Vahana ran on ahead. Bent and twisted with age, his half-naked figure far outstripped the riders whose horses ploughed heavily through the morass of jungle-grass. Behind them, again, came the straggle, panic-driven horde of Ayeshi's army, and after them the flood, rising over Heerut.
Vahana halted from time to time and looked back, nodding and beckoning. He was too far in advance for them to see his face. But in that feverish agility, in that patient waiting on them there was a malignant joy, the expression of a soundless, senile laughter.
They had strange companions—cheetahs, antelopes, wild pigs—all the creatures of the plain—trotting at their sides, unheeded and unheeding, conscious only of their common peril. They moved slowly, dragging themselves painfully free from the clinging mud. It was the flight of an evil dream—the enemy at their heels, their limbs weighted, each step an anguished effort. They made no outcry, but the tortured breathing of these flying thousands became an unbroken moan of terror.
Vahana led them by a circuitous path back over a ridge of ground rising to the rear of the temple. They followed unquestioningly. There was no choice. Their retreat was already cut off: to the right the flooded plain, to the left the trackless jungle hemmed them in. The ridge was all that remained to them.
Sigrid rode between Ayeshi and Barclay. They had not spoken. Ayeshi held himself like a sleep-walker, his face blank, his eyes wide open and expressionless. The hand that held the reins was slack and indifferent. His horse, instinctively aware of the danger pursuing them, kept up of its own account, but he did not seek to control it. Compared with him, Barclay was the very spirit of sombre exultation. He turned persistently to the woman beside him, his eyes ugly with significance. But her small, white face betrayed no consciousness of him. Its serenity was deathlike. Her body rode beside him, but her mind, the living part of her, eluded him. He had not hoped that it would be otherwise—his pitiless intuition had showed him the limit of his power, the limit of all power; but there was Tristram, who by now knew the value of the freedom which she had bought for him—Tristram, who represented all that he, Barclay, had desired and hoped for and loved, all that he now hated with the intensity of a mutilated passion, Tristram who would suffer at the last.
He laughed at his own thought and pointed a shaking hand at the mournful immensity beneath them.
"Your friend will have a wet ride. Look out there—the bridge has gone. It was swept away an hour ago."
He laughed again, and urged his horse past her. He had triumphed, but he did not wish to see her face.
She turned her head in the direction which he had indicated. The night, mingling its sable with the dirty greys of sky and water, shrouded the familiar landmarks, but that very narrowing of her vision widened the boundaries of her hearing. The thunder of the torrent sounded nearer—she heard again the mysterious mutterings which had arrested her at the bridge-head only an hour or two before. She knew that Barclay had not boasted.
"Did you know that too, Ayeshi?"