He sat very still indeed.

A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him. The corncrakes
had ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away,
the breeze had fallen. A drowsing comfort took possession of him.
He grew more placid and more placid still. He was enormously
content to find that fear had fled before him and was gone. He
drifted into that state of mind when one thinks without ideas, when
one's mind is like a starless sky, serene and empty.



12


Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
Lucifer rising amidst the black branches. He was sitting upon a
rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree. He had been
asleep, and it was daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and
colourless.

He must have slept soundly.

He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away
and bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled
gardens, was the scream of peacocks. And some invisible bird was