第12章 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT(11)

He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of light spread out above him.All the world seemed swimming in its radiance.The stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.

The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass and sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the silver, and then it plunged into obscurities.For a time it lifted, and then on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast moonlit valley wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of jungle, copses, and a great lake as black as ebony.For a time the path ran thus open, and then the jungle closed in again and there were more thickets, more levels of grass, and in one place far overhead among the branches he heard and stood for a time perplexed at a vast deep humming of bees....

Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves.He stood quite still until it had gone.He could not tell whether it was a boar or hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the heaviness of its rush.

The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended.

He passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers.

On the ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these flowers; they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible in the shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent.

And they emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path.

Presently he passed another such tree.Then he became aware of a tumult ahead of him, a smashing of leaves, a snorting and slobbering, grunting and sucking, a whole series of bestial sounds.

He halted for a little while, and then drew nearer, picking his steps to avoid too great a noise.Here were more of those white-blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness, something very black and big was going to and fro, eating greedily.Then he found that there were two and then more of these black things, three or four of them.

Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.

Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a huge, black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque face, and he was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth with his curved fore claws.He took not the slightest notice of the still man, who stood perhaps twenty yards away from him.He was too blind and careless.He snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and plunged into the shadows again.Benham heard him root among the leaves and grunt appreciatively.The air was heavy with the reek of the crushed flowers.

For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these preoccupied gluttons.At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left them and went on his way.For a long time he could hear them, then just as he was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some dispute arose among them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals, protests, comments, one voice ridiculously replete and authoritative, ridiculously suggestive of a drunken judge with his mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance high above the others....

The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the jungle to the incessant night-jars....

For what end was this life of the jungle?

All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about him, and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that riddle.Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice, for the sake of his manhood? Will he preserve it?

Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce.Will the jungle keep him fierce?

For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....

He had missed the track....

He was now in a second ravine.He was going downward, walking on silvery sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in the air--.It was the croaking of frogs.Ahead was a solitary gleam.He was approaching a jungle pool....

Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar."HONK!" cried a great voice, and "HONK!" There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush--a rush as it seemed towards him.Was he being charged? He backed against a rock.A great pale shape leaped by him, an antlered shape.It was a herd of big deer bolting suddenly out of the stillness.He heard the swish and smash of their retreat grow distant, disperse.He remained standing with his back to the rock.

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.