throats with a fat thick gurgle, and they gulped that raw stuff down with greedy gulpings like water going down a gully drain.
It was a drink that would have felled an ox, a terrific lightning-blast of alcohol that would have thrown Polyphemus to the earth; and yet it was not drink alone that made them drunk that day. For they were all young men, and they had shouted, sung, and roared with laughter, and pounded one another with affectionate delight as they rushed on—and it was not drink alone that made them drunk.
For they felt that everything on earth was good and glorious, that everything on earth was made for their delight, that they could do no wrong and make no error, and that such invincible strength was in them that trees would fall beneath their stroke, the immortal hills bow down before their stride, and that nothing in the world could stop them.
And for Eugene it seemed that everything had come to life for him at once—that he had emerged instantly and victoriously from the horror of shame, the phantasmal and dreamlike unreality that had held him in its spell. It seemed to him that all the earth had come to life again in shapes of deathless and familiar brightness, that he had gloriously re-entered a life he thought he had lost for ever, and that all the plain priceless joy and glory of the earth was his, as it had never been before.
And first of all, and with an almost intolerable relief and happiness, he was conscious of the pangs of hunger: his famished belly and his withered stomach, which had for days shrunk wearily and with disgust from food, now, under the stimulation of a ravenous hunger, fairly pleaded for nourishment. He thought of food—food in a hundred glorious shapes and varieties: the literal sensual images of food blazed in his mind like paintings from the brush of a Dutch master, and it seemed to him that no one had ever painted, spoken, or written about food before in a way that would do it justice.
Later, these were the things Eugene would remember from that day with a living joy, for it was as if he had been born again, or discovered the world anew in all its glory. And besides all this—a part, an element in all this whole harmonious design of triumphant joy and rediscovery—was the way the hills had looked that day as they came down the mountain, the smell of the air which was mellow and autumnal, and yet had in it the premonitory breath of frost and sharpness, and the wild joy, power, and ecstasy that had filled their hearts, their throats, their lives—the sense of victory, triumph, and invincible strength, and of some rare, glorious, and intolerable happiness that was pending
