t might be a deer.

Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close
at hand. A monkey?...

These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
bats....

Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. This was its waking
hour. Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping
out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies,
the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their
lairs in the grass. Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat
and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon
their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the
moonlight and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again Benham heard that
sound like the belling of a stag....

This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man
did not go. Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed
trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still
almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet. What intruders men
are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!

He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an
irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two
turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--low,
monotonous--it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and
stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale
space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well. The
clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees,
and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One might have
fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not
for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether
swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that
are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments
that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer....

Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....

He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization,
that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry
advance of physical science and material organization. He was full of
unsatisfied curiosities abou