The Red One | Page 4

down in a fit of involuntary weeping.
And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had pealed forth--if by PEAL, he had often
thought since, an adequate description could be given of the enunciation of so vast a
sound melting sweet. Sweet it was, as no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a
resonance that it might have proceeded from some brazen-throated monster. And yet it
called to him across that leagues-wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his
long-suffering, pain racked spirit.
He remembered how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no longer sobbing,
listening to the sound and wondering that he had been able to hear it on the beach of
Ringmanu. Some freak of air pressures and air currents, he reflected, had made it possible
for the sound to carry so far. Such conditions might not happen again in a thousand days
or ten thousand days, but the one day it had happened had been the day he landed from
the Nari for several hours' collecting. Especially had he been in quest of the famed jungle

butterfly, a foot across from wing-tip to wing-tip, as velvet-dusky of lack of colour as
was the gloom of the roof, of such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted only to the jungle
roof and could be brought down only by a dose of shot. It was for this purpose that
Sagawa had carried the ten-gauge shot-gun.
Two days and nights he had spent crawling across that belt of grass land. He had suffered
much, but pursuit had ceased at the jungle- edge. And he would have died of thirst had
not a heavy thunderstorm revived him on the second day.
And then had come Balatta. In the first shade, where the savannah yielded to the dense
mountain jungle, he had collapsed to die. At first she had squealed with delight at sight of
his helplessness, and was for beating his brain out with a stout forest branch. Perhaps it
was his very utter helplessness that had appealed to her, and perhaps it was her human
curiosity that made her refrain. At any rate, she had refrained, for he opened his eyes
again under the impending blow, and saw her studying him intently. What especially
struck her about him were his blue eyes and white skin. Coolly she had squatted on her
hams, spat on his arm, and with her finger-tips scrubbed away the dirt of days and nights
of muck and jungle that sullied the pristine whiteness of his skin.
And everything about her had struck him especially, although there was nothing
conventional about her at all. He laughed weakly at the recollection, for she had been as
innocent of garb as Eve before the fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the same time,
asymmetrically limbed, string-muscled as if with lengths of cordage, dirt-caked from
infancy save for casual showers, she was as unbeautiful a prototype of woman as he, with
a scientist's eye, had ever gazed upon. Her breasts advertised at the one time her maturity
and youth; and, if by nothing else, her sex was advertised by the one article of finery with
which she was adorned, namely a pig's tail, thrust though a hole in her left ear-lobe. So
lately had the tail been severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that dried upon her
shoulder like so much candle-droppings. And her face! A twisted and wizened complex
of apish features, perforated by upturned, sky-open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth that
sagged from a huge upper-lip and faded precipitately into a retreating chin, by peering
querulous eyes that blinked as blink the eyes of denizens of monkey-cages.
Not even the water she brought him in a forest-leaf, and the ancient and half-putrid chunk
of roast pig, could redeem in the slightest the grotesque hideousness of her. When he had
eaten weakly for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see her, although again and
again she poked them open to peer at the blue of them. Then had come the sound. Nearer,
much nearer, he knew it to be; and he knew equally well, despite the weary way he had
come, that it was still many hours distant. The effect of it on her had been startling. She
cringed under it, with averted face, moaning and chattering with fear. But after it had
lived its full life of an hour, he closed his eyes and fell asleep with Balatta brushing the
flies from him.
When he awoke it was night, and she was gone. But he was aware of renewed strength,
and, by then too thoroughly inoculated by the mosquito poison to suffer further
inflammation, he closed his eyes and slept an unbroken stretch till sun-up. A little later