d tops
of single trees, resembling small islets emerging black and solid from a
ghostly and impalpable sea. Upon the faintly luminous background of the
eastern sky, the sombre line of the great forests bounded that smooth
sea of white vapours with an appearance of a fantastic and unattainable
shore.

He looked without seeing anything--thinking of himself. Before his eyes
the light of the rising sun burst above the forest with the suddenness
of an explosion. He saw nothing. Then, after a time, he murmured
with conviction--speaking half aloud to himself in the shock of the
penetrating thought:

"I am a lost man."

He shook his hand above his head in a gesture careless and tragic, then
walked down into the mist that closed above him in shining undulations
under the first breath of the morning breeze.

CHAPTER FOUR

Willems moved languidly towards the river, then retraced his steps to
the tree and let himself fall on the seat under its shade. On the other
side of the immense trunk he could hear the old woman moving about,
sighing loudly, muttering to herself, snapping dry sticks, blowing up
the fire. After a while a whiff of smoke drifted round to where he sat.
It made him feel hungry, and that feeling was like a new indignity added
to an intolerable load of humiliations. He felt inclined to cry. He felt
very weak. He held up his arm before his eyes and watched for a little
while the trembling of the lean limb. Skin and bone, by God! How thin
he was! . . . He had suffered from fever a good deal, and now he thought
with tearful dismay that Lingard, although he had sent him food--and
what food, great Lord: a little rice and dried fish; quite unfit for a
white man--had not sent him any medicine. Did the old savage think that
he was like the wild beasts that are never ill? He wanted quinine.

He leaned the back of his head against the tree and closed his eyes.
He thought feebly that if he could get hold of Lingard he would like
to flay him alive; but it was only a blurred, a short and a passing
thought. His imagination, exhausted by the repeated delineations of his
own fate, had not enough strength left to grip the idea of revenge.
He was not indignant and rebellious. He was cowed. He was cowed by
the immense cataclysm of his disaster. Like most men, he had carried
solemnly within his breast the whole universe, and the approaching end
of all things in the destruction of his own personality filled him
with paralyzing