Memoirs 1

“Dear Watson
I have reached the end of the roads. There is nobody here.. It is a world without crime, my old friend because there is no one to commit crime against. My many detractors would try to disprove me by saying that there is always the self. They would construct trivial examples of me hitting myself needlessly over the head with a stone. “That is crime” they would say. But were it to be a crime, who could convict me? Is it not against the very grain of jurisprudence that a person who is guilty is made to condemn himself?

There are no robbers who hurl their devious plots at my sharpened wit, no murderers who look to purport heinous sin unless it be the wind which gives me no quarter. The ground beneath my feet is hard and it rises and falls in uneven furrows and ridges. The soil is never distinctive and my feet cannot leave their mark on it. There is no exoticism; no sense of awe, no adventure dwells here at the end of all roads. I have no witnesses bar the soul less sky and yet I feel the land is sinister. I can see shapes that close in on me, some ferocious like the shadows of snarling hounds, yet others whose very breath gives shape to the wind and faces that I have seen pass away into another world.

As I write to you I cringe to think that the end of all activity is upon me. You have seen patients like these, who cannot live a life that is already spent. They are but a shadow of themselves and in shadow they belong.. Life my constant friend is at an end.”

Note(Watson): Holmes spent a further two days in his room until he finally came out complaining of stale air. It is clear that its effect (the drug) wanes exponentially.

- From” Holmes on cocaine”- Chapter xvii,
A detective’s story- John Hamish Watson