.
The moaning rose to a great volume of sound. "They come!" said Tarzan
of the Apes, and sought the shelter of a thickly foliaged tree. Quite
suddenly the trees bent their tops simultaneously as though God had
stretched a hand from the heavens and pressed His flat palm down upon
the world. "They pass!" whispered Tarzan. "The lions pass." Then came
a vivid flash of lightning, followed by deafening thunder. "The lions
have sprung," cried Tarzan, "and now they roar above the bodies of
their kills."

The trees were waving wildly in all directions now, a perfectly
demoniacal wind threshed the jungle pitilessly. In the midst of it the
rain came--not as it comes upon us of the northlands, but in a sudden,
choking, blinding deluge. "The blood of the kill," thought Tarzan,
huddling himself closer to the bole of the great tree beneath which he
stood.

He was close to the edge of the jungle, and at a little distance he had
seen two hills before the storm broke; but now he could see nothing.
It amused him to look out into the beating rain, searching for the two
hills and imagining that the torrents from above had washed them away,
yet he knew that presently the rain would cease, the sun come out again
and all be as it was before, except where a few branches had fallen and
here and there some old and rotted patriarch had crashed back to enrich
the soil upon which he had fatted for, maybe, centuries. All about him
branches and leaves filled the air or fell to earth, torn away by the
strength of the tornado and the weight of the water upon them. A gaunt
corpse toppled and fell a few yards away; but Tarzan was protected from
all these dangers by the wide-spreading branches of the sturdy young
giant beneath which his jungle craft had guided him. Here there was
but a single danger, and that a remote one. Yet it came. Without
warning the tree above him was riven by lightning, and when the rain
ceased and the sun came out Tarzan lay stretched as he had fallen, upon
his face amidst the wreckage of the jungle giant that should have
shielded him.

Bukawai came to the entrance of his cave after the rain and the storm
had passed and looked out upon the scene. From his one eye Bukawai
could see; but had he had a dozen eyes he could have found no beauty in
the fresh sweetness of the revivified jungle, for to such things, in
the chemistry of temperament, his brain failed to react; nor, even had
he had a nose, which he had not for