I would have to die there all the same,” he said.  He reached and grabbed desperately with his hands, and only succeeded in gathering a horrible cold shiny heap of slime against his breast—­up to his very chin.  It seemed to him he was burying himself alive, and then he struck out madly, scattering the mud with his fists.  It fell on his head, on his face, over his eyes, into his mouth.  He told me that he remembered suddenly the courtyard, as you remember a place where you had been very happy years ago.  He longed—­so he said—­to be back there again, mending the clock.  Mending the clock—­that was the idea.  He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts, efforts that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to crack the earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs—­and he felt himself creeping feebly up the bank.  He lay full length on the firm ground and saw the light, the sky.  Then as a sort of happy thought the notion came to him that he would go to sleep.  He will have it that he did actually go to sleep; that he slept—­perhaps for a minute, perhaps for twenty seconds, or only for one second, but he recollects distinctly the violent convulsive start of awakening.  He remained lying still for a while, and then he arose muddy from head to foot and stood there, thinking he was alone of his kind for hundreds of miles, alone, with no help, no sympathy, no pity to expect from any one, like a hunted animal.  The first houses were not more than twenty yards from him; and it was the desperate screaming of a frightened woman trying to carry off a child that started him again.  He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered with filth out of all semblance to a human being.  He traversed more than half the length of the settlement.  The nimbler women fled right and left, the slower men just dropped whatever they had in their hands, and remained petrified with dropping jaws.  He was a flying terror.  He says he noticed the little children trying to run for life, falling on their little stomachs and kicking.  He swerved between two houses up a slope, clambered in desperation over a barricade of felled trees (there wasn’t a week without some fight in Patusan at that time), burst through a fence into a maize-patch, where a scared boy flung a stick at him, blundered upon a path, and ran all at once into the arms of several startled men.  He just had breath enough to gasp out, “Doramin!  Doramin!” He remembers being half-carried, half-rushed to the top of the slope, and in a vast enclosure with palms and fruit trees being run up to a large man sitting massively in a chair in the midst of the greatest possible commotion and excitement.  He fumbled in mud and clothes to produce the ring, and, finding himself suddenly on his back, wondered who had knocked him down.  They had simply let him go—­don’t you know?—­but he couldn’t stand.  At the foot of the slope random shots were fired,