Chapter 29
HE CAME to his senses with the sudden shock characteristic of the waking of one who has overslept. It was like emerging into consciousness from the effects of an anæsthetic. He had lost all sense of time or place. He did not seem to know who he was, where he was, or where he had been, whether he were alive or still sunk in that dreamless, all-effacing slumber which is civilized man’s closest analogy to death.
The stealthy lapping of water was in his ears. In terror he gazed about him. The room in which he found himself was tiny and dimly lit and plunged in a profound silence threaded only by that faint, susurrant gurgle. A clinging blanket of sheer oblivion muffled his mind: he could not imagine what he was doing in that utterly unfamiliar setting.
He sat up, and instantly a
