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  held me broad awake—and then for the first time I fully realized the nauseous reek of the fever-fog. One smelled odors which seemed to emanate from the entrails of the earth. You know, Doctor, the nauseous, charnel stench of rotting insects and vegetation, with the fetid breath of the flower that issues from the mouth of a great, carnivorous plant? You have seen these trap-like flowers, if one may call them such, which grow in the botanical gardens of Demerara? Br'r'r'rgh! And as I lay, hot and cold and clammy, with a heavy weight upon my chest, and thought of how we had lain and breathed that thin effluvium, the vehicle for myriad infusoria and plasmodiæ, this hypochrondriac fear became reasonable, and I marveled that we were still alive.

"Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. "We lay in hammocks of plaited grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl's hammock was beside MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and [ 16 ]