Page:Taylor - In the Dwellings of the Wilderness.djvu/77

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Within the Tomb


the suffocation of the tomb, flooded him like a dash of cold water, infinitely grateful. He straightened himself, smiling vacantly, as Merritt and Holloway came towards him, and dropped in a heap just inside the threshold.

They carried him away with profane expressions of sympathy, and he raved half-consciously of dead things that watched him with living eyes; of flowers whose essence could drag a man's soul to the torments of the damned; and of the pain in his head, and of the sun, and blue bottles. And at the word, Ibraheem, quaking with fear, was fain to confess that in the medicine chest he could find no blue bottle and had brought instead a cup of plain water—"by Lord-God, saars, vurry plain!"—knowing the penalty of

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