Yet never in his life would he forget
that pitiful sound of sobbing, and the feeling that the whole awful
wilderness of woods listened....

His own mind busied itself for a long time with the recent events, of
which _this_ took its mysterious place as one, and though his reason
successfully argued away all unwelcome suggestions, a sensation of
uneasiness remained, resisting ejection, very deep-seated--peculiar
beyond ordinary. IV


But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. His
thoughts soon wandered again; he lay there, warm as toast, exceedingly
weary; the night soothed and comforted, blunting the edges of memory and
alarm. Half an hour later he was oblivious of everything in the outer
world about him. Yet sleep, in this case, was his great enemy, concealing all approaches,
smothering the warning of his nerves. As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with
a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail
accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events
that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind
somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in
the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest
delusion. At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake,
ready to let slip the judgment. "All this is not _quite_ real; when you
wake up you'll understand." And thus, in a way, it was with Simpson. The events, not wholly
inexplicable or incredible in themselves, yet remain for the man who saw
and heard them a sequence of separate facts of cold horror, because the
little piece that might have made the puzzle clear lay concealed or
overlooked. So far as he can recall, it was a violent movement, running downwards
through the tent towards the door, that first woke him and made him
aware that his companion was sitting bolt upright beside him--quivering. Hours must have passed, for it was the pale gleam of the dawn that
revealed his outline against the canvas. This time the man was not
crying; he was quaking like a leaf; the trembling he felt plainly
through the blankets down the entire length of his own body. Défago had
huddled down against him for protection, shrinking away from something
that apparently concealed itself near the door flaps of the little tent. Simpson thereupon called out in a loud voice some question or other--in
the first bewilderment of waking he does not remember exactly what--and
the man made no reply. The atmosphere and feeling of true nightmare lay
horribly about him, making movement and speech both difficult. At first,
indeed, he was not sure where he was--whether in one of the earlier
camps, or at home in his bed at Aberdeen. The sense of confusion was
very troubling. And next--almost simultaneous with his waking, it seemed--the profound
stillness of the dawn outside was shattered by a most uncommon sound. It
came without warning, or audible approach; and it was unspeakably
dreadful. It was a voice, Simpson declares, possibly a human voice;
hoarse yet plaintive--a soft, roaring voice close outside the tent,
overhead rather than upon the ground, of immense volume, while in some
strange way most penetratingly and seductively sweet. It rang out, too,
in three separate and distinct notes, or cries, that bore in some odd
fashion a resemblance, farfetched yet recognizable, to the name of the
guide: "_Dé-fa-go!_"

The student admits he is unable to describe it quite intelligently, for
it was unlike any sound he had ever heard in his life, and combined a
blending of such contrary qualities. "A sort of windy, crying voice," he
calls it, "as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable
power...."

And, even before it ceased, dropping back into the great gulfs of
silence, the guide beside him had sprung to his feet with an answering
though unintelligible cry. He blundered against the tent pole with
violence, shaking the whole structure, spreading his arms out
frantically for more room, and kicking his legs impetuously free of the
clinging blankets. For a second, perhaps two, he stood upright by the
door, his outline dark against the pallor of the dawn; then, with a
furious, rushing speed, before his companion could move a hand to stop
him, he shot with a plunge through the flaps of canvas--and was gone. And as he went--so astonishingly fast that the voice could actually be
heard dying in the distance--he called aloud in tones of anguished
terror that at the same time held something strangely like the frenzied
exultation of delight--

"Oh! oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire! Oh! oh! This height
and fiery speed!" And then the distance quickly buried it, and the deep silence of very
early morning descended upon the forest as before. It had all come about with such rapidity that, but for the evidence of
the empty bed beside him, Simpson could almost have believed it to have
been the memory of a nightmare carried over from sleep. He still felt
the warm pressure of that vanished body against his side; there lay the
twisted blankets in a heap; the very tent yet trembled with the
vehemence of the impetuous departure. The strange words rang in his
ears, as though he still heard them in the distance--wild language of a
suddenly stricken mind. Moreover, it was not only the senses of sight
and hearing that reported uncommon things to his brain, for even while
the man cried and ran, he had become aware that a strange perfume, faint
yet pungent, pervaded the interior of the tent. And it was at this
point, it seems, brought to himself by the consciousness that his
nostrils were taking this distressing odor down into his throat, that he
found his courage, sprang quickly to his feet--and went out. The grey light of dawn that dropped, cold and glimmering, between the
trees revealed the scene tolerably well. There stood the tent behind
him, soaked with dew; the dark ashes of the fire, still warm; the lake,
white beneath a coating of mist, the islands rising darkly out of it
like objects packed in wool; and patches of snow beyond among the
clearer spaces of the Bush--everything cold, still, waiting for the sun. But nowhere a sign of the vanished guide--still, doubtless, flying at
frantic speed through the frozen woods. There was not even the sound of
disappearing footsteps, nor the echoes of the dying voice. He had
gone--utterly. There was nothing; nothing but the sense of his recent presence, so
strongly left behind about the camp; _and_--this penetrating,
all-pervading odor. And even this was now rapidly disappearing in its turn. In spite of his
exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its
nature, and define it, but the ascertaining of an elusive scent, not
recognized subconsciously and at once, is a very subtle operation of
the mind. And he failed. It was gone before he could properly seize or
name it.