“If this man isn’t really dead, then he’s in bad shape somehow and needs help,” he declared.
“No, no!” Piang insisted. “He is hunati! Let us leave here quickly!”
Pale with fright, he looked around the moonlit grove. They were on a low plateau where the jungle was monsoon-forest rather than rain-forest. The big silk-cotton and ficus trees were less choked with brush and creepers here, and they could see along dim forest aisles to gigantic distant banyans that loomed like dark lords of the silver silence.
Silence. There was too much of it to be quite natural. They could faintly hear the usual clatter of birds and monkeys from down in the lowland thickets, and the cough of a tiger echoed from the Laos foothills. But the thick forest here on the plateau was hushed.
Farris went to the motionless, staring tribesman and gently touched his thin brown wrist. For a few moments, he felt no pulse. Then he caught its throb — an incredibly slow beating.
“About one beat every two minutes,” Farris muttered. “How the devil can he keep living?”
* * *
He watched the man’s bare chest. It rose — but so slowly that his eye could hardly detect the motion. It remained expanded for minutes. Then, as slowly, it fell again.
He took his pocket-light and flashed it into the tribesman’s eyes.
There was no reaction to the light, not at first. Then, slowly, the eyelids crept down and closed, and stayed closed, and finally crept open again.