Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed possession of his consciousness.  But now some primitive instinct perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him meticulously noiseless.

He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the drinking-place.  He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking into the undergrowth.  Benham paused for a moment and then walked out softly into the light, and, behold! as if it were to meet him, came a monster, a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been instantly changed to stone.

It had stopped with one paw advanced.  Its striped mask was light and dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of viscous saliva shone vivid.  Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly.  At last the nightmare of Benham’s childhood had come true, and he was face to face with a tiger, uncaged, uncontrolled.

For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man.  They stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes all things like a dream.

Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted together.  That confrontation had an interminableness that had nothing to do with the actual passage of time.  Then some trickle of his previous thoughts stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.

He spoke hoarsely.  “I am Man,” he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.  “The Thought of the world.”

His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved.  But the great beast went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.

“Man,” he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.

“Wough!” With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees.  And then it had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of instantaneousness.

For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger had passed among them and was gone. . . .

He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.

“I understand the jungle.  I understand. . . .  If a few men die here, what matter?  There are worse deaths than being killed. . . .

“What is this fool’s trap of security?

“Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from death. . . .