p
to a pitch of sensitiveness that excited his own contempt, he pulled on
some pyjamas and went out to his _charpoy_ on the veranda.

He dismissed the _punkah_ coolie, feeling his presence to be
intolerable, and threw himself down with his coat flung open. The
oppression of the atmosphere was as though a red-hot lid were being
forced down upon the tortured earth. The blackness beyond the veranda
was like a solid wall. Sleep was out of the question. He could not
smoke. It was an effort even to breathe. He could only lie in torment
and wait--and wait.

The flashes of lightning had become less frequent. A kind of waking
dream began to move in his brain. A figure gradually grew upon that
screen of darkness--an elf-like thing, intangible, transparent, a
quivering, shadowy image, remote as the dawn.

Wide-eyed, he watched the vision, his pulses beating with a mad longing
so fierce as to be utterly beyond his own control. It was as though he
had drunk strong wine and had somehow slipped the leash of ordinary
convention. The savagery of the night, the tropical intensity of it, had
got into him. Half-naked, wholly primitive, he lay and waited--and
waited.

For a while the vision hung before him, tantalizing him, maddening him,
eluding him. Then came a flash of lightning, and it was gone.

He started up on the _charpoy_, every nerve tense as stretched wire.

"Come back!" he cried, hoarsely. "Come back!"

Again the lightning streaked the darkness.

There came a burst of thunder, and suddenly, through it and above it,
he heard the far-distant roar of rain. He sprang to his feet. It was
coming.

The seconds throbbed away. Something was moving in the compound, a
subtle, awful Something. The trees and bushes quivered before it, the
cluster-roses rattled their dead leaves wildly. But the man stood
motionless in the light that fell across the veranda from the open
window of his room, watching with eyes that shone with a fierce and
glaring intensity for the return of his vision.

The fevered blood was hammering at his temples. For the moment he was
scarcely sane. The fearful strain of the past few weeks that had
overwhelmed less hardy men had wrought upon him in a fashion more subtle
but none the less compelling. They had been stricken down, whereas he
had been strung to a pitch where bodily suffering had almost ceased to
count. He had grown used to the torment, and now in this supreme moment
it tore from him his civilizatio