Around them a circle of silence spread outwards till the distant circumference of howling died. But there was a movement. They seemed to Lychnis to be surrounded by looming shapes, by moving jewelled hands gesturing in darkness. There were movements in the unseen masses of foliage on the banks—swift movements of night hunters, slow movements of ancient creatures. There were long plungings and swirlings in the water. A vapour of heat drifted over them. The river flowed by unseen, and the Dragon held his breast to it like a soul in the flow of time. There were presences. Glancing at Yuan, half-visible, Lychnis found him, now, less than human, or perhaps more. Over the jungle there gleamed those lily petals, and a light from them seemed to illuminate his face. The eyes became oblongs of darkness in a mask of dry gold. The small closed mouth was a carved symbol of eternal serenity. He became a god, and she found him almost intolerably strange. “Forget your humanness,” murmured the mask. It was like a breath of the jungle speaking. “Forget it and know the creatures of the jungle.” They were drifting a little down-stream towards the bank on their right. They were aware of a movement in the reeds, an arrival of concentrated silence. The darkness watched them. Then the reeds waved and parted, and there shone at them two savage emeralds. Lychnis, feeling the beautiful ferocity that crouched for her, glanced at Yuan, perhaps to see if she could share her experience with him. But he was in combat with the tiger, putting out the fierceness of the tiger, meeting, subduing the hunger that was about to spring. He entered through the deeps of being into the nature of tiger, and in some sort of wrestle in the realm of the tiger’s understanding dissipated the desire that sought to satisfy itself on Lychnis’s flesh. They became aware that the knot of silence was resolved. Presently as if the tiger had spread some kind of intelligence, howling was heard again in the distance, and before long the rim of howling contracted. The forest had forgotten them. They were free in it. “You are not afraid?” The pale gold mask uttered voice. “Only a little.” But her fear was a fear of the being beside her. All other fear had vanished and survived only in that. “Are you never afraid?” she asked. “Here, or in the sky?” “The personal I,” he answered, “the individual local Yuan, was a mass of fears. But the man I am becoming, the man whose I is vanishing, the god-saturated man, cannot experience fear. The wine-drunken man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the cart he breaks no bones. The god-intoxicated man is not afraid, and if he falls out of the sky all is well.” “I am not god-intoxicated, as far as I know.” “Nevertheless your perceptions are like those of one who is thus intoxicated. You perceive rhythms that only the heart of the infinite perceives.” “I had not thought I was anything out of the way,” she said.