I was then all right for twenty minutes, until the mania came back reformulated as the proposition that if I actually got rid of my sunglasses, and only if, I would be able to see the true and fundamental color of nature. I was to understand that what we perceive as beautiful individual colors are only corruptions and distortions of the true color of reality, which is ravishing and ultimate and apprehensible only in extremely rare circumstances. This was not a question of hallucination. It was analogous to dream knowledge, but different. I knew that for some reason at some deep level I was doing this to myself. But still I was tempted to act. I said aloud things like This is about self-injury, This is about self-worth, What are we to ourselves? and other pop-psych trash. The experience was strange in every way. Was I trying to get myself to turn around and go back to Kang before it was too late, because navigating in the Kalahari without sunglasses is one thing for Bushmen who have presumably been adapting their vision to a surplus of light for millennia and another thing for a lakhoa already in a state of anxiety? On any trip like mine there’s a point of no return. So was this some ideational response to the fact, which I was already having to fight to repress, that I was over my head? Had my brilliant unconscious chosen the one thing that if discarded would virtually disable me for making the long trip to Tsau but be manageable for a quick retreat back to Kang and safety? I think what broke the grip of this mania on me was firstly just hearing my own voice, whatever it was saying, and, secondly, remembering reading about someone who had been lost in the Kalahari and survived it reporting that he had had to get past a point when he experienced the desert as an organism or totality trying to get him to become part of it, as in surrender to it. This would make my sunglasses mania an analog of the feeling people lost in the Arctic get that they would be more comfortable if they took off their caps and mittens. The mania left, also suddenly, and we went on uneventfully.