The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock.
He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he could.

During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk.

He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him.

His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever preceded it in his life.

It did not muddle him.