the lake, the low hills, the forest, all seemed illuminated by a supernatural light.
He had been tramping the borders of the muddy lake since dawn and as the sun, risen now, began to scald away the scant dew, he threw himself down to rest in the precarious shadow of a stunted acacia. Lying on his back he watched the wild bees and the tiny, glittering gnats weaving their crazy patterns through the checkered light and shadow, until presently there swept over him a strange, unearthly sense of peace, in which he seemed to exist no longer as an individual set apart, but only as a part of all the world of bees and gnats and animals and birds all about him. All at once the fears and torments of his mind became no more substantial than the shadows of the parched acacia-leaves. He seemed suddenly to fit into some grand scheme of things in which he occupied but a tiny, insignificant place, yet one in which he knew an odd, luxurious sense of freedom and solitude, cut off from Naomi and Swanson, and from all the things for which they stood as symbols. Dimly he experienced a desire to remain thus forever, half-enchanted, bathed as in a bath of clean cold water, in a feeling of senses satisfied and at peace.
He never knew how long he lay thus, but he was aware, after a long time, of music drifting toward him through the hot, pungent air from somewhere near the borders of the lake. It was a weird, unearthly sound which resolved itself slowly into a pattern of melody sung by high-pitched, whining voices—a melody cast in a minor key, haunting and beautiful in its simplicity, tragic in the insinuation of its haunting echoes. It was brief, too, scarcely a dozen bars in the notation of
