s that stabbed like pen-knives. I emerged bleeding and
with torn clothes upon the lip of a long creek opening northward.
I went straight into the water without a minute's hesitation, wading up
the creek, and presently finding myself kneedeep in a little stream.
I scrambled out at last on the westward bank, and with my heart beating
loudly in my ears, crept into a tangle of ferns to await the issue.
I heard the dog (there was only one) draw nearer, and yelp when it came
to the thorns. Then I heard no more, and presently began to think I
had escaped.

The minutes passed; the silence lengthened out, and at last
after an hour of security my courage began to return to me.
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable.
I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair.
I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion
made me capable of daring anything. I had even a certain wish
to encounter Moreau face to face; and as I had waded into the water,
I remembered that if I were too hard pressed at least one path
of escape from torment still lay open to me,--they could not
very well prevent my drowning myself. I had half a mind to drown
myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out,
a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me.
I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants,
and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed
to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black
face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had
met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique
stem of a palm-tree. I gripped my stick, and stood up facing him.
He began chattering. "You, you, you," was all I could distinguish
at first. Suddenly he dropped from the tree, and in another
moment was holding the fronds apart and staring curiously
at me.

I did not feel the same repugnance towards this creature which I
had experienced in my encounters with the other Beast Men.
"You," he said, "in the boat." He was a man, then,--at least as much
of a man as Montgomery's attendant,--for he could talk.

"Yes," I said, "I came in the boat. From the ship."

"Oh!" he said, and his bright, restless eyes travelled over me,
to my hands, to the stick I carried, to my feet, to the tattered places
in my coat, and the cuts and scratches I had received from the thorns.
He seemed puzzled at some