It was crowded with all sorts of strange and shifting scenes, some
colored brilliantly, and vivid, others vague and fleeting as moonlight
through a cloud. It was wonderful, too, that he should live again
through things that he had lived already. He was back with Mr. Austin.
He saw the kind and generous face quite plainly and recognized his
voice. He saw Benito and Juana, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl; he was on
the pyramid and in it, and he saw the silver cone of Orizaba. Then he
shifted suddenly back to Texas and the wild border, the Comanche and the
buffalo.
His life now appeared to have no order. Time turned backward. Scenes
occurred out of their sequence. Often they would appear for a second or
third time. It was the most marvelous jumble that ever ran through any
kaleidoscope. His brain by and by grew dizzy with the swift interplay of
action and color. Then everything floated away and blackness and silence
came. Nor could he guess how long this period endured, but when he came
out of it he felt an extraordinary weakness and a lassitude that was of
both mind and body.
His eyes were only half open and he did not care to open them more. He
took no interest in anything. But he became slowly conscious that he had
emerged from somewhere out of a vast darkness, and that he had returned
to his life in the dungeon under the sea.
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