d for a moment and then walked out
softly into the light, and, behold! as if it were to meet him, came
a monster, a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the
blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been instantly changed
to stone.

It had stopped with one paw advanced. Its striped mask was light and
dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its
mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of viscous saliva shone
vivid. Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly. At last
the nightmare of Benham's childhood had come true, and he was face to
face with a tiger, uncaged, uncontrolled.

For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man. They
stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless
and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes all things like a
dream.

Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted together.
That confrontation had an interminableness that had nothing to do with
the actual passage of time. Then some trickle of his previous thoughts
stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.

He spoke hoarsely. "I am Man," he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
"The Thought of the world."

His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved. But the great beast
went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.

"Man," he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.

"Wough!" With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees. And then it
had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
instantaneousness.

For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger had
passed among them and was gone....

He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.

"I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....

"What is this fool's trap of security?

"Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
death....

"Let men stew in their cities if they will. It is in the lonely places,
in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still observatories
and the silent laboratories, in those