still pouring down, and the lightning flashes lit up
the slippery sides of his hiding-place with a steely glare: however, the
fury of the storm seemed to have spent itself, or passed over, but the
bellowing, vomiting voice of the flood as it surged past the retreat,
was sufficient to drown all other sounds. Then it occurred to him that
he could be seen from above by any one peering over. He must get
further in.

He was more than knee deep in water. Towards its head, however, the
cleft was dry. It terminated in a cavity just large enough for him to
crouch within--overhung too, with thorn bush from above. An ideal
hiding-place.

The situation reminded him of something. Once he had shot a guinea-fowl
on a river bank, and the bird had dropped into just such a cleft as
this. After a long and careful search, he had discovered it, crouching,
just as he was now crouching. It was only winged, however, and fled
further into the cleft. He remembered the fierce eagerness with which
he had pursued the wounded bird, fearing to lose it, how he had pounced
upon and seized it when it came to the end of the cleft and could get no
further. Well, events had a knack of repeating themselves. He was the
hunted one now.

Wet through now, he shivered to the very bones. The pangs of hunger
were gnawing him. He dived a hand into his pocket. The pulpy biscuit
was well-nigh uneatable, and black with tobacco dust. There was no help
for it. He swallowed the stuff greedily, and it produced a horrible
nausea. Soaked, chilled through and through, he crouched throughout
that long terrible day, and a sort of lightheadedness came over him.
Once more he was within Umzilikazi's sepulchre, and the awful coils of
the black _mamba_ were waving, over yonder in the gloom, then, with a
prolonged hiss, the terror plunged into the flood which was bearing him
along. It had seized his legs beneath the surface and was dragging him
down--and then it changed to Hermia. She was in the stream with him,
and he was striving to save her, and yet fiercely combating a longing to
let her drown, but ever around his heart was one yearning, aching pain,
an awful, unsatisfied longing for a presence, a glimpse of a face--he
hardly realised whose--and it would not come. Had he gone mad--he
wondered dully, or was this delirium, the beginning of the end, or the
terrible unsatisfied longings of another world? Then even that amount
of brain consciousness faded, an