"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.
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