And this first abandonment was a time of ecstasy. The long tranquil days were crowned by nights of peace yet more desired. I lay beneath the verandah and watched the stars in their splendour, not the pin-points of cold light that pierce our misty western heavens, but bright orbs in innumerable companies hovering upon the tranced earth. Night after night I saw the incomparable vision; month after month the moon rose slowly over the high wall of the jungle, first a great globe imminent upon the trees, next soaring remote through the upper heavens, waning at last to a sphere of pale unquickening light. I would lie thus for hours motionless, with lulled mind, until the breeze forerunning the dawn, or the quavering wail of the jackal, recalled the startled thought to the prison bonds of self. With the gentle lapse of months all these impersonal influences took dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder world sit beneath an overhanging rock and see the hot air quivering over leagues of plain; while in the nearer distance, far down beneath my feet, the rice-fields shone like emerald and the palm-fringed pools like shields of silver. Or I would stretch myself at early afternoon on the close-cropped grass on the jungle-edge, and watch the opposite sky take on an ever-deeper blue against the setting sun behind me. Often at such times I would hear a rushing in the highest branches, and turning very silently, see the outposts of a troop of monkeys peering down through the gleaming foliage. Then, if I moved, neither head nor limb, others would come, and yet others, leaping from branch to branch and plunging down from higher to lower levels like divers cleaving a deep green sea; until at last some slightest involuntary movement of mine would put the whole host to flight, and greybeards, young warriors, camp followers and mothers with their children on their backs would spring precipitate from tree to tree, screaming and gibbering like Homer's sapless dead. Then, when the stars rushed out and the darkness came on apace, it was sweet to wander home along those paths so dear to primitive men in all countries, narrow paths and sinuous, smoothed by the footfalls of centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is never still.