any merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water
from his eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed
to himself with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the
night of time he had built a bridge - a bridge that spanned
illimitable levels of shining seas; but the Deluge had swept it
away, leaving this one island under heaven for Findlayson and his
companion, sole survivors of the breed of Man.

An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there
was to be seen on the little patch in the flood - a clump of
thorn, a clump of swaying creaking bamboos, and a grey gnarled
peepul overshadowing a Hindoo shrine, from whose dome floated a
tattered red flag. The holy man whose summer resting-place it was
had long since abandoned it, and the weather had broken the
red-daubed image of his god. The two men stumbled, heavy-limbed
and heavy-eyed, over the ashes of a brick-set cooking-place, and
dropped down under the shelter of the branches, while the rain
and river roared together.

The stumps of the indigo crackled, and there was a smell of
cattle, as a huge and dripping Brahminee bull shouldered his way
under the tree. The flashes revealed the trident mark of Shiva on
his flank, the insolence of head and hump, the luminous stag-like
eyes, the brow crowned with a wreath of sodden marigold blooms,
and the silky dewlap that almost swept the ground. There was a
noise behind him of other beasts coming up from the flood-line
through the thicket, a sound of heavy feet and deep breathing.

"Here be more beside ourselves," said Findlayson, his head
against the tree pole, looking through half-shut eyes, wholly at