I was a huge chap, with a girdle of leaves about my waist ... strange, tropic leaves ... there was black hair all over my body ... there was a little, red fire back in the cave's obscurity....
I had come in, casting a dead fawn down from my shoulder....
Hildreth came forward ... it was plainly she ... though with fine red hair like down on her legs....
"But your name is Naa ... my name is Kaa, the hunter, the slayer of good, red meat."
"Johnnie, do you really see that,—all that!"
She was enthralled like a child, as I described the landscape that lay, spread immense, beneath us ... and the wide ocean, great and blue, that tossed to the east.
Though I was genuinely possessed by this strange vision, though it was no make-believe, I could not help injecting a little Kansas horse-play into it....
I sank my teeth in "Naa's" shoulder, till she cried aloud. I seized her by the hair and dragged her till she lay prone on the floor.
I stood over her, making guttural noises, which I did so realistically that it made shivers run up and down my back while doing it....
I was almost as frightened as she was.