Even now he was conscious of a peculiar
taste in his mouth. Yet no wine in the world had ever been able to do
him harm. He returned to the room to examine the contents of his flask.
But even the flask was now nowhere to be seen. There was not a single
forgotten object, not a single indication to give him a clue in this
obscure confusion. What could have happened here?--he had not the
faintest idea.
He went and stood in front of the _csarda_. He gazed out upon the
desolate _puszta_ stretching around him in every direction. From every
point of the compass wagon tracks, some old, some still fresh,
zig-zagged to and from the _csarda_ and he could not make up his mind
which of them to take in order to reach the world beyond.
CHAPTER XVI
LEANDER BABEROSSY
Whenever one carts away a heap of stones which have been lying
undisturbed for years, or whenever one removes the shingle-roof of an
ancient tenement, or drains off the water from a marshy place, one
generally stumbles upon all sorts of hitherto undiscovered, curious
beetles, odd looking moths and spiral-shaped, creeping things in these
routed out lurking places, which nobody ever saw before or read of in
the natural history books; and at such times a man bethinks him how
wonderful it is of Mother Nature to provide even such holes and corners
as these with living inhabitants which never see the light of day at
all.
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