It was a curious thing that there was no perceptible wind over the lagoon. Perhaps the reason was that we invariably associate wind with coolness, rather than any sort of a hushed movement of the air--and the impulse that brushed up on the veranda to us was as warm as a child's breath on the face. There was simply no whisper of sound on shore or sea or forest. The curlews were stilled, the wild creatures were likely lying motionless, trying to escape the heat, the little rustlings and murmurings of stirring vegetation was gone from the gardens. But that first silence, remarkable enough, seemed to deepen as we waited.
There is a point, in temperature, that seems the utter limit of cold. Mushers along certain trails in the North had known that point--when there seems simply no heat left in the bitter, crackling, biting air. The temperature, at such times, registers forty--fifty--sixty below. Yet the scientist, in his laboratory, with his liquid hydrogen vaporizing in a vacuum, can show that this temperature is not the beginning of the fearful scale of cold. To-night it was the same way with the silence. There simply seemed no sound left. But as we waited the silence grew and swelled until the brain ceased to believe the senses and the image of reality was gone. It gave you the impression of being fast asleep and in a dream that might easily turn to death.
The mind kept dwelling on death. It was a great deal more plausible than life. The image of life was gone from that bleak manor house by the sea--the sea was dead, the air, all the elements by which men view their lives. The forest, lost in its silence, its most whispered voices stilled, was a dead forest, incomprehensible as living.
I went upstairs soon after. I thought it might be cooler there. Sometimes, if you go a few feet off the ground, you find it XXXX cooler--quite in opposition to the fact that hot air rises. There was no appreciable difference, however; but here, at least, I could take off my outer clothes. Then I got into a dressing-gown and slippers and waited, with a breathlessness and impatience not quite healthy and normal, for the late night sea breeze to spring up.
Seemingly it had been delayed. The hour was past eleven, the sweltering heat still remained. There was no way under Heaven to pass the time. One couldn't read, for the reason that the mental effort of following the lines of type was incomprehensibly fatiguing. I had neither the energy nor the interest to work upon the cryptogram--that baffling column of four-lettered words. Yet the brain was inordinately active. Ungoverned thought swept through it in ordered trains, in sudden, lunging waves, and in swirling eddies. Yet the thoughts were not clean-cut, wholly true--they overlapped with the bizarre and elfin impulses of the fancy, and the fine edge of discrimination between reality and dreams was some way dulled. It wasn't easy to hold the brain in perfect bondage.