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Chapter 8 - The Dance of Death
Through the luxuriant, tangled vegetation of the Stygian jungle night a great lithe
body made its way sinuously and in utter silence upon its soft padded feet. Only
two blazing points of yellow-green flame shone occasionally with the reflected
light of the equatorial moon that now and again pierced the softly sighing roof
rustling in the night wind.
Occasionally the beast would stop with high-held nose, sniffing searchingly. At
other times a quick, brief incursion into the branches above delayed it
momentarily in its steady journey toward the east. To its sensitive nostrils came
the subtle unseen spoor of many a tender four-footed creature, bringing the
slaver of hunger to the cruel, drooping jowl.
But steadfastly it kept on its way, strangely ignoring the cravings of appetite that
at another time would have sent the rolling, fur-clad muscles flying at some soft
throat.
All that night the creature pursued its lonely way, and the next day it halted only
to make a single kill, which it tore to fragments and devoured with sullen,
grumbling rumbles as though half famished for lack of food.
It was dusk when it approached the palisade that surrounded a large native
village. Like the shadow of a swift and silent death it circled the village, nose to
ground, halting at last close to the palisade, where it almost touched the backs of
several huts. Here the beast sniffed for a moment, and then, turning its head
upon one side, listened with up-pricked ears.
What it heard was no sound by the standards of human ears, yet to the highly
attuned and delicate organs of the beast a message seemed to be borne to the
savage brain. A wondrous transformation was wrought in the motionless mass of
statuesque bone and muscle that had an instant before stood as though carved
out of the living bronze.
As if it had been poised upon steel springs, suddenly released, it rose quickly and
silently to the top of the palisade, disappearing, stealthily and cat-like, into the
dark space between the wall and the back of an adjacent hut.
In the village street beyond women were preparing many little fires and fetching
cooking-pots filled with water, for a great feast was to be celebrated ere the night
was many hours older. About a stout stake near the centre of the circling fires a
little knot of black warriors stood conversing, their bodies smeared with white
and blue and ochre in broad and grotesque bands. Great circles of colour were
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