Adventure stories, American; Fiction; Short stories
Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, as if cloven by the sword of
God in the hand of God, the jungle terminated. The edge of it,
perpendicular and as black as the infamy of it, was a hundred feet up and
down. And, beginning at the edge of it, grew the grass—sweet, soft,
tender, pasture grass that would have delighted the eyes and beasts of
any husbandman and that extended, on and on, for leagues and leagues of
velvet verdure, to the backbone of the great island, the towering
mountain range flung up by some ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and
gullied but not yet erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass!
He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it,
and broken down in a fit of involuntary weeping.
And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had pealed forth—if by _peal_, he
had often thought since, an adequate description could be given of the
enunciation of so vast a sound melting sweet. Sweet it was, as no sound
ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a resonance that it might have
proceeded from some brazen-throated monster. And yet it called to him
across that leagues-wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his
long-suffering, pain racked spirit.
He remembered how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no longer
sobbing, listening to the sound and wondering that he had been able to
hear it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air pressures and air
currents, he reflected, had made it possible for the sound to carry so
far. Such conditions might not happen again in a thousand days or ten
thousand days, but the one day it had happened had been the day he landed
from the _Nari_ for several hours’ collecting. Especially had he been in
quest of the famed jungle butterfly, a foot across from wing-tip to
wing-tip, as velvet-dusky of lack of colour as was the gloom of the roof,
of such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted only to the jungle roof
and could be brought down only by a dose of shot. It was for this
purpose that Sagawa had carried the ten-gauge shot-gun.
Two days and nights he had spent crawling across that belt of grass land.
He had suffered much, but pursuit had ceased at the jungle-edge. And he
would have died of thirst had not a heavy thunderstorm revived him on the
second day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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