But the fiery breath,--the tawny, tossing mane of Typhon seemed still to envelop me; his moaning hiss yet filled my ears. I felt as if I had stood face to face with one of the Lords of Hell. The reek of Tophet was still in my nostrils. Midnight had passed before sleep came. When Hendrick wakened me I felt as though I had hardly lost consciousness. It was the specified hour. Hendrick could no more read the face of a clock than he could decipher a logarithm, but he knew what it was we were going to attempt, and that if our adventure were to have any chance of success, we should set about it without delay. Before waking me, Hendrick had brewed the coffee, so after hurriedly emptying a pannikin and adding a few rusks to the contents of my haversack, I seized a rifle and made a start. My course lay due south, my objective being the vicinity in which the troops of ostriches had been visible on the previous morning. It had been arranged that Hendrick was to start an hour later and make a wide detour to the right, for the purpose of stampeding any birds he could manage to get to the westward of. It was trusted that such birds might run towards the spot where I intended to lie concealed. The sky was clear as a crystal lens, for the copious dew had caught all dust particles which were left suspended in the atmosphere after yesterday's outburst, and carried them back to earth. The waning moon had just arisen; fantastic shadows were cast by every shrub and tussock. The air was cool--almost cold; not a breath stirred. Every few yards I stumbled over irregular heaps of soft sand, varying in height, in size and in contour. These were fragments of the ravaged locks of Typhon-- locks torn out in his fury of yesterday and flung far and wide over the desert. How still it was; how void my environment of the details of ordinary experience. It was like a ramble through dreamland. The whirring wheels of Time seemed to have become dislocated; each as it were turning reversed on its axis--no two moving at the same speed. It seemed as though the mill of which sequence is a product had fallen out of gear, for yesterday joined hands with a day of twenty years old, while the intervening myriads of days flew forth into the void like chaff from a winnower. Space seemed to have taken on additional dimensions,--the impossible to have become actual without an effort. Faces glimmered up through the mists that hung over the dimming pathway of the past--through the steam of long-shed tears--through the ghastly coffin-lid and the horrible six feet of clay. They smiled for an instant, and vanished. Winds that had slept for years arose laden with the laughter from lips whose warm red faded with dawns long overblown. Surely I must have strayed into some pallid Hades such as the ancients fabled of,--some zone where shadows only were real and real things appeared as shadows.