long procession
of black and ragged specks. He could swim out and drift away on one of
these trees. Anything to escape! Anything! Any risk! He could fasten
himself up between the dead branches. He was torn by desire, by fear;
his heart was wrung by the faltering of his courage. He turned over,
face downwards, his head on his arms. He had a terrible vision of
shadowless horizons where the blue sky and the blue sea met; or a
circular and blazing emptiness where a dead tree and a dead man drifted
together, endlessly, up and down, upon the brilliant undulations of the
straits. No ships there. Only death. And the river led to it.

He sat up with a profound groan.

Yes, death. Why should he die? No! Better solitude, better hopeless
waiting, alone. Alone. No! he was not alone, he saw death looking at him
from everywhere; from the bushes, from the clouds--he heard her speaking
to him in the murmur of the river, filling the space, touching his
heart, his brain with a cold hand. He could see and think of nothing
else. He saw it--the sure death--everywhere. He saw it so close that
he was always on the point of throwing out his arms to keep it off. It
poisoned all he saw, all he did; the miserable food he ate, the muddy
water he drank; it gave a frightful aspect to sunrises and sunsets, to
the brightness of hot noon, to the cooling shadows of the evenings. He
saw the horrible form among the big trees, in the network of creepers
in the fantastic outlines of leaves, of the great indented leaves that
seemed to be so many enormous hands with big broad palms, with stiff
fingers outspread to lay hold of him; hands gently stirring, or hands
arrested in a frightful immobility, with a stillness attentive and
watching for the opportunity to take him, to enlace him, to strangle
him, to hold him till he died; hands that would hold him dead, that
would never let go, that would cling to his body for ever till it
perished--disappeared in their frantic and t