For a while the vision hung before him, tantalizing him, maddening him,
eluding him. Then came a flash of lightning, and it was gone.

He started up on the _charpoy_, every nerve tense as stretched wire.

"Come back!" he cried, hoarsely. "Come back!"

Again the lightning streaked the darkness.

There came a burst of thunder, and suddenly, through it and above it,
he heard the far-distant roar of rain. He sprang to his feet. It was
coming.

The seconds throbbed away. Something was moving in the compound, a
subtle, awful Something. The trees and bushes quivered before it, the
cluster-roses rattled their dead leaves wildly. But the man stood
motionless in the light that fell across the veranda from the open
window of his room, watching with eyes that shone with a fierce and
glaring intensity for the return of his vision.

The fevered blood was hammering at his temples. For the moment he was
scarcely sane. The fearful strain of the past few weeks that had
overwhelmed less hardy men had wrought upon him in a fashion more subtle
but none the less compelling. They had been stricken down, whereas he
had been strung to a pitch where bodily suffering had almost ceased to
count. He had grown used to the torment, and now in this supreme moment
it tore from him his civilization, but his physical strength remained
untouched. He stood alert and ready, like a beast in a cage, waiting for
whatever the gods might deign to throw him.