MS-WU-MSS008-2-47

[1574] down, saying, The surface thus pressed against the ground
will remain dry, whereas standing I would get ^uniformly wet
all over, as if rain were a mere matter of drops per hour, like
electricity. [1575] So he lay down, prostrate, after a moment's hesit-
ation, for he could just as easily have lain down supine or,
meeting himself half-way, on one of his two sides.

[1576] But he fancied
that the nape of the neck and the back right down to the loins
were more vulnerable than the chest and belly, not realizing,
any more than if he had been a crate of tomatoes, that all these
parts are intimately and even indissolubly bound up together,

[1576] at ^least until death do them part, and to many another too of
which he had no conception, and that a drop of water out of
season on the coccyx for example may lead to spasms of the
risorius ^lasti^ng for years as when, having waded through a bog,
you merely die of pneumonia and your legs none the worse
for the wetting, but if anything better, thanks perhaps to the
action of the bog-water.

[1577] It was a heav^y, cold and perpendicular
rain, which led Macmann to suppose it would be brief, as if
there were a relation between violence and duration, and that
he would spring to his feet in ten minutes or a quarter of an
hour, his front, no, his back, white with, no, front was right,
his front white with dust.

[1578] This is the kind of story he has been
telling himself all his life, saying, This cannot possibly [^last] ^last
much longer. [1579] It was sometime in the afternoon, impossible to say
more, for hours and hours past it had been the same leaden light,