“Let men stew in their cities if they will.  It is in the lonely places, in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still observatories and the silent laboratories, in those secret and dangerous places where life probes into life, it is there that the masters of the world, the lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate come to their own. . . .

“You sleeping away there in the cities!  Do you know what it means for you that I am here to-night?

“Do you know what it means to you?

“I am just one—­just the precursor.

“Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about you.  You must come out of them. . . .”

He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he saw no more living creatures because they fled and hid before the sound of his voice.  He wandered until the moon, larger now and yellow tinged, was low between the black bars of the tree stems.  And then it sank very suddenly behind a hilly spur and the light failed swiftly.

He stumbled and went with difficulty.  He could go no further among these rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to wait for day.

He sat very still indeed.

A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him.  The corncrakes had ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away, the breeze had fallen.  A drowsing comfort took possession of him.  He grew more placid and more placid still.  He was enormously content to find that fear had fled before him and was gone.  He drifted into that state of mind when one thinks without ideas, when one’s mind is like a starless sky, serene and empty.

12

Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be Lucifer rising amidst the black branches.  He was sitting upon a rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree.  He had been asleep, and it was daybreak.  Everything was coldly clear and colourless.

He must have slept soundly.

He heard a cock crow, and another answer—­jungle fowl these must be, because there could be no village within earshot—­and then far away and bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled gardens, was the scream of peacocks.  And some invisible bird was making a hollow beating sound among the trees near at hand.  TUNK. . . .  TUNK, and out of the dry grass came a twittering.

There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the stars after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few remained faintly visible.  The sound of birds increased.  Through the trees he saw towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a monster,—­but that was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of teak.

He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed of a tiger.