It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; and two hours' march brought them to that ridge which Berselius had indicated from the camp as being near the skyline.
When they reached the ridge, and not before, Berselius halted and stared over the country in front of him, his face filled with triumph and hope.
He seized Adams's hand and pointed away to the west. The ridge gave a big view of the country.
"I can remember all that," said he, "keenly, right up to the skyline."
"Stands the mist," replied Berselius. "But it will lift before me as I go on. Now I know it is only the sight of the things I have seen that is needful to recall the memory of them and of myself in connection with them."
Adams said nothing. It struck him with an eerie feeling that this man beside him was actually walking back into his past. As veil after veil of distance was raised, so would the past come back, bit by bit.
But he was yet to learn what a terrible journey that would be.
One thing struck him as strange. Berselius had never tried to pierce the mist by questions. The man seemed entirely obsessed by the curtain of mist, and by the necessity of piercing it by physical movement, of putting tree to tree and mile to mile.
Berselius had not asked questions because, no doubt, he was under the dominion of a profound instinct, telling him that the past he had lost could only be recalled by the actual picture of the things he had seen.
Berselius had not asked a single question as to the catastrophe. His own misfortune had banished for him, doubtless, all interest in everything else.
Adams had said to him nothing of Félix, his horrible deeds or his theft of the rifle. Félix, though he had vanished from Adams's life completely and forever, had not vanished from the face of the earth. He was very much alive and doing, and his deeds and his fate are worth a word, for they formed a tragedy well fitting the stage of this merciless land.
The Zappo Zap, having secured the gun and its ammunition, revelling in the joy of possession and power, went skipping on his road, which lay to the northeast. Six miles from the camp he flung himself down by a bush, and, with the gun covered by his arm, slept, and hunted in his sleep, like a hound, till dawn.