hadow of some nightmare, and now it was there, very near, motionless
and still as if listening; one hand and one knee advanced; the neck
stretched out and the head turned full towards the fire. He could see
the emaciated face, the skin shiny over the prominent bones, the black
shadows of the hollow temples and sunken cheeks, and the two patches of
blackness over the eyes, over those eyes that were dead and could not
see. What was the impulse which drove out this blind cripple into
the night to creep and crawl towards that fire? He looked at him,
fascinated, but the face, with its shifting lights and shadows, let out
nothing, closed and impenetrable like a walled door.

Omar raised himself to a kneeling posture and sank on his heels, with
his hands hanging down before him. Willems, looking out of his dreamy
numbness, could see plainly the kriss between the thin lips, a bar
across the face; the handle on one side where the polished wood caught a
red gleam from the fire and the thin line of the blade running to a dull
black point on the other. He felt an inward shock, which left his body
passive in Aissa's embrace, but filled his breast with a tumult of
powerless fear; and he perceived suddenly that it was his own death that
was groping towards him; that it was the hate of himself and the hate of
her love for him which drove this helpless wreck of a once brilliant and
resolute pirate, to attempt a desperate deed that would be the glorious
and supreme consolation of an unhappy old age. And while he looked,
paralyzed with dread, at the father who had resumed his cautious
advance--blind like fate, persistent like destiny--he listened with
greedy eagerness to the heart of the daughter beating light, rapid, and
steady against his head.

He was in the grip of horrible fear; of a fear whose cold hand robs its
victim of all will and of all power; of all wish to escape, to resist,
or to move; which destroys hope and despair alike, and holds the empty
and useless carcass as if in a vise under the coming stroke. It was not
the fear of death--he had faced danger before--it was not even the fear
of that particular form of death. It was not the fear of the end, for he
knew that the end would not come then. A movement, a leap, a shout would
save him from the feeble hand of the blind old man, from that hand that
even now was, with cautious sweeps along the ground, feeling for his
body in the darkness. It was the unreasoning fear of this g