him, the crowds of people at the Franz Josef station, the sense of rest in finding himself alone with Keyork in a compartment of the express train; after that he had slept during most of the journey, waking to find himself in a city of the snow-driven Tyrol.  With tolerable distinctness he remembered the sights he had seen, and fragments of conversation—­then another departure, still southward, the crossing of the Alps, Italy, Venice—­a dream of water and sun and beautiful buildings, in which the varied conversational powers of his companion found constant material.  As a matter of fact the conversation was what was most clearly impressed upon Kafka’s mind, as he recalled the rapid passage from one city to another, and realised how many places he had visited in one short month.  From Venice southwards, again, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sicily, by sea to Athens and on to Constantinople, familiar to him already from former visits—­up the Bosphorus, by the Black Sea to Varna, and then, again, a long period of restful sleep during the endless railway journey—­Pesth, Vienna, rapidly revisited and back at last to Prague, to the cold and the gray snow and the black sky.  It was not strange, he thought, that his recollections of so many cities should be a little confused.  A man would need a fine memory to catalogue the myriad sights which such a trip offers to the eye, the innumerable sounds, familiar and unfamiliar, which strike the ear, the countless sensations of comfort, discomfort, pleasure, annoyance and admiration, which occupy the nerves without intermission.  There was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka’s, full of undeveloped artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty, animate and inanimate.  The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had been vaguely aware before beginning the journey.  None of these lacked reality, any more than Keyork himself, thought it seemed strange to the young man that he should actually have seen so much in so short a time.

But Keyork and Unorna understood their art and knew how much more easy it is to produce a fiction of continuity where an element of confusion is introduced by the multitude and variety of the quickly succeeding impressions and almost destitute of incident.  One occurrence, indeed, he remembered with extraordinary distinctness, and could have affirmed under oath in all its details.  It had taken place in Palermo.  The heat had seemed intense by contrast with the bitter north he had left behind.  Keyork had gone out and he had been alone in a strange hotel.  His head swam in the stifling scirocco.  He had sent for a local physician, and the old-fashioned doctor had then and there taken blood from his arm.  He had lost so much that he had fainted.  The doctor had been gone when Keyork returned, and the sage had been very angry, abusing in most violent terms the ignorance which could still apply such methods.  Israel Kafka knew that the lancet had left a wound on his arm and that the scar was still visible.  He remembered, too, that he had often felt tired since, and that Keyork had invariably reminded him of the circumstances, attributing to it the weariness from which he suffered, and indulging each time in fresh abuse of the benighted doctor.