This night, however, I had no fancy for tobacco.  Neither the cigars nor the dulcissimus tempted me.  I tried to sleep, but in vain.  Once or twice I began to doze, but was roused again by violent cramps and twitchings in all my limbs.  There is nothing more horrible than a night passed in the way I passed that one, faint and weak, enduring torture from hunger and thirst, striving after sleep and never finding it.  I can only compare the sensation of hunger I experienced to that of twenty pairs of pincers tearing at my stomach.

With the first grey light of morning I got up and prepared for departure.  It was a long business, however, to get my horse ready.  The saddle, which at other times I could throw upon his back with two fingers, now seemed made of lead, and it was as much as I could do to lift it.  I had still more difficulty to draw the girths tight; but at last I accomplished this, and scrambling upon my beast, rode off.  Luckily my mustang’s spirit was pretty well taken out of him by the last two days’ work; for if he had been fresh, the smallest spring on one side would have sufficed to throw me out of the saddle.  As it was, I sat upon him like an automaton, hanging forward over his neck, some times grasping the mane, and almost unable to use either rein or spur.

I had ridden on for some hours in this helpless manner, when I came to a place where the three horsemen whose track I was following had apparently made a halt, perhaps passed the previous night.  The grass was trampled and beaten down in a circumference of some fifty or sixty feet, and there was a confusion in the horse tracks as if they had ridden backwards and forwards.  Fearful of losing the right trace, I was looking carefully about me to see in what direction they had recommenced their journey, when I noticed something white amongst the long grass.  I got off my horse to pick it up.  It was a piece of paper with my own name written upon it; and I recognized it as the back of a letter in which my tobacco had been wrapped, and which I had thrown away at my halting-place of the preceding night.  I looked around, and recognized the island and the very tree under which I had slept or endeavoured to sleep.  The horrible truth instantly flashed across me—­the horse tracks I had been following were my own:  since the preceding morning I had been riding in a circle!

I stood for a few seconds thunderstruck by this discovery, and then sank upon the ground in utter despair.  At that moment I should have been thankful to any one who would have knocked me on the head as I lay.  All I wished for was to die as speedily as possible.