own to have a good rest before night, ready
to keep awake for the visitor who might come.

Salaman now came to say that my dinner was ready, and had been waiting
two hours, but my appetite was very poor, and I got on badly. Still I
ate, feeling that I needed all the strength I could get up, and at last
my regular retiring hour came, and I lay down once more to listen to the
trampling of my attendants and their low murmuring voices; then to the
noises in the forest, and twice over I heard in the distance the low
howl of a tiger.

But how slowly the time passed before all was silent in the camp, and I
waited for the whispering voice at the canvas! The moment it came I
meant to creep to the side silently, and then I could hear the news of
the friends who were near, and what they proposed to do.

Can you imagine the misery and weariness of waiting hour after hour in
the midst of this silence, broken only by the calls of the wild beasts
and nightbirds, the slightest sound being turned into a footstep or
voice? A hundred times over I must have thought that I heard Salaman or
his men listening, and I grew hot with anxiety as I wondered whether
they suspected anything.

Then I turned cold as ice and shivered, for a shriek rang out from
somewhere among the trees, and immediately I pictured the messenger
transfixed by the lance of one of the sowars on guard.

But I heard no further sound, and by degrees grew calmer, as I recalled
hearing such a cry before, and knew that it was made by a night-bird.

There, stretched out on the cushions upon my back, gazing at the lamp,
and with my ears all attent for the slightest sound--the right for
danger, the left for my friends--thus I lay listening, till the lamp
grew dim. The sounds of the forest were distant; and then I was at
Brandscombe, busy with the notes of lectures, and in great trouble about
something, but what I could not tell, only that the old professor of
Sanscrit, with a long grey beard and much tangled hair, was leaning over
me, his eyes wild and strange, his cheeks hollow, and a horrible look of
fierce anger in his voice as he whispered hoarsely, evidently in disgust
with my knowledge of the subject he taught. But what it was he
whispered I could not tell, only that it chilled me and paralysed me
when I wanted to struggle and get away from him. I tried hard, I knew,
but it was all in vain, and an interminable time passed on, during which
I lay helpless there, wit