“Hunt, hunt”; that might be a deer.

Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close at hand.  A monkey? . . .

These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were bats. . . .

Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep.  This was its waking hour.  Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies, the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their lairs in the grass.  Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the moonlight and shadows.  The jungle was awakening.  Again Benham heard that sound like the belling of a stag. . . .

This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man did not go.  Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet.  What intruders men are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!

He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents, one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men.  One or two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice—­ low, monotonous—­it must have been telling a tale.  Further, sighing and stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well.  The clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees, and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in.  One might have fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer. . . .

Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again. . . .

He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization, that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry advance of physical science and material organization.  He was full of unsatisfied curiosities about its fierce hungers and passions, its fears and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet most precious understandings.  He had long ceased to believe that the wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for men. . . .

Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he was now.

It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so inaccessible. . . .