“Listen.”

On his left a branch snapped, ahead of them a bush that had been bent aside swished back on its release.

“They are moving with us.  They are all round us,” the shikari whispered.  “They know everything we do.  Let us wait here.  When the morning breaks they will charge or they will go.”

So once again the little party came to a halt.  Hillyard stood listening and wondering if the morning would ever come; and even in that time of tension the habit of his mind reasserted its sway.  This long, silent waiting for the dawn in the depths of an African forest with death at his very elbow—­here was another sharp event of life in vivid contrast with all the others which had gone before.  The years in London, the letter-box opposite the Abbey where he had posted his manuscripts at three in the morning and bought a cup of coffee at the stall by the kerb—­times so very close to him—­the terms at Oxford, the strange hungry days on the quays of Spain, the moonlit wanderings on the footpath over the rustic ridge and up the hill, when he composed poems to the moon and pithy short, great thoughts—­here was something fresh to add to them if he didn’t go down at daybreak under the hoofs of the herd!  Here was yet a further token, that out of the vicissitudes of his life something more, something new, something altogether different and unimagined was to come, as the crown and ultimate reason of all that had gone before.  Once more the shikari’s hand touched him and pointed eastwards.  The tree-trunks were emerging from the darkness.  Beyond them the black cup of the sky was thinning to translucency.  Very quickly the grey light widened beyond this vast palisade of trees.  Even in here below the high branches, it began to steal vaporous and dim.  About them on every side now the buffalo were moving.  The shikari’s grip tightened on Hillyard’s arm.  The moment of danger had come.  It would be the smash of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled horns until long after he was dead, or—­the new test and preparation to add to those which had gone before!

Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.

“They are off”; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible.  Then silence came again for a few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets stormed the stars.

Hillyard drew a breath.

“Let us go on,” he said.

They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that morning smote upon his eyes.  A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out among the tree-boles.