You will hear persons speak of one who has been in a trance or swoon as "returning to consciousness." I remember once of hearing someone objecting to the phrase, saying that a person was either conscious or unconscious, and to speak of one returning to consciousness as though there was a middle state, he argued, was erroneous; but I discovered for myself, that day, the full meaning of the phrase; for first it was a sound that I heard, a sound as of rustling wings, and this presently changed and became the sound of whispering as of a whole chamber full of furtive, stealthy persons talking under the breath. Then I was aware of the sunlight in my face and at the same moment the number of voices dwindled and the power of them increased. I opened my eyes and found myself lying in a mighty uncomfortable and strained position upon a slab of rock, so hot with the sun that my hands, which were behind my back and under me as I lay, were absolutely scorched. I made to withdraw them and then found they were fast tied together. As for the voices I heard, they were only two in number, I think. "He’s all right; I see his eyes flickerin’," said one, and there, bending over me, was a face as full of evil as ever I desired to see. I have seen a cast of an eye that almost seemed to give a certain quaint charm to a face; but the cast in these eyes that scrutinised me now was of the most diabolic. My head was beating and thumping like a shipyard with all its riveters, and the pain between my eyes was well-nigh unbearable. With puckering eyebrows I scrutinised my captor, and as I did so he cried out: "Here you are now, Farrell." "Right!" came a voice from behind, and the man called Farrell shuffled down on us, a big-boned, heavy-browed man with a three days’ stubble on his face which was of a blue colour around the upper lip and on the jaws—and over his right cheek-bone there was an ugly scar of a dirty white showing there amidst the sun-tan. I thought at first it was a whip he carried in his hand, but suddenly what I took for the thong of the whip wriggled as of its own accord, and addressing himself to it, he said: "None o’ your wrigglin’, Mr. Rattler, or I ’ll give you one flick that ’ll crack your backbone." Then I saw that what he carried was a stick, with a short string at the end of it and in the end of that string was a noose, taut around a rattlesnake’s tail, just above the knob of the rattle. "See what I’ve bin fishin’ for you?" he said, and laughed in an ugly way.