Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 6 (1925-06).djvu/20

Rh offered up a hideous libation to the spirit of the ancient forest. As Mpatanasi crouched in misery and sobbed and gibbered, a million million burning eyes watched him from behind gloomy thickets and envied him the protection of the moonlight and the quiet desolation of the clearing.

was a poet and easily impressed, albeit he pretended to despise poetry, and the sentiency of the forest filled him with an irrational fear. He had known moments of skepticism, when he had doubted the existence of the forest-devil, but now—he could no longer doubt. And then he thought of the treachery of his daughter and the diabolic machinations of Mu-senyui, and his torment and anguish grew into a fever, which flushed his face and darkened his eyes, and dried up his tongue.

But he was conscious that he had pronounced a doom—a miserable and disgraceful and maddening doom; and the forest-devil would expect, would require a victim. And he had pronounced the doom against the king, and he himself was king. He repeated it over and over again to himself, "I am king! I am king! I am king!" and the words seemed to echo and re-echo through every chamber of his brain, and he fancied that his blood took up the weird refrain and shouted it out through the tips of his fingers to the maimed and grotesque and revolting spirit-shapes that hovered mincingly about him and required and demanded the fulfilment of a doom.

"But I don't really believe in the forest-devil!" He spoke aloud and his voice sounded weak and strange and far away.

He went back to the hut and looked at his daughter sadly out of tired, bloodshot eyes. Then he made up a little bundle, and selected a tall, hard staff. He walked over and patted his daughter upon the head.

"I must go away," he said. "Perhaps if I travel fast I can escape the doom. It has been done, you know, and the forest-devil isn't really my enemy, and I'm not sure that he exists. But it is safer to travel."

His daughter bit her lips and glared. Then she kissed him upon the cheek, and took his head between her hands and smiled into his tired eyes, "I do not blame you at all for wishing to save your head!" she said.

But when Mpatanasi had turned his back upon her, and had gone out through the narrow way into the weird, early dawn, she stamped violently upon the floor and tore out her hair in handfuls

next day Mpatanasi traveled. At night with nervous limbs and dim eyes he sat down under a huge, reddish palm. The darkness closed in upon him, and he could feel it passing over his head and streaming past his ears. He felt that the darkness was solid, substantial, and that he could reach out and seize great handfuls of it. He breathed with difficulty, and he fancied that the palm above his head was breathing in unison with him. Once he imagined that the plant had laughed.

He got together a few sticks and made an insignificant fire. He sat with bowed head in the wretched light, moving his fingers over the fire to warm them, and casting frightened glances into the dark forest recesses before him, and at the swaying palm above his head. He toppled on his side, and lay with one arm extended, the fingers of his right hand touching the glowing embers.

He awoke with a shriek, and sat up. The forest was moving. Everything was moving, the trees, the mosses beneath him, the gigantic spreading lianas, the interlacing creepers—moving to a dreadful, an unsuspecting rhythm. A drumming and a droning, remote, uncanny, titanic, struck upon his ears and unfathomable abysses seemed to open out before him.