BEHIND THE MASK
The Silent Pools and the woods around were the haunts of innumerable birds. Rose-coloured flamingoes and gorgeous ducks, birds arrayed in all the jewellery of the tropics, birds not much bigger than dragon-flies, and birds that looked like flying beetles.
When they had dined, Adams, leaving the others to smoke and take their siesta, went off by the water’s edge on a tour of the pools. They were three in number; sheets of water blue and tranquil and well-named, for surely in all the world nowhere else could such perfect peace be found. Perhaps it was the shelter of the forest protecting these windless sheets of water; perhaps it was the nature of the foliage, so triumphantly alive yet so motionless; perhaps beyond these some more recondite reason influenced the mind and stirred the imagination. Who knows? The spirit of the scene was there. The spirit of deep and unalterable peace. The peace of shadowy lagoons, the peace of the cedar groves where the sheltering trees shaded the loveliness of Merope, the peace of the heart which passes all understanding and which men have named the Peace of God.
It was the first time since leaving Yandjali that Adams had found himself alone and out of sight of his companions. He breathed deeply, as if breathing in the air of freedom, and as he strode along, tramping through the long grass, his mind, whilst losing no detail of the scene around him, was travelling far away, even to Paris, and beyond.
Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, bounding and beautiful in its freedom and grace, a small antelope passed with the swiftness of an arrow; after it, almost touching it, came another form, yellow and fierce and flashing through the grass and vanishing, like the antelope, amidst the high grasses on the edge of the pool.
The antelope had rushed to the water for protection, and the leopard had followed, carried forward by its impetus and ferocity, for Adams could hear its splash following the splash of the quarry; then a roar split the silence, echoed from the trees, and sent innumerable birds fluttering and crying from the edge of the forest and the edge of the pool.
Adams burst through the long speargrass to see what was happening, and, standing on the boggy margin, holding the grasses aside, gazed.
The antelope had vanished as if it had never been, and a few yards from the shore, in the midst of a lather of water that seemed beaten up with a great swizzle-stick, the leopard’s head, mouth open, roaring, horrified his eyes for a moment and then was jerked under the surface.
The water closed, eddied, and became still, and Silence resumed her sway over the Silent Pools.
Something beneath the water had devoured the antelope; something beneath the water had dragged the leopard to its doom, and swish! a huge flail tore the speargrass to ribbons and sent Adams flying backward with the wind of its passage.