t its fierce hungers and passions, its fears
and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet
most precious understandings. He had long ceased to believe that the
wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for
men....

Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
was now.

It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
inaccessible....

As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him. The
lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened.
It opened out to him with a quality of invitation....

There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?

"Come!" the road said to him.

Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
motionless.

Was he afraid?

Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
watching with infinite still patience. Kepple had told him how they
would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
fire--and then crouch to advance. Beneath the shrill overtone of
the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
cracklings and creepings might there not be?...

Was he afraid?

That question determined him to go.

He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A stick? A gun, he knew, was
a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man. No! He would go now, even as
he was with empty hands. At least he would go as far as the end of that
band of moonlight. If for no other reason than because he was afraid.
NOW!

For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to lift
and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he
strolled towards the cart-track.

Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
the men. No one would miss him. They would think he was in his tent.
He faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track was a rutted path of
soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled
for an instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like a flake of
moonlight across the track and vanished without a sound among the trees.

Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees his
footste