While frightening, the hallucinations did not seem particularly sinister, because I had an explanation for them. I decided they were an exhausted mind's attempt to make sense out of random visual phenomena, 'phosphenes', I thought they were called: the specks and flashes of light stimulated in the eye or the brain by pressure or some other physical disturbance. I had read that phosphenes provided the raw physiological material for the collective dream-journeys taken by certain Amazonian Indians after ingesting hallucinogenic drugs. What did surprise me was that mine organized themselves so exotically. What I saw were wayan kulits, Balinese shadow-puppet plays, enacted in blood and fire against the curtains drawn around my bed, along with tamer single-line processions of small red turtles and large red cockroaches which scuttled across the floor, up the walls, across the ceilings, down the walls, across the floor and up the walls again.

...........................................................

And then deep in my mind I heard a sound I had forgotten, or had not needed to remember until then. Not quite a sound, more a dark crimson vibration, a sensation in the diaphragm: the low, rumbling, sighing cough of the tiger.
He was my favorite best, because he was the only animal who did not acknowledge he was in a cage. He would pace its length, the huge body moving smooth as an oiled machine, head carried low and level, searchlight eyes absolutely steady, and then at the corner would come the lunging pivot, the blinding turn within the single body length, and he would be padding back the other way, his indifferent gaze sweeping bars, lawns, people, keepers, and dismissing them utterly. Incidents in a tiger landscape.

The vision of the tiger offered me salvation. I too was in a cage, with feeding times and washing times and bars at the sides of my cot, and people coming to stare and prod, but the kaleidoscope of the horror of the helplesness ceased to turn because I withdrew my consent from it. Thereafter, whenever I felt the threat of the violation of self, I would invoke the vision of the tiger and the freedom that vision gave me, to be at once the superb gaze, and the object of the gaze: an incident in a tiger landscape.

It sounds like a religious experience. It was not. It came with no moral or metaphysical messages attached, and it had nothing to do with the supernatural. It was, I think, aesthetic. The tiger emancipated me from the terror of shrivelling death by the beauty and the completeness of his natural being.