She wouldn’t answer that. She walked in silence until they reached the top of the forested plateau. Then she spoke in a whisper.
“We must be quiet now. It will be bad if we are seen here.”
The grove that covered the plateau was pierced by horizontal bars of red sunset light. The great silk-cottons and ficus trees were pillars supporting a vast cathedral-nave of darkening green.
A little way ahead loomed up those huge, monster banyans he had glimpsed before in the moonlight. They dwarfed all the rest, towering bulks that were infinitely ancient and infinitely majestic.
Farris suddenly saw a Laos tribesman, a small brown figure, in the brush ten yards ahead of him. There were two others, farther in the distance. And they were all standing quite still, facing away from him.
They were hunati, he knew. In that queer state of slowed-down life, that incredible retardation of the vital processes.
Farris felt a chill. He muttered over his shoulder, “You had better go back down and wait.”
“No,” she whispered. “There is Andre.”
He turned, startled. Then he too saw Berreau.
His blond head bare, his face set and white and masklike, standing frozenly beneath a big wild-fig a hundred feet to the right.