worshipped, whimpered and shivered, her back curved in an arch of
distress, by the head of the bed.




CHAPTER VII

THE HEART OF THE CYCLONE


There are times in life when our affairs are at some high crest, when
all emotion and the processes of thought become intensified and
crystallised: the slightest incident makes a deep-bitten impression; the
most momentary effect of colour or lighting, or the tones of a voice,
remain in the memory indissolubly connected with the phase the mind is
passing through. Every sense is hung upon a hair-trigger, and even
irrelevant things touch more sharply than usual, in the same way that a
magnifying glass reveals the minutest pores and hairs on the hand
holding whatever the primary object to be looked at may be. They are
mercifully few, those periods of intense clarity, for they leave a mind
and heart deadened and surfeited, that slowly awake to the dull
consciousness of pain, even as the body, numbed by a severe accident,
only after a while awakes to sentient aching. Ishmael passed into this
phase in the first days after the scene in the wood, before physically
he was conscious of much beyond a dull throbbing in his head.

He lay and stared from out his bandages, feigning more stupor than he
felt in his passionate craving to keep off all discussion and inquiry.
He lay and watched the spring sunlight creep over the whitewashed wall