amphitheatre, and here the four of us halted.
Then Moreau sounded the horn, and broke the sleeping stillness
of the tropical afternoon. He must have had strong lungs.
The hooting note rose and rose amidst its echoes, to at last an
ear-penetrating intensity.

"Ah!" said Moreau, letting the curved instrument fall to his side again.

Immediately there was a crashing through the yellow canes,
and a sound of voices from the dense green jungle that marked
the morass through which I had run on the previous day.
Then at three or four points on the edge of the sulphurous area
appeared the grotesque forms of the Beast People hurrying towards us.
I could not help a creeping horror, as I perceived first one and then
another trot out from the trees or reeds and come shambling along
over the hot dust. But Moreau and Montgomery stood calmly enough;
and, perforce, I stuck beside them.

First to arrive was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast
a shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from
the brake came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros,
chewing a straw as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman
and two Wolf-women; then the Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes
in her peaked red face, and then others,--all hurrying eagerly.
As they came forward they began to cringe towards Moreau and chant,
quite regardless of one another, fragments of the latter half
of the litany of the Law,--"His is the Hand that wounds;
His is the Hand that heals," and so forth. As soon as they had
approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted,
and bowing on knees and elbows began flinging the white dust upon
their heads.

Imagine the scene if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our
misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse
of sunlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded
by this circle of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,--some
almost human save in their subtle expression and gestures,
some like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to resemble nothing
but the denizens of our wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy
lines of a canebrake in one direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees
on the other, separating us from the ravine with the huts,
and to the north the hazy horizon of the Pacific Ocean.

"Sixty-two, sixty-three," counted Moreau. "There are four more."

"I do not see the Leopard-man," said I.

Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, an