A pale light broke ahead. He neither knew whence it came nor its significance. He made for it with a last call to every nerve and muscle in him. He reached it. He was dimly conscious of a brightening luminousness, of something black, serenely still, rising up out of the grey transparency before him. Then the end. It came upon him with a rush. It closed in in a clammy band about his throat. He turned. A flat head with a wizened face and small dead eyes and pointed mouth swayed before his vision in a sinister, rhythmic measure. It was Vahana—yet not Vahana. It was not Vahana who was slowly dragging his life from him. It was that cold tightening band—and yet Vahana was there—close to him.
He screamed. Again and again. The jungle—the whole world, his world, shrinking about him till it was no bigger than his own brain, echoed with his screams.
CHAPTER XVI
TOWARDS MORNING
The rain had ceased. A soft wind blowing from the north swept the low-hanging clouds into the fantastic, tattered fragments, between which a thin moonlight poured down on to the desolation of waters. All that had been had been washed out as though a child's sponge had passed over a slate covered with the laborious work of a life. Fields and villages, rich pastures, homesteads, bridges, each of them some man's dream and ambition, lay under that smooth, glittering surface awaiting their resurrection at the hands of a patient humanity.
It was by this first break of light that Tristram saw the way over which they had still to travel. He sat motionless and upright, scanning the seeming limitless expanse, and perhaps in that moment some dim, unformed appeal went up from him to the Unknown which steels the hearts of men to supreme effort.
And, swift on the heels of that brief intercession, there followed an aching pity for the faithful comrade whose share in the coming struggle was so much greater than his own, whose purpose in it was no more than to serve him with the last breath of her life. He stroked her ungainly neck, striving to break down the barrier between living things which made his remorse and pity powerless. She answered gallantly with the grand courage of her kind, and the water rose about them.
It was a nightmare redreamed, save that now the first violence of the storm had spent itself. The wreckage had gone its way, and the flood's polished bosom shone bare and empty under the wane and glow of light. There was no landmark left by which they could guide their course. The jungle-clad mountains were mingled with the clouds. The temple shrouded itself in the shadow of the jungle. They could but drift with the currents, fighting their way across, hoping—Tristram himself scarcely knew for what. For who could have lived in that deluge, what escape was possible? Yet he carried with him a belief born of despair, a serenity such as men feel for whom there is no choice, no second possibility.
Something black drifted past him. He could not recognize it, and in a moment it was gone. They were now in midstream, where the rush of the water swept over Arabella's desperately uplifted head. It was then, the moon sailing out unveiled into the open sky, that he saw other black shapes and knew them for what they were. They were the bodies of men—not of isolated victims, of villagers and field labourers trapped separately or even in small communities by the swift disaster. They were many hundreds. They had died together, and death had not separated them. Like driftwood, they had been swept into entangled, shapeless piles of floating horror.
"Sahib! Sahib!"