Perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps I am supremely
intelligent. But in either case I am not understandable to myself. How,
then, be understandable to others? If these sheets of paper, this
incoherence, is ever read, the others will understand it about as much
as the investigating hawk. But none the less be it of record that I,
Karslake, SAW. It reads like Revelations: 'I, John, saw.' It is just
that. There is something apocalyptic in it all. I have seen a vision,
but cannot--there is the pitch of anguish in the impotence--bear record.
If time were allowed to order and arrange the words of description, this
exaltation of spirit, in that very space of time, would relax, and the
describer lapse back to the level of the average again before he could
set down the things he saw, the things he thought. The machinery of the
mind that could coin the great Word is automatic, and the very force
that brings the die near the blank metal supplies the motor power of the
reaction before the impression is made ... I stopped for an instant,
looking up from the page, and at once the great vague panorama faded. I
lost it all. Cosmos has dwindled again to an amphitheatre of sage and
sand, a vista of distant purple hills, the shimmer of scorching alkali,
and in the middle distance there, those figures, blanketed, beaded,
feathered, rifle in hand.
"But for a moment I stood on Patmos.
"The Ridiculous jostles the elbow of the Sublime and shoulders it from
place as Idaho announces that he has found two more cartridges in
Estorijo's pockets.
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