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 CHAPTER V

THE BEHEST

and over Angkor Wat a moon, a little past the full, was rising. On earth the night. was intensely still; the air—hot, moist, scent- laden—seeming to float in suspension above the ground, like a dense vapour, invisible but stifling. But, high aloft in the heavens, atmospheric currents were raging, and vast masses of black cloud, ragged and fantastic, rushed storm-driven across the sky, rapidly changing their formation as they scudded, like some vanquished host in panic-stricken flight. Almost incessantly the horizon toward the south was illumined by wide flares of summer lightning that, with the irregular regularity of a helio- graph, were blazoned for an instant above the jagged line of forest tree-tops—shimmered and went out. Pale stars glimmered mistily in little patches of open sky, till the storm-wrack over- whelmed them and they seemed to soar upward into infinite, smoky depths of air. Amid this noiseless violence of inaudible storm, the moon