Teak and Bamboo. 1 7 



who regarded our advent with lordly surprise, his sweeping 

 antlers springing from a head poised grandly on a massive, 

 shaggy-maned neck. The bristles on his broad back were 

 raised, and his tail stuck stiffly out as he faced us, and then, 

 curling his lip and drawing his breath with a slight hissing 

 noise through his teeth, he slowly bent his neck, and with a 

 powerful stroke of his horns, to which there still adhered 

 some strips of rough skin, scored a deep gash on the stem of 

 asalai sapling. 



" Ihe Red ones !" he growled. "Ah! they were here 

 yesterday : how these ill weeds increase ; it is not like old 

 times when they were scarce!" And in spite of bravado 

 his tone betrayed a tinge of suppressed fear. Passing down- 

 hill, I stopped a moment to gape at him, as he bent his great 

 strength against the frayed sapling that groaned under his 

 antlers, and rained red strings of peeled bark on the grass 

 below ; when he paused, and again lifting the corner of his 

 mouth, and distending his eye-pits, from which there 

 exuded a strange sickly-sweet odour, edged majestically 

 towards me and slowly lowered his sharp tines. His 

 temper was evidently uncertain ; so, with a skip, I rejoined 

 my mother, and we wound down a slippery grass slope to 

 take up our new quarters. 



We found ourselves in a much finer glen than that we 

 had left ; it ran up right under the precipices buttressing 

 the mighty Bairat, which raises its flat-topped bulk 4,000 

 feet above the sea. A stone detached from the cliffs fell 

 crashing into the dry leaves at our feet, and the faint 

 whoops of the great grey apes sounded far above our heads 

 as they sprang in play among the bare white branches of a 

 torchwood tree which jutted from a ledge in the sheer face of 

 black basalt. In the cool depths of bamboo thicket high up 

 the ravine side was our day retreat, where the wild plantain 



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