He knew nothing of blindness; he knew little of pain. An Englishman in his wounded state would have been screaming in agony; to Félix the pain was sharp, but it was nothing to the fact that the sun had “gone down.”
He put his hand to the pain and felt his ruined face, but that did not tell him anything.
This sudden black dark was not the darkness which came from shutting one’s eyes; it was something else, and he scrambled on his feet to find out.
He could feel the darkness now, and he advanced a few steps to see if he could walk through it; then he sprang into the air to see if it was lighter above, and dived on his hands and knees to see if he could slip under it, and shouted and whooped to see if he could drive it away.
But it was a great darkness, not to be out-jumped, jumped he as high as the sun, or slipped under, were he as thin as a knife, or whooped away, though he whooped to everlasting.
He walked rapidly, and then he began to run. He ran rapidly, and he seemed to possess some instinct in his feet which told him of broken ground. The burst gun lay where he had left it in the grass, and the dead giraffe lay where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the grass waved, the sun spread his pyramid of light from horizon to horizon, and in the sparkle above a black dot hung trembling above the stricken beast at the edge of the wood.
The black figure of the man continued its headlong course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by the dark soul raging in it.
Hours passed, and then it fell, and lay face to the sky and arms outspread. You might have thought it dead. But it was a thing almost indestructible. It lay motionless, but it was alive with hunger.
During all its gyrations it had been followed and watched closely. It had not lain for a minute when a vulture dropped like a stone from the sky and lit on it with wings outspread.
Next moment the vulture was seized, screeching, torn limb from limb, and in the act of being devoured!