I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they grew, if such visionary things could be rooted anywhere.

Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it.

I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe.

At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted?
It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool.
I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant.

It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before.