CHAPTER XVI.
Here, my friend, thou must permit me to pause. The following incidents are of a kind to which the most ardent invention has never conceived a parallel; Fortune, in her most wayward mood, could scarcely be suspected of an influence like this. This scene was pregnant with astonishment and horror; I cannot even now recall it without reviving the dismay and confusion which I then experienced.
Possibly, the period will arrive when I shall look back without agony on the perils I have undergone: that period is still distant. Solitude and sleep are now no more than the signals to summon up a tribe of ugly phantoms. Famine and blindness, and death and savage enemies, never fail to be conjured up by the silence and darkness of the night; I cannot dissipate them by any efforts of reason: my cowardice requires the perpetual consolation of light; my heart droops when I mark the decline of the sun; and I never sleep but with a candle burning at my pillow. If, by any chance, I should awake and find myself immersed in darkness, I know not what act of desperation I might be suddenly impelled to commit.
I have delayed this narrative longer than my duty to my friend enjoined: now that I am able to hold a pen, I will hasten to terminate that uncertainty with regard to my fate, in which my silence has involved thee—I will recall that series of unheard-of and disastrous vicissitudes which has constituted the latest portion of my life.
I am not certain, however, that I shall relate them in an intelligible manner; one image runs into another, sensations succeed in so rapid a train, that I fear I shall be unable to distribute and express them with sufficient perspicuity. As I look back, my heart is sore and aches within my bosom; I am conscious to a kind of complex sentiment of distress and forlornness that cannot be perfectly portrayed by words: but I must do as well as I can. In the utmost vigour of my faculties, no eloquence that I possess would do justice
