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.