394
Martinique
Sketches.
cognizance;—she ignores human purposes, knows only molecules and their combinations; and the blind blood in your veins,—thick with Northern heat and habit,—is still in dumb desperate rebellion against her. Perhaps she will quell this revolt forever,—thus :— One day, in the second hour of the afternoon, a few moments after leaving home, there will come to you a sensation such as you have never known before : a sudden weird fear of the light. It seems to you that the blue sky-fire is burning down into your brain,—that the flare of the white pavements and yellow walls is piercing somehow into your life,— creating an unfamiliar mental confusion,—blurring out thought. . . . Is the whole world taking fire ? . . . The flaming azure of the sea dazzles and pains like a crucible-glow ;—the green of the mornes flickers and blazes in some amazing way. . , . Then dizziness inexpressible : you grope with eyes shut fast—afraid to open them again in that stupefying torréfaction,—moving automatically,— vaguely knowing you must get out of the flaring and flashing,— somewhere, anywhere away from the white wrath of the sun, and the green fire of the hills, and the monstrous color of the s e a . . . . Then, remembering nothing, you find yourself in bed,-—with an insupportable sense of weight at the back of the head,—a pulse beating furiously,— and a strange sharp pain at intervals stinging through your eyes. . . . And the pain grows, expands,—fills all the skull,—forces you to cry out,— replaces all other sensations except a weak consciousness, vanishing and recurring, that you are very sick, more sick than ever before in all your life. . . . And with the tedious ebbing of the long fierce fever, all the heat seems to pass from your veins. You can no longer imagine, as before, that it would be delicious to die of cold ;—you shiver even with all the win-