第14章 THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT(13)

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.

He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night wanderings.

A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.

He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and thoughtfully.

Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of water, and the ruins of an old embankment.It was the ancient tank of his overnight encounter.The pool of his dream?

With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the sandy level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last found, and then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several sorts of deer and the footprints of many biggish birds, first the great spoor of the tiger and then his own.Here the beast had halted, and here it had leapt aside.Here his own footmarks stopped.Here his heels had come together.

It had been no dream.

There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-space wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine.Then the ground had looked like a floor of frosted silver.

And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just as the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from which he had strayed overnight.It was, he found, a longer way back to the camp than he remembered it to be.Perhaps he had struck the path further along.It curved about and went up and down and crossed three ravines.At last he came to that trampled place of littered white blossom under great trees where he had seen the bears.

The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet.The dew had gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots before he came back into the open space about the great banyan and the tents.And Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee, was wondering loudly where the devil he had gone.