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But the strain would be too great for him if the burden were to remain present to him daily, while the blessing was to be postponed for so long a time. He had already felt his spirits numbed and his energy weakened. It seemed to him in all his daily work that his great hope had been robbed from him.
Came now a long, a seemingly interminable wait. The door remained fast-barred. Oppression, heat, thirst, hunger tortured them, but relief there was none. And at length the merciful sleep of stupefaction overcame them; and all their pain, their anguish and forebodings were numbed into a welcome oblivion.
They did not rave or sleep. Their minds always remained cool and calm up to the moment their heart numbed and stopped. And another strange thing was the rapidity of decomposition. No sooner was a person dead than the body seemed to fall to pieces, to fly apart, to melt away even as you looked at it. That was one of the reasons the plague spread so rapidly.
He felt with numbed hands the face of the gateposts. Here was an entrance to some dwelling, and it stood open. The path led through it, and if he left the path he would without doubt perish in a bog-hole. In his desolation he longed for a human face. He might find a good fellow who would house him; at the worst he would get direction about the road. So he passed the gateway and entered an avenue.
These sensations lasted for what seemed years. Then all the sensations ended abruptly. But he still could not see; his eyes were still dazzled by the lights that closing his eyelids had not changed. He still could not hear. He'd been deafened by the sounds that had dazed and numbed him. He moved, and he knew it, but he could not feel anything. His hands and body felt numb.
As the torture continued his body began to feel numbed, and he became light-headed; he caught himself counting in a foolish manner the number of strokes he had received, and as each one fell, he would add two or three according to whether he felt it more or less than its predecessor.
He now crept close to his former partner, and frequently clasped his hand, and besought him to take courage and to pray. But Crauford's eye was glassy and dim, and his veins seemed filled with water: so numbed and cold and white was his cheek.
After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact.
Ranulph's desertion was discovered. The fight was begun between a single Jersey shipwright and a French war-ship. His strength, however, could not last much longer. Every muscle of his body had been strained and tortured, and even this lighter task tried him beyond endurance. His legs stiffened against the ledge of rock, the tension numbed his arms. He wondered how near Alixandre was to the top.
In the winter time the temperature of this garret was arctic, and fireplace there was none; still he could not intermit his custom of spending at least an hour in what he called scientific study, with the result that he went to bed numbed and shivering. It was but another illustration of possibilities rendered futile by circumstances.
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