When I recovered my faculties a little, it was to find myself once more in the great vacant plain which surrounded that accursed home of pleasure,--a great and desolate waste upon which I could see no track, which my heart fainted to look at, which no longer roused any hope in me, as if it might lead to another beginning, or any place in which yet at the last it might be possible to live. As I lay in that horrible giddiness and faintness, I loathed life and this continuance which brought me through one misery after another, and forbade me to die. Oh that death would come,--death, which is silent and still, which makes no movement and hears no sound! that I might end and be no more! Oh that I could go back even to the stillness of that chamber which I had not been able to endure! Oh that I could return,--return! to what? To other miseries and other pain, which looked less because they were past. But I knew now that return was impossible until I had circled all the dreadful round; and already I felt again the burning of that desire that pricked and drove me on,--not back, for that was impossible. Little by little I had learned to understand, each step printed upon my brain as with red-hot irons: not back, but on, and on--to greater anguish, yes; but on, to fuller despair, to experiences more terrible,--but on, and on, and on. I arose again, for this was my fate. I could not pause even for all the teachings of despair. The waste stretched far as eyes could see. It was wild and terrible, with neither vegetation nor sign of life. Here and there were heaps of ruin, which had been villages and cities; but nothing was in them save reptiles and crawling poisonous life and traps for the unwary wanderer. How often I stumbled and fell among these ashes and dust-heaps of the past! Through what dread moments I lay, with cold and slimy things leaving their trace upon my flesh! The horrors which seized me, so that I beat my head against a stone,--why should I tell? These were nought; they touched not the soul. They were but accidents of the way.