I was trying to remember the thing I most wanted to say, and that was not about Beyers and his guns.

Those were nightmare minutes.

A speaker who has lost the thread of his discourse, a soldier who with a bayonet at his throat has forgotten the password--I felt like them, and worse.

And to crown all I felt my faintness coming back, and my head dropping with heaviness.

I was in a torment of impotence.
Arcoll, still holding my hands, brought his face close to mine, so that his clear eyes mastered and constrained me.
'Look at me, Davie,' I heard him say.