upstanding Van Horn, and had it gone out as the flickering flame of a
splinter of wood goes out when it is quite burnt to a powder-fluff of
ash? Had all that made Van Horn passed like the flame of the splinter?
Had he passed into the darkness for ever into which the beast passed,
into which passed the speared crocodile, the hooked bonita, the netted
mullet, the slain pig that was fat to eat? Was Van Horn's darkness as
the darkness of the blue-bottle fly that his fly-flapping maid smashed
and disrupted in mid-flight of the air?--as the darkness into which
passed the mosquito that knew the secret of flying, and that, despite its
perfectness of flight, with almost an unthought action, he squashed with
the flat of his hand against the back of his neck when it bit him?

What was true of this white man's head, so recently alive and erectly
dominant, Bashti knew was true of himself. What had happened to this
white man, after going through the dark gate of death, would happen to
him. Wherefore he questioned the head, as if its dumb lips might speak
to him from out of the mystery and tell him the meaning of life, and the
meaning of death that inevitably laid life by the heels.

Jerry's long-drawn howl of woe at sight and scent of all that was left of
Skipper, roused Bashti from his reverie. He looked at the sturdy, golden-
brown puppy, and immediately included it in his reverie. It was alive.
It was like man. It knew hunger, and pain, anger and love. It had blood
in its veins, like man, that a thrust of a knife could make redly gush
forth and denude it to death. Like the race of man it loved its kind,
and birthed and breast-nourished its young. And passed. Ay, it passed;
for many a dog, as well as a human, had he, Bashti, devoured in his hey-
dey of appetite and youth, when he knew only motion and strength, and fed
motion and strength out of the calabashes of feasting.

But from woe Jerry went on into anger. He stalked stiff-legged, with a
snarl writhen on his lips, and with recurrent waves of hair-bristling
along his back and up his shoulders and neck. And he stalked not the
head of Skipper, where rested his love, but Bashti, who held the head on
his knees. As the wild wolf in the upland pasture stalks the mare mother
with her newly delivered colt, so Jerry stalked Bashti. And Bashti, who
had never feared death all his long life and who had laughed a joke with
his forefinger blown off by the bursting flint-lock