At dark the villagers were driven into their huts and at the door of each hut lay a sentry.
A big fire was lit, and by its light two more sentries kept watch over the others and their prisoners. Then the moon rose, spreading silver over the silence of the pools and the limitless foliage of the forest.
CHAPTER XV
THE PUNISHMENT
The sun rose, bringing with it a breeze. Above the stir and bustle of the birds you could hear the gentle wind in the tree-tops like the sound of a sea on a low-tide beach.
The camp was still in gloom, but the whole arc of sky above the pools was thrilled and filled with living light. Sapphire blue, dazzling and pale, but deep with infinite distance, it had an intrinsic brilliancy as though filled with sunbeams brayed to dust.
The palm tops had caught the morning splendour and then, rapidly, as though the armies of light were moving to imperious trumpet-calls, charging with golden spears, legion on legion, a hurricane of brightness, Day broke upon the pools.
We call it Day, but what is it, this splendour that comes from nowhere, and vanishes to nowhere, that strikes our lives rhythmically like the golden wing of a vast and flying bird, bearing us along with it in the wind of its flight?