I had in that early morning a strange impression, as though deep in my dreams I was listening to some history.

I know that I did not sleep and yet even now as I recover his quiet voice and, I believe, many of his very words, in reminiscence those hours are still dreaming hours.

I know that every word that he told me then was true in actual fact.

And yet it seems to me that we were all slumbering, the world at our feet, the sun in the sky, the wounded in their tent, and that through the mist of all that slumber Nikitin's voice, soft, measured, itself like an echo of some other voice miles away, penetrated--but to my heart rather than to my brain.

Afterwards this was all strangely parallel in my mind with that earlier conversation that I had had with Trenchard in the train....