e size lying
around eloquently proclaim. His supposed place of refuge is but a
village inhabited by the dead.

Grim and gruesome as this thought is, a new hope springs within the
hunted man's resourceful mind. His pursuers, even should they suspect
the direction he has taken--he is satisfied that they have lost his
spoor, or they would have been upon him long since--will forbear to
follow him here. The last asylum they will dream of him seeking will be
this village of the dead. There is comfort in this, at any rate, and
now, his next thought is to collect the ears, or rather bunches of
millet--there is still plenty left which is not crushed and trampled--
and as he devours great handfuls of the grain, he remembers that where
there is a village there must be water. Fortified by even this sorry
food, rough, indigestible, unwholesome as it is, he renews his search
and is soon rewarded. He has no difficulty--save for the exhaustion of
dragging along his weary frame--in finding water, which, though slimy,
and tepid and unpalatable, is still water--and having slaked his thirst,
he crawls back to the village again.

The sun has sunk beneath the ridge of black rocks, and in the brief
gloaming the miasmatic vapours seem to roll up thicker than before. One
by one, the stars twinkle forth into the hot misty sky, and soon the
reddening glow of a broad moon suffuses the tree tops, flooding with its
spectral light the open space and whitened relics of those who erewhile
tenanted these silent and primitive dwellings. Gigantic bats are
flitting to and fro, uttering their strident squeaks, and the forest
depths begin to resound with the howling of hyaenas, and the shrill
baying of hunting jackals. To the fugitive the sounds are not without a
certain sinister significance. Well he knows that the hyaena is the
most cowardly of beasts, but he remembers too, how in these regions of
constant massacre, even the most cowardly of beasts can hardly have
failed to lose all respect for the dominant animal, Man--seeing that he,
at any rate dead, constitutes an easy and abundant form of prey. He
realises his own enfeebled state, and knows that the otherwise cowardly
carnivora will realise it too. Even now, he can descry grisly,
blunt-snouted shapes, skulking about in the moonlight, allured by the
scent of fresh blood--his own blood to wit--nor does the occasional
subdued shout he utters avail to alarm them overmuch, or cause them to
re