Parr protested that she must eat. In this climate one did not fast with impunity. "I sha'n't collapse," she replied, that stony look returning to her face. Night fell like the abruptly loosened folds of a great curtain. The air became vibrant with the shrilling of insects. Fireflies filled the darkness with a twinkling mist, so that the immense spangle of the purple sky seemed to have invaded the purple ambiguities of earth. But along the river bank shone the fires of the safari--points of flame that outlined, like a binding of copper wire, the silhouettes of squatting men, or turned a half-inchoate face to molten bronze, or illuminated, against the lustrous blackness of the water, the fragment of a muscular back, the crook of an arm, a stare of eyeballs, a display of teeth that seemed to be swimming there unrelated to a head. The babble of the camp--a continuous chattering, crooning, and guffawing, blended with the indignant cries of monkeys. It was, she thought, all one threnody of purely natural creatures, of which one species, by some accident of structure and unplanned immunity, had enlarged its powers of experiment and imitation to this point of triumph--the kindling of fires, the eating of cooked food, the gradually enhanced capacity for suffering. "Are you religious, Parr?" she asked the little man who sat huddled in a faded ulster, sucking at a cold pipe. What she meant was, "Do you believe, poor traveler, that you have a soul--some spark that these black savages share with you perhaps, but that those chattering monkeys lack?" His pinched, gray countenance took on a timid look. "I hope so, ma'am," he stammered, and tried to assume an expression of befitting dignity. "So you can pray without laughing at yourself!" Her cold voice was replete with the bitterness of those who have got from suffering nothing except rancor, as if at some vast hoax. Parr was frightened by this glimpse into her disillusionment; and prayer, which he himself had abandoned in his childhood, seemed suddenly worthy of his timid championship. He mumbled something about faith; he had, it appeared, seen some of its achievements. He recalled the faith of strong men, which had accomplished prodigies; the confidence of youth---- "And when one is old and weak? So it is all a physical phenomenon?" When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the tent-fly. But Parr, not utterly crushed, proffered faintly that he knew he could not argue with the likes of her, being without education, having taken life as it came, mostly obeying orders----