scrub and long grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from
their insidious approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather
less than a mile across. If we could get through it to the bare
hill-side, there, as it seemed to me, was an altogether safer
resting-place; I thought that with my matches and my camphor I could
contrive to keep my path illuminated through the woods. Yet it was
evident that if I was to flourish matches with my hands I should
have to abandon my firewood; so, rather reluctantly, I put it down.
And then it came into my head that I would amaze our friends behind
by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious folly of this
proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move for covering
our retreat.

'I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must
be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's
heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by
dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts.
Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to
widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with
the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In
this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on
the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were
an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.

'She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have
cast herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up,
and in spite of her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the
wood. For a little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Looking
back presently, I could see, through the crowded stems, that from my
heap of sticks the blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a