How I Found Livingstone Travels, Adventures And Discoveries In Central Africa Including Four Months Residence With Dr. Livingstone By Sir Henry M. Stanley
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Before The Darkened Vision Of The
Suffering Man, Float In A Seething Atmosphere, Figures Of Created
And Uncreated Reptiles, Which Are Metamorphosed Every Instant Into
Stranger Shapes And Designs, Growing Every Moment More Confused,
More Complicated, More Hideous And Terrible.
Unable to bear longer
the distracting scene, he makes an effort and opens, his eyes,
and dissolves the delirious dream, only, however, to glide again
unconsciously into another dream-land where another unreal inferno
is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered.
Oh! the many
many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which
the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body
that a traveller in Africa must undergo! Oh! the spite, the
fretfulness, the vexation which the horrible phantasmagoria of
diabolisms induce! The utmost patience fails to appease, the most
industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest humility
displeases. During these terrible transitions, which induce
fierce distraction, Job himself would become irritable, insanely
furious, and choleric. A man in such a state regards himself as
the focus of all miseries. When recovered, he feels chastened,
becomes urbane and ludicrously amiable, he conjures up fictitious
delights from all things which, but yesterday, possessed for him
such awful portentous aspects. His men he regards with love and
friendship; whatever is trite he views with ecstasy. Nature appears
charming; in the dead woods and monotonous forest his mind becomes
overwhelmed with delight. I speak for myself, as a careful
analysation of the attack, in all its severe, plaintive, and silly
phases, appeared to me.
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