Behind there were other jets, other explosions, but your brain was screaming so loudly in its desperation that you were only faintly aware of them. You tore through the jungle, little shrieks coming with each expelled breath, charging the foliage, falling, up, charging again, thrusting, bursting through, bringing a long bride’s veil of vines and runners with you. Soon your backpack became hopelessly entrapped and you flashed your machete and cut the straps—cut yourself too but there was no time to care about that. Then a water bottle became snared and you cut that away too. You passed packs and equipment belts and even weapons abandoned by the others but, mad as Snowy, you clung to the precious AK. Your clothes were in shreds and so was much of your skin, but there was no pain, only panic. Back there the explosions strode across the ridge like the footfalls of a vast creature, but even after the bombing stopped, you struggled on with the very last of your strength and beyond. Where is that fuckin’ crater? Where are they? How much further? Can’t go on? Keep going? Run you bastard run! And at last stumbled into the clearing.
”Come, come, sir,” said Holmes, laughing. “You are like my friend Dr Watson, who has a bad habit of telling his stories wrong end foremost…” The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge.
… “You will have observed, of course,” said he at last. “that the ears are not a pair.” The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.
…”Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last..” The Adventure of the Red Circle
… “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” “Good old Watson ! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared....” His Last Bow
Which only goes to prove that Sherlock Holmes didn’t know everything, but then, the world beyond the First World War was no place for him. But neither did Conan Doyle know the future. Having been obliged to resurrect Holmes once, he allowed him to depart in this quieter and more complete way in His Last Bow. He was sure that would be the end of him. It wasn’t.
Sherlock Holmes in retirement? I don’t think so.
“Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,” said Holmes that evening. “it can only be as an example of what temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed…” The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax…
”The bluff,” said Holmes, sternly. “is upon your side, Dr Leon Sterndale, and not upon mine.” The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.
… “We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth…” The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
…Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman…. The Adventure of the Dying Detective