Page:The further side of silence (IA furthersideofsil00clifiala).pdf/59

 for the Great Salt Lick, and thither went I by a circuitous path of mine own contrivance. This time we go by a shorter route. Come."

Five miles farther on the forest thinned out suddenly and gave place to an irregular space, roughly circular in shape, the surface of which resembled a ploughed field. Though the red soil was rich, barely so much as a tuft of grass grew upon it—a strange sight in a land where green things sprout into lusty life almost as you watch them; for this was one of the natural saline deposits not infrequently found in Malayan jungles. Hither flock all the beasts of the forest, from the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the tiger to the red dogs, the tiny mouse-deer no larger than a rabbit, and even the stoats and weasels, to lick the salt and to knead and trample the earth with countless pads and claws and hoofs.

Kria looked out upon the place, and as he looked his heart stood still, while for a moment all things were blotted out in a blinding, swirling mist of blood-stained darkness. He reeled against a trunk, and stood there sobbing and shaking ere he could muster force to look again.

At the foot of a big tree some twenty yards away the body of Pi-Noi, its aspect strangely delicate and childlike, lay coiled up in death. There was a little blue hole below her left breast where the cruel bullet had entered, and the wild swine and the hungry red dogs had already been busy.

Kria, reeling like a drunken man, staggered across the open space toward the dead body of his wife.