There was a dull smell of camphor; a farther sense of coolness and prickling wet on Holmes's hot, cracking face and hands; then silence and sleep again.

Sometime--when, he never knew--a gray light stinging his eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into warm, unsounded darkness and unconsciousness.

It might be years, it might be ages.
Even in after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks or days: people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain, always: it was a vague vacuum in his memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm.

When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its calming mist with him out of the shades.
The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on the pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him unreal at first: parts only of the dull, lifeless pleasure.

There was a sharper memory pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to sleep,--a remembrance of great, cleaving pain, of falling giddily, of owing life to some one, and being angry that he owed it, in the pain.