shrubs, kulpa and
tamarind-trees. Quickly concealing myself, I waited the coming of the
would-be tiger-man.

"He was hardly more than a boy--slim and almost feminine--and came
gallivanting along the narrow path through the brushwood, like some
careless, high-spirited, brown-skinned hoyden.

"The moment he reached the edge of the mystic circle, however, his
behaviour changed; the light of laughter died from his eyes, his lips
straightened, his limbs stiffened, and his whole demeanour became one of
respect and humility.

"Advancing with bare head and feet some three or so feet into the
clearing, he knelt down, and, touching the ground three times in
succession with his forehead, looked up at a giant kulpa-tree opposite
him, chanting as he did so some weird and monotonous refrain, the
meaning of which was unintelligible to me. Up to then it had been
light--the sky, like all Indian skies at that season, one blaze of
moonbeams and stars; but now it gradually grew dark. An unnatural,
awe-inspiring shade seemed to swoop down from the far distant mountains
and to hush into breathless silence everything it touched. Not a bird
sang, not an insect ticked, not a leaf stirred. One might have said all
nature slept, had it not been for an uncomfortable sensation that the
silence was but the silence of intense expectation--merely the prelude
to some unpleasant revelation that was to follow. At this juncture my
feelings were certainly novel--entirely different from any I had
hitherto experienced.

"I had not believed in the supernatural, and had had absolutely no
apprehensions of coming across anything of a ghostly character--all my
fears had been of malicious natives and tigers; they now, however,
changed, and I was confronted with a dread of what I could not
understand and could not analyse--of something that suggested an
appearance, alarming on account of its very vagueness.

"The pulsations of my heart became irregular, I grew faint and sick, and
painfully susceptible to a sensation of excessive coldness, which
instinct told me was quite independent of any actual change in the
atmosphere.

"I made several attempts to remove my gaze from the kulpa-tree, which
intuition told me would be the spot where the something, whatever it
was, that was going to happen would manifest itself. My eyes, however,
refused to obey, and I was obliged to keep them steadily fixed on this
spot, which grew more and more gloomy. All of a sudden the