I had developed a new sensitiveness,
the sensitiveness of an alien in an alien land, in the hands of
new-made, faithful friends. Without them I should have been a waif of
all the world, helpless in the midst of unconquerable surroundings,
leading to an inevitable destiny of death. I seemed declimatized,
denationalized, a luckless victim of fate and morbid fancy.
It was malaria and her workings, from which there was no escape.
Malaria is supposed by the natives of the tropic belt to be sent to
Europeans by Providence as a chastening for the otherwise insupportable
energy of the white man. Malignant malaria is one of Nature's
watch-dogs, set to guard her shrine of peace and ease and to punish
woeful intruders. And she had brought me to China to punish me. As is
her wont, Nature milked the manhood out of me, racked me with aches and
pains, shattered me with chills, scorched me with fever fires, pursued
me with despairing visions, and hag-rode me without mercy. Accursed
newspapers, with their accursed routine, came back to me; all the
stories and legends that I had ever heard, all the facts that I had ever
learnt, came to me in a fashion wonderfully contorted and distorted;
sensations welded together in ghastly, brain-stretching conglomerates,
instinct with individuality and personality, human but torturingly
inhuman, crowded in upon me.
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