54 RIFLE AND ROMANCE 



solitudes of Abapur by day, but his nightly beat was now 

 traced in huge pad-marks along the deep valleys to east 

 and west. 



It is not at every point indeed that the girdling scarps 

 of these hills may be passed, and the few precipitous spurs 

 that give access to the lofty plateau are followed by narrow 

 winding pathways made and used by wild beasts and 

 jungle men. By one or other of these game-paths our 

 tiger would issue on his nightly prowl. Far below the 

 eastern verge of the heavily wooded range in which he 

 now had his home there wound the shingly bed of a deep- 

 sunk mountain torrent, and in this direction one of these 

 hill-paths pierced the mural scarp of black basalt and fell 

 twining through the trees of the jungly hillside. A thou- 

 sand feet below it led down to the dry bed of the river, at 

 a place marked by a miniature bay of level ground and a 

 rock-bound waterhole. This was " Muing-pati " " the 

 flat by the muing trees" and of all the neighbouring 

 pools the least distant from the fastnesses of Abapur. 



It was one balmy evening in May that the tiger rose 

 from his lair on the Abapur hills and slowly followed the 

 path that led to distant Muingpdti. The declining sun 

 had already left the eastern slopes in shadow, but, as the 

 great brindled brute silently emerged from the heavy 

 green jungle of his lonely plateau, and paused in the open 

 at the brow of the hill, the stretching mountain ranges 

 beyond the valley were still bathed in its last golden 

 beams. 



To the immediate left of the precipitous spur down 

 which his path now began to twist its way there yawned 

 a cavernous gulch, falling suddenly to a great depth from 

 the foot of the dark scarps of horizontal basalt that 

 rimmed the tableland above. This huge, dim gully was 

 drained by a boulder-strewn ravine and filled with a 

 choked tangle of thick, dry jungle bamboo thickets, 

 rotting tree-trunks, fallen masses of rock, long reed-grass, 



