She remembered how she had listened to it in the morning, sitting in the sunshine, dreaming; and her heart suddenly contracted with a pain intolerable. Those golden dreams were over for ever. He had given her up.
Again her restlessness urged her. Cold as it was, she could not bring herself to go indoors. She descended into the compound, passed swiftly through it, and began to climb the rough ground of the hill that rose behind it above the native village.
The Magician's bungalow looked very ghostly in the starlight. Presently she paused, and stood motionless, gazing down at it. She remembered how, when she and her uncle had first come to it, the native servants had told them of the curse that had been laid upon it; of the evil spirits that had dwelt there; of voices that had cried in the night! Was it true, she wondered vaguely? Was it possible for a place to be cursed?
A faint breeze ran down the valley, stirring the trees to a furtive whispering. Again, subconsciously, she was aware of the cold, and moved to return. At the same moment there came a sound like the report of a cannon half a mile away, followed by a long roar that was unlike anything she had ever heard—a sound so appalling, so overwhelming, that for an instant, seized with a nameless terror, she stood as one turned to stone.
And then—before the impulse of flight to the bungalow had reached her brain—the whole terrible disaster burst upon her. Like a monster of destruction, that which had been a gurgling stream rose above its banks in a mighty, brown flood, surged like an inrushing sea over the moonlit compound, and swept down the valley, turning it into a whirling turmoil of water.
XIV
HOW THE TALE WAS TOLD
Ronnie Carteret was the subject of a good deal of chaff that night at mess. The Rajah was being entertained, and he was the only man who paid the young officer any compliments on the matter of his achievement on the racecourse. Everyone else openly declared that the horse, and not its rider, was the one to be congratulated.