White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.

He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever.  But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal. . . .

11

One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.  He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle country in the hills above the Tapti.  He had been very anxious to see something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had snatched at the chance Kepple had given him.  But they had scarcely started before the expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by a pony and his ankle broken.  He and Benham bandaged it as well as they could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids.  The second day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging.  In the evening Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to his tent.  Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.

Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.  He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.

He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan, that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of the world.  It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped off the superficial reality of things.  The moon was full and high overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and unsubstantial clearness.  The jungle that bordered the little encampment north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.

(Surely it had been silent during the day.)

A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the leaves.  In the day the air had been still.

Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peacocks in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however, were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to England, in midsummer.  It was like a watchman’s rattle—­a nightjar!

So there were nightjars here in India, too!  One might have expected something less familiar.  And then came another cry from far away over the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry.  It was repeated.  Was that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?—­