THE LEOPARD WOMAN



CHAPTER I


THE MARCH

It was the close of the day. Over the baked veldt of Equatorial Africa a
safari marched. The men, in single file, were reduced to the unimportance
of moving black dots by the tremendous sweep of the dry country stretching
away to a horizon infinitely remote, beyond which lay single mountains,
like ships becalmed hull-down at sea. The immensities filled the world--
the simple immensities of sky and land. Only by an effort, a wrench of the
mind, would a bystander on the advantage, say, of one of the little rocky,
outcropping hills have been able to narrow his vision to details.

And yet details were interesting. The vast shallow cup to the horizon
became a plain sparsely grown with flat-topped thorn trees. It was not a
forest, yet neither was it open country. The eye penetrated the thin
screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile or more, but was
brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered by
irregular patches of shale that tinkled when stepped on. Well-defined
paths, innumerable, trodden deep and hard, cut into the iron soil. They
nearly all ran in a northwesterly direction. The few traversing paths took
a long slant. These paths, so exactly like those crossing a village green,
had in all probability never been trodden by human foot. They had been
made by the game animals, the swarming multitudinous game of Central
Africa.