As he seated himself upon this hard resting-place, something upon its surface caught his horrified gaze. It was the head and shoulders of a warrior, cut in bold bas-relief.
II
THE DELIRIUM
There are circumstances in which even the bravest of men experience a hopelessness of utter despair. Such was King's state of mind when he realised that he had wandered in an aimless circle since noon and was back again at his starting-point. Weakened by physical exhaustion and hunger, he contemplated the future with nothing but pessimism. He had had his chance to escape from the jungle, and he had failed. There was no reason to believe that another day might bring greater opportunity. Rest might recoup his strength slightly, but what he needed was food, and on the morrow he would set forth not with a canteen full of water, but with only a few drops with which to moisten his parched throat. He had stumbled through plenty of mud-holes during the day, but he knew that it would doubtless prove fatal to drink from such wells of pollution.
As he stood there with bowed head, searching his mind for some solution of his problem, his eyes gradually returned to focus, and as they did so he saw on the surface of the soft ground beneath his gaze something that, for the moment, drove thoughts of hunger and thirst and fatigue from his mind—it was the pug of a tiger, fresh made in the soft earth.
"Why worry about to-morrow?" murmured King. "If half what that Cambodian told me about this place at night is true, I'll be in luck if I see another to-morrow."
He had read somewhere that tigers started to hunt late in the afternoon, and he knew that they seldom climbed trees; but he was also aware of the fact that leopards and panthers do and that the latter, especially, on account of their size and inherent viciousness, were fully as much to be dreaded as My Lord the Tiger himself. Realising that he must find some sort of shelter as quickly as possible and recalling the ruins that he had seen through the screen of foliage behind the rock before which he stood, he parted the leafy screen ahead of him and forced his way through.
Here the vegetation was less dense, as though the lesser growth of the jungle had halted in fearful reverence before this awe-inspiring work of man. Majestic even in its ruin was the great rectangular pile that loomed clearly now before the eyes of the American. But not all of the jungle had feared to encroach upon its sanctity. Great trees had taken root upon its terraced walls, among its columns and its arches, and by the slow and resistless pressure of their growth had forced aside the supporting foundation and brought much of the edifice into complete ruin.
Just before him rose a tower that seemed better to have withstood the ravages of time than other portions of the building. It rose some sixty feet above the ground, and near the summit was carved in heroic size the face of a god that King suspected was Siva, the Destroyer. A few feet above the rectangular doorway was a crumbling ledge and just above that a smaller opening that might have been a window. Behind it all was dark, but it carried to King's mind the suggestion of a hiding-place—a sanctuary in the very bosom of Siva.