Imagine yourself marching all day, then spending the night on a vast banyan tree in the very heart of a dangerous forest! It took us a little over half an hour to find that tree, for banyans do not often grow in high altitudes, and also the same reason that made us choose the banyan made us look for a very large one of its kind—it would be of no use to us if it were slender enough for an elephant to break down by walking backwards against it! That is how the pachyderm destroys some very stout trees. We looked for something tall and so stout that no elephant could reach its upper branches with his trunk and not even two tuskers could break it by pushing against it with their double weight.
With enormously long reach he almost touched the top of the tree.
At last we found a tree to our liking. Radja stood on Ghond's shoulder and I on Radja's, until we reached branches as thick as a man's torso. I climbed and sat on one of them and from it let down our rope ladder which we always carried in the jungle for emergencies such as the present one. Radja climbed up and sat near me, then Ghond ascended the branch and sat between us. Now we saw that below us where Ghond had stood it had not only grown dark as the heart of a coal mine but there glowed two green lights set very close to one another. We knew too well whose they were. Ghond exclaimed jovially: "Had I been delayed down there two extra minutes the striped fellow would have killed me."
Seeing that his prey had escaped him, the tiger gave a thunderous yell, scourging the air like a curse. At once a tense silence fell and smothered all the noises of insects and little beasts and it descended further and deeper until it sank into the earth and seemed to grip the very roots of the trees.
We made ourselves secure on our perch and Ghond passed the extremely flexible rope ladder around his waist, then Radja's, then mine, fastening the rest of it around the main trunk of the tree. We tested it by letting it bear the weight of one of us at a time. This precaution was taken for the purpose of preventing a sleep-stricken member of our group from slipping down to the floor of the jungle, for after all, in sleep the body relaxes so that it falls like a stone. Finally, Ghond arranged his arms for pillows for our heads when slumber came.
Now that we had taken all the necessary precautions we concentrated our attention on what was happening below. The tiger had vanished from under our tree. The insects had resumed their song, which was again and again stilled for a few seconds as huge shapes fell from far off trees with soft thuds. Those were leopards and panthers who had slept on the trees all day and were now leaping down to hunt at night.
When they had gone the frogs croaked, insects buzzed continually and owls hooted. Noise, like a diamond, opened its million facets. Sounds leapt at one's hearing like the dart of sunlight into unprotected eyes. A boar passed, cracking and breaking all before him. Soon the frogs stopped croaking, and way down on the floor of the jungle we heard the tall grass and other undergrowth rise like a hay-cock, then with a sigh fall back. That soft sinister sigh like the curling up of spindrift drew nearer and nearer, then ... it slowly passed our tree. Oh! what a relief. It was a constrictor going to the water hole. We stayed on our tree-top as still as its bark—Ghond was afraid that our breathing might betray our position to the terrible python.