IN THE SHADOW
temptation many times before, the temptation of the virile human animal to slip the leash which binds it to the mental part and range untrammeled; now it was not temptation which he fought; it was the death of his soul: the soul he had so struggled to possess, to hold cleanly.
He had no idea toward what he was impelled; no thought; his longing was to let go; to leap into the circle and rave and revel and drink that bloody brew. It forced cries from his chest; he struggled against a torturing impulse to give his great voice vent in a roar of the chorus of that maddening song which seemed to shake the foundations of the swamp; set the tree roots aquiver. He was the battle ground of an unfair fight; centuries crowding decades; the outcome could only be one way.
The great fire burned lower, unheeded; the leaping flames sank, licking redly along the burned-out embers, now shooting upward to shrink again. These flaring lights painted in a flash sights at which the soul of the struggling man reached and recoiled and sprang again, eager as the yellow tongues of the panting fire; reaching for what the shadows held, recoiling from what the flames showed. The fire became merely a lurid glow; glistening shapes, heaving bodies, swam about him; the gloom of the jungle was peopled with unreal hell shapes; they represented the concentrated lust from the earth from which they had been banished. The air was thick with black passions.
Something stirred at his side—a flutter, a gasp. A white figure passed between him and the palpitating glow of the fire, lightly, with the swirl of a wisp of smoke borne on a zephyr. A low laugh trilled above the gut-
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