The Babu has been absconding--"irritable in the sun", as this Joseph Conrad quote puts it, but without the final consequences: "You very red, Mr. Kayerts. If you are so irritable in the sun, you will get fever and die--like the first chief!" pronounced Makola impressively." (From 'An Outpost of Progress'.)
Ray Bradbury, incidentally, came up with a chillingly accurate description of fever in 'Fever Dream'.
"Now he no longer had any arms or legs, and his body was beginning to change. He did not move on the bed, but
looked at the vast blank ceiling space with insane concentration. Now he was silent, his hands strapped to his legs.
He felt the walls of his body change, the organs shift, the lungs catch fire like burning bellows of pink alcohol. The room was lighted up as with the flickerings of a hearth.
Now he had no body. It was all gone. It was under him, but it was filled with a vast pulse of some burning, lethargic drug. It was as if a guillotine had neatly lopped off his head, and his head lay shining on a midnight pillow while the body, below,
still alive, belonged to somebody else. The disease had eaten his body and from the eating had reproduced itself in feverish duplicate."
Some of you might quibble that I couldn't possibly have felt exactly like this, since Bradbury's protagonist was in the process of changing into something distinctly non-human. Then again, anyone who had the dubious pleasure of sharing an office with the Babu will suggest that the transformation happened quite a long while ago.