it all behind me! You must hear me! You
shall hear me!"

When her voice, a thin blade of sound, pierced the silence of the black
forest, without a premonitory thud the rumble of the drums began, as
though the roused spirit of the jungle were trying to drown out this
cry. The drum music swelled louder and louder in the breathless night,
its mingled rhythms combining into a thunder. But once more the cry,
"Hear me!" rose to contest with that demoniacal uproar.

When she had remained motionless for a while with upturned face,
weariness rolled down upon her like an avalanche.

The moonlight, creeping through the tangles, covered her prostrate
body. She was dreaming that Anna Zanidov stood before her in the
barbarically painted evening gown. She sat up with a bound. Hands had
embraced her feet. A grayish form crouched before her.

The albino had heard her.

CHAPTER LXVI

Sitting back upon his heels, hugging against his breast a small bow and
a handful of arrows, the albino scrutinized the fallen divinity. Yes,
by some pass of magic she had been changed into a helpless human being,
full of human despair. The poor pariah contemplated her in her
abasement from an eminence of pity.

He rose with an uncouth gesture of invitation. He guided her through
the mottled labyrinth. Stumbling over the roots, bursting her way
through the vines, she pressed after the bent figure whose very
loathsomeness now seemed precious to her.

He had found the lost path. He crept forward more quickly, halted at
last, and pointed. Ahead there expanded a wide sheen of moonlight, in
the midst of which she discerned a man standing like a statue, a fez on
his head and a rifle over his arm.

The albino was gone.

A challenge rang out as she stood forth on the edge of the clearing.
Beyond the sentinel she saw red embers and tents, rising black skulls,
and agitated fezzes. But in the midst of a broad pool of moonlight was
spread a tent cloth through which appeared the outline of a body.

She sank down upon her knees, turned back the tent cloth from the
inscrutable face.

It was the face of Cornelius Rysbroek, who, in the dead of night,
beside his sleeping rival, while drawing the pistol from the holster,
had been shot in the back.

She perceived, on the curtain of a tent before her, a hand that thrust
back the folds, a hand that moved, that lived. Under the tent fly
emerged a man cadaverous from fever, to gaze at another