Out from some crack in the great wall of rock a lithe white-marked gray leopard peered. She heard its sudden purr of delight, and looked up at it, and its great green eyes glared down at them, ravished and famished. She heard the vulture’s wings flap. She looked up—still higher, and saw the scavenger-bird’s bald head thrust out, a vicious, fleshless skull in the dear moonlight above.
She saw. But she didn’t care. As well one way as any other.
But nothing should harm him, nothing should touch a hair of that battered head—first.
She covered the thing beside her with her body, and waited.
The snow-leopard slunk, slowly, stealthily nearer.
The vulture craned its bleak bony head, and watched. It must wait—till the leopard had done.
And when day’s first apple-green slipped up from the East, the native woman slept on her last marriage bed.
It was very quiet.
CHAPTER XLI
It well might have been the wedding-day of heaven and earth, it was so lovely. There were scant wild flowers in Rukh, but each that there was lifted up a glad, gay face. There are few song-birds in the Himalayas, but a lark sang and swayed on the spear-shaped lace of a green bamboo, and a choir of thrushes throated up a silver carol of song from the full-berried rowans. Yellow sunshine lay in unbroken, imperial swathes everywhere. Children laughed and pranked, women sang at their tasks—none doing more than she must to-day—men smoked and walked about arm in arm.