As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of
existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream. I must
at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the
destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood
with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it. I must have somehow
crawled, or dragged myself forward. There is an impression on my mind
that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory,
or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do
not know whence I have them. I think that I remember retching with
desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face
as I moved the regulator in the engine-room: but any recollection of
going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not. Happily, the
wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she
must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the
wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head
against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in
sight, and morning breaking.
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