rial
and supersensuous realms.

And thereafter Jerry hated Bashti intensely, as a lord of life who
possessed and laid on his knees the nothingness of Skipper. Not that
Jerry reasoned it out. All dim and vague it was, a sensation, an
emotion, a feeling, an instinct, an intuition, name it mistily as one
will in the misty nomenclature of speech wherein words cheat with the
impression of definiteness and lie to the brain an understanding which
the brain does not possess.

CHAPTER XVI

Three months more passed; the north-west monsoon, after its half-year of
breath, had given way to the south-east trade; and Jerry still continued
to live in the house of Agno and to have the run of the village. He had
put on weight, increased in size, and, protected by the taboo, had become
self-confident almost to lordliness. But he had found no master. Agno
had never won a heart-throb from him. For that matter, Agno had never
tried to win him. Nor, in his cold-blooded way, had he ever betrayed his
hatred of Jerry.

Not even the several old women, the two acolytes, and the fly-flapping
maid in Agno's house dreamed that the devil devil doctor hated Jerry. Nor
did Jerry dream it. To him Agno was a neutral sort of person, a person
who did not count. Those of the household Jerry recognized as slaves or
servants to Agno, and he knew when they fed him that the food he ate
proceeded from Agno and was Agno's food. Save himself, taboo protected,
all of them feared Agno, and his house was truly a house of fear in which
could bloom no love for a stray puppy dog. The eleven-years' maid might
have placed a bid for Jerry's affection, had she not been deterred at the
start by Agno, who reprimanded her sternly for presuming to touch or
fondle a dog of such high taboo.

What delayed Agno's plot against Jerry for the half-year of the monsoon
was the fact that the season of egg-laying for the megapodes in Bashti's
private laying-yard did not begin until the period of the south-east
trades. And Agno, having early conceived his plot, with the patience
that was characteristic of him was content to wait the time.

Now the megapode of the Solomons is a distant cousin to the brush turkey
of Australia. No larger than a large pigeon, it lays an egg the size of
a domestic duck's. The megapode, with no sense of fear, is so silly that
it would have been annihilated hundreds of centuries before had it not
been preserved by the taboos of the ch