And now, to his measureless surprise, he saw the jungle open out before him. A small clearing, such as those in which the Aswalia villages are planted, only of much more limited extent, lay under his eyes. A low fig-tree, a stunted bamboo, and the cotton-tree which he had already seen, could be dimly discerned through the darkness. Nothing else at first except the three vast birds. They sat side by side under the cotton-tree, as if in hideous expectation of a feast. Bâl Narîn stamped his foot and cried out, and they rose slowly, but they did not go far. They hovered overhead, and it seemed to him that they were watching his movements. And now, pausing, he could hear distinctly sounds as of fluttered stirring to and fro, and breath drawn labouringly. He trimmed his lamp and went on cautiously, carrying it before him. In a few instants its light fell on a rude shed, made of branches of trees and dried leaves. On the side by which he had approached it there was no opening; but he could see, through the interstices between the branches, that figures were moving about within. Giving it rather a wide berth so as to see before he was seen, he came round to the front, and pulled up for a few moments to observe what was going on. Within the small enclosure, which was such a hut as hermits dwell in, he saw three figures. Two were on the ground, whether dead or asleep he could not tell, and the third--a slender figure in woman's garments--was going from one to the other, stooping over them, and, as it seemed to Bâl Narîn, weeping bitterly. While he was considering how he should reveal himself without increasing her distress and alarm, she came out to the front of the hut, and, his lamp being turned that way, he saw her plainly. That was a moment which Bâl Narîn will never forget. For an instant he shut his eyes. He was seized with a tremor that seemed to be drawing away his power, and the presence of mind on which he prided himself. Wild as she was, with that haunting terror in her sweet eyes that was never, so long as she lived, to leave them again, there was a beauty and majesty in this face that awed him, he could not have told why. It was like the face of a spirit, he said--of one who had done with the earth for ever. Thus for a moment he saw it; in the next it was suffused with a horror and anguish, such as he had never beheld before. Looking up, he saw the heavens darkened with the wings of the birds of prey that were swooping nearer and nearer to the entrance of the hut, as if they would defy this weak living woman to keep them any longer from the dead.