第13章 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT(12)

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....

"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.

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