just below the ceiling; you could hear a faint scratch from it as it
travelled along, a scratch that seemed an echo of Meeus's pen as it
travelled across the paper.

He held between his lips the everlasting cigarette.

Sitting thus, meditating, pen in hand, he heard sounds: the sound of the
night wind, the sound of one of the soldiers singing as he cleaned his
rifle--the men always sang over this business, as if to propitiate the gun
god--the scratch of the scorpion and the "creak, creak" of a joist warping
and twisting to the heat.

But the sound of the wind was the most arresting. It would come over the
forest and up the slope and round the guest house with a long-drawn,
sweeping "Ha-a-a-r," and sob once or twice, and then die away down the
slope and over the forest and away and beyond to the east, where
Kilimanjaro was waiting for it, crowned with snow on his throne beneath
the stars.

But the wind was almost dead now--the heat of the night had stifled it.
The faintest breathing of air took the place of the strong puffs that had
sent the flame of the lamp half up the glass chimney. As Meeus listened,
on this faint breath from the forest he heard a sound--

"Boom--boom"--very faint, and as if someone were striking a drum in a
leisurely manner.

"Boom--boom."

A great man-ape haunted this part of the forest of M'Bonga like an evil
spirit. He had wandered here, perhaps from the west coast forests. Driven
away from his species--who knows?--for some crime. The natives of the fort
had caught glimpses of him now and then; he was huge and old and gray, and
now in the darkness of the forest was striking himself on the chest,
standing there in the gloom of the leaves, trampling the plantains under
foot, taller than the tallest man, smiting himself in the pride of his
strength.

"Boom--boom."

It is a hair-lifting sound when you know the cause, but it left Meeus
unmoved. His mind was too full of the business of writing his report to
draw images or listen to imagination; all the same, this sinister
drum-beat acted upon his subconscious self and, scarcely knowing why he
did so, he got up from the table and came outside to the fort wall and
looked over away into the dark.

There was not a star in the sky. A dense pall of cloud stretched from
horizon to horizon, and the wind, as Meeus stepped from the veranda into
the darkness, died away utterly.

He stood looking into the dark. He could make out the forest, a blackne