My heart leaped, and beat quickly.
The savage’s face seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay; his scream of delight was the death knell of all my hopes, and, as the sinister head was withdrawn, I stood breathless, unarmed, wondering in what form death would come to us, and praying to Allah that we might die swiftly and painlessly, for I dreaded the horrible, revolting tortures I had so frequently witnessed.
I remembered it was the hour when Azala, in the far-off city of the Sultan, was wafting to me, from her high lattice, a fervent message of comfort, of peace and of love. There came before me the pale image of those hours of enchantment. Upon the successful accomplishment of my strange mission depended all our future, all our happiness. I struggled to look the circumstances fairly in the face, to see the folly of my wild frenzy, and to reason with myself.
But a profound sense of loneliness, helplessness and despair had settled upon me. I became seized by an excessive dread.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
Facing Malec.
Above, in the dimness, there moved again a grotesque, spectral shadow. The savage was peering into the pit, but it occurred to me that he was unable to distinguish us in that rayless obscurity.
He shouted in a hoarse voice, and I saw that in his hand he carried a long spear. Neither of us replied or moved a muscle. We watched in silence, waiting with drawn breath. Everything, except the hole above where the unkempt head showed as a round, black projection, was profoundly dark, and when I looked up again it had disappeared. A deep stillness fell, broken only by the distant trumpeting of an elephant; then suddenly we heard a noise like the breaking of sticks and the tearing of foliage. With our eyes riveted upon the hole through which we had fallen, we were, a few minutes later, startled by the appearance of a curious glare, as if a fire had been lighted, and suddenly the black denizen of the forest appeared at the hole, holding above his head a roughly-made torch. Its fickle light shone down upon us, but at the same time illumined the black, savage face of the man who held it.