ooked down on me in friendly
fashion, seeming to claim with me old acquaintance. She was very bright,
and the same moon, I thought, that saw me through the terrors of my
first night in that strange world. A cold wind blew from the gate,
bringing with it an evil odour; but it did not chill me, for the sun had
plenished me with warmth. I crept again into the city. There I found the
few that were still in the open air crouched in corners to escape the
shivering blast.

I was walking slowly through the long narrow street, when, just before
me, a huge white thing bounded across it, with a single flash in the
moonlight, and disappeared. I turned down the next opening, eager to get
sight of it again.

It was a narrow lane, almost too narrow to pass through, but it led
me into a wider street. The moment I entered the latter, I saw on
the opposite side, in the shadow, the creature I had followed, itself
following like a dog what I took for a man. Over his shoulder, every
other moment, he glanced at the animal behind him, but neither spoke to
it, nor attempted to drive it away. At a place where he had to cross a
patch of moonlight, I saw that he cast no shadow, and was himself but
a flat superficial shadow, of two dimensions. He was, nevertheless, an
opaque shadow, for he not merely darkened any object on the other
side of him, but rendered it, in fact, invisible. In the shadow he was
blacker than the shadow; in the moonlight he looked like one who had
drawn his shadow up about him, for not a suspicion of it moved beside
or under him; while the gleaming animal, which followed so close at his
heels as to seem the white shadow of his blackness, and which I now saw
to be a leopardess, drew her own gliding shadow black over the ground by
her side. When they passed together from the shadow into the moonlight,
the Shadow deepened in blackness, the animal flashed into radiance. I
was at the moment walking abreast of them on the opposite side, my bare
feet sounding on the flat stones: the leopardess never turned head
or twitched ear; the shadow seemed once to look at me, for I lost his
profile, and saw for a second only a sharp upright line. That instant
the wind found me and blew through me: I shuddered from head to foot,
and my heart went from wall to wall of my bosom, like a pebble in a
child's rattle.

CHAPTER XXIII. A WOMAN OF BULIKA

I turned aside into an alley, and sought shelter in a small archway. In
the mouth of it