“Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. We lay in hammocks of plaited grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl’s hammock was beside MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and still depressed, my lungs half drowned in the dense humor of the valley and my ears ringing from the clamorous insect mob without, I heard a stifled, whimpering cry—the moan of a little child who has been whipped for inheriting nerves. It struck a chill—there was a great deal that was chill in that place of hot fears, cold passions, joyless content and light-hearted sloth—a place where one’s skin crept clammily while the bones were burning.
“‘Who is that?’ I asked, quite loudly, for I did not care if the others awoke.
“There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless terror? It was that kind of a sound.
“‘What is it?’ I asked.
“‘It is Tomba.’
“‘What is the matter with you?’ said I.
“‘I am afraid.’
“‘And what are you afraid of?’
“She found her voice then and began to tell me, but there my limited knowledge of the dialect failed, for I had no such linguistic scope as to-day, when one dialect more or less is simply a matter of ear and comparison. There was something in her speech of devils and death, and she kept repeating this and I do not know what besides—and then, as I was trying to reassure her as one might a child or a horse, less through the reason than the senses, the soothing of primitive sounds, a startling thing occurred. MacFarlane, whose breathing had become more labored, like that of a man rapidly climbing the ladder of consciousness from deep oblivion, gasped once or twice and awoke with a scream. Vinckers, roused with the echo ringing in his ears, awoke with a muffled shout—a strangled, bleating shout such as might come from a slaughtered animal. MacFarlane, but half awake, screamed again. At this Tomba’s breathless terror found outlet in a shriek that swept out under the low mist, struck the mountain-side and quavered away in countless reverberations.
“Vinckers shouted again and leaped from his hammock.