39°
Martinique
Sketches.
the most important project;—you fall fast asleep over the most fascinating of books. Then comes the vain revolt, the fruitless desperate striving with this occult power which numbs the memory and enchants the will. Against the set resolve to think, to act, to study, there is a hostile rush of unfamiliar pain to the temples, to the eyes, to the nerve centres of the brain ; and a great weight is somewhere in the head, always growing heavier : then comes a drowsiness that overpowers and stupefies, like the effect of a narcotic. And this obligation to sleep, to sink into coma, will impose itself just so surely as you venture to attempt any mental work in leisure hours, after the noon repast, or during the heat of the afternoon. Yet at night you can scarcely sleep. Repose is made feverish by a still heat that keeps the skin drenched with thick sweat, or by a perpetual, unaccountable, tingling and prickling of the whole body-surface. With the approach of morning the air grows cooler, and slumber comes,—a slumber of exhaustion, dreamless and sickly ; and perhaps when you would rise with the sun you feel such a dizziness, such a numbness, such a torpor, that only b y the most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. Y o u experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave : it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,—all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of the night. . . .
V.
I T might be stated, I think, with safety, that for a certain class of invalids the effect of the climate is like a powerful stimulant,—a tonic medicine which may produce astonishing results within a fixed time,—but which if taken beyond that time will prove dangerous. After