Presently, tormented by a fly, a huge-humped buffalo, with great
shaggy mane, came galloping along, straight for where she lay. At
sight of the thing on the grass, he started, swerved yards aside,
stopped dead, and then came slowly up, looking malicious. Nycteris lay
quite still, and never even saw the animal.
"Now she'll be trodden to death!" said Watho. "That's the way those
creatures do."
When the buffalo reached her, he sniffed at her all over, and went
away; then came back, and sniffed again; then all at once went off as
if a demon had him by the tail.
Next came a gnu, a more dangerous animal still, and did much the same;
then a gaunt wild boar. But no creature hurt her, and Watho was angry
with the whole creation.
At length, in the shade of her hair, the blue eyes of Nycteris began
to come to themselves a little, and the first thing they saw was a
comfort. I have told already how she knew the night-daisies, each a
sharp-pointed little cone with a red tip; and once she had parted the
rays of one of them, with trembling fingers, for she was afraid she
was dreadfully rude, and perhaps was hurting it; but she did want, she
said to herself, to see what secret it carried so carefully hidden;
and she found its golden heart. But now, right under her eyes, inside
the veil of her hair, in the sweet twilight of whose blackness she
could see it perfectly, stood a daisy with its red tip opened wide
into a carmine ring, displaying its heart of gold on a platter of
silver. She did not at first recognize it as one of those cones come
awake, but a moment's notice revealed what it was. Who then could have
been so cruel to the lovely little creature, as to force it open like
that, and spread it heart-bare to the terrible death-lamp? Whoever it
was, it must be the same that had thrown her out there to be burned to
death in its fire! But she had her hair, and could hang her head, and
make a small sweet night of her own about her! She tried to bend the
daisy down and away from the sun, and to make its petals hang about it
like her hair, but she could not. Alas! it was burned and dead
already! She did not know that it could not yield to her gentle force
because it was drinking life, with all the eagerness of life, from
what she called the death-lamp. Oh, how the lamp burned her!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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