ck hand struck him in the face and
flung him backward. He lay for a moment, half-stunned; then he sat up,
and, behold! the sun had gone out and he was in perfect blackness.

He was blind, for his eyes were gone, and where his nose had been was now
a cavity. He looked as though he had put on a red velvet domino, and he
sat there in the sun with the last vestige of the blue smoke dissolving
above him in the air, not knowing in the least what had happened to him.

He knew nothing of blindness; he knew little of pain. An Englishman in his
wounded state would have been screaming in agony; to Felix the pain was
sharp, but it was nothing to the fact that the sun had "gone down."

He put his hand to the pain and felt his ruined face, but that did not
tell him anything.

This sudden black dark was not the darkness which came from shutting one's
eyes; it was something else, and he scrambled on his feet to find out.

He could feel the darkness now, and he advanced a few steps to see if he
could walk through it; then he sprang into the air to see if it was
lighter above, and dived on his hands and knees to see if he could slip
under it, and shouted and whooped to see if he could drive it away.

But it was a great darkness, not to be out-jumped, jumped he as high as
the sun, or slipped under, were he as thin as a knife, or whooped away,
though he whooped to everlasting.

He walked rapidly, and then he began to run. He ran rapidly, and he seemed
to possess some instinct in his feet which told him of broken ground. The
burst gun lay where he had left it in the grass, and the dead giraffe lay
where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the grass waved, the
sun spread his pyramid of light from horizon to horizon, and in the
sparkle above a black dot hung trembling above the stricken beast at the
edge of the wood.

The black figure of the man continued its headlong course. It was running
in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by
the dark soul raging in it.

Hours passed, and _then_ it fell, and lay face to the sky and arms
outspread. You might have thought it dead. But it was a thing almost
indestructible. It lay motionless, but it was alive with hunger.

During all its gyrations it had been followed and watched closely. It had
not lain for a minute when a vulture dropped like a stone from the sky and
lit on it with wings outspread.

Next moment the vulture was seized, screeching, torn li