The Pools of Silence (Paperback)

Excerpt: ...and cast it. Even at 162 this distance the air was tainted with the odour of the birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before a savage. "Come," said he, and they started. The birds saw them coming, and some flew away; others, trying to fly away, rose in the air heavily and fluttering a hundred yards sank and scattered about in the grass, looking like great vermin; a few remained waddling here and there, either too impudent for flight or too greatly gorged. Truly it had been a great killing, and the ground was ripped as if by ploughs. Over a hundred square yards lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, though not a movement was there, save the movement of the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of a rag of skin to the breeze. They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and with teeth glinting in the sun. It was the smallest tent, ripped here and there, but otherwise sound; the mosquito net inside was intact and rolled up like a ball, but the pole was broken in two. As they carried it between them, they had to pass near a man. He was very dead, that man; a great foot had trodden on his face, and it was flattened out, looking like a great black flat-fish in which a child, for fun, had punched holes for eyes and mouth and nose; it was curling up at the edges under the sun's rays, becoming converted into a cup. 163 "B'selius," said Felix, with a laugh, indicating this thing as they passed it. Adams had his hands full, or he would have struck the brute to the ground. He contented himself with driving the tent pole into the small of his back to urge him forward. From that moment he conceived a hatred for Felix such as few men have felt, for it was not a hatred against a man, or even a brute, but a black automatic figure with filed teeth, a thing with the brain and heart...