From 8ed6c73d889c6601b420b24f0bf3939978546828 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Gustavo Henrique Santos Souza de Miranda <gustavohssmiranda@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 18:19:19 -0300
Subject: [PATCH] Adicionado Mais Capitulos em arquivos tex individuais.

---
 .gitignore                                   |    8 +-
 chapters/A Catastrophe.tex                   |  167 ++
 chapters/Alone With the beast folk.tex       |  188 ++
 chapters/Concerning the beast folk.tex       |  173 ++
 chapters/How the beast folk taste blood.tex  |  465 +++++
 chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday.tex        |  258 +++
 chapters/The Finding of Moreau.tex           |  150 ++
 chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk.tex |  402 ++++
 main.tex                                     | 1802 +-----------------
 9 files changed, 1817 insertions(+), 1796 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 chapters/A Catastrophe.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/Alone With the beast folk.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/Concerning the beast folk.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/How the beast folk taste blood.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/The Finding of Moreau.tex
 create mode 100644 chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk.tex

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diff --git a/chapters/A Catastrophe.tex b/chapters/A Catastrophe.tex
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+Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike
+and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau’s. My one idea
+was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image,
+back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men. My
+fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume
+idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory. My first friendship with
+Montgomery did not increase. His long separation from humanity, his
+secret vice of drunkenness, his evident sympathy with the Beast People,
+tainted him to me. Several times I let him go alone among them. I
+avoided intercourse with them in every possible way. I spent an
+increasing proportion of my time upon the beach, looking for some
+liberating sail that never appeared,—until one day there fell upon us
+an appalling disaster, which put an altogether different aspect upon my
+strange surroundings.
+
+It was about seven or eight weeks after my landing,—rather more, I
+think, though I had not troubled to keep account of the time,—when this
+catastrophe occurred. It happened in the early morning—I should think
+about six. I had risen and breakfasted early, having been aroused by
+the noise of three Beast Men carrying wood into the enclosure.
+
+After breakfast I went to the open gateway of the enclosure, and stood
+there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the freshness of the early
+morning. Moreau presently came round the corner of the enclosure and
+greeted me. He passed by me, and I heard him behind me unlock and enter
+his laboratory. So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of
+the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim
+begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek,
+almost exactly like that of an angry virago.
+
+Then suddenly something happened,—I do not know what, to this day. I
+heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning saw an awful
+face rushing upon me,—not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed
+with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the
+lidless eyes ablaze. I threw up my arm to defend myself from the blow
+that flung me headlong with a broken forearm; and the great monster,
+swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about it,
+leapt over me and passed. I rolled over and over down the beach, tried
+to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, his
+massive white face all the more terrible for the blood that trickled
+from his forehead. He carried a revolver in one hand. He scarcely
+glanced at me, but rushed off at once in pursuit of the puma.
+
+I tried the other arm and sat up. The muffled figure in front ran in
+great striding leaps along the beach, and Moreau followed her. She
+turned her head and saw him, then doubling abruptly made for the
+bushes. She gained upon him at every stride. I saw her plunge into
+them, and Moreau, running slantingly to intercept her, fired and missed
+as she disappeared. Then he too vanished in the green confusion. I
+stared after them, and then the pain in my arm flamed up, and with a
+groan I staggered to my feet. Montgomery appeared in the doorway,
+dressed, and with his revolver in his hand.
+
+“Great God, Prendick!” he said, not noticing that I was hurt, “that
+brute’s loose! Tore the fetter out of the wall! Have you seen them?”
+Then sharply, seeing I gripped my arm, “What’s the matter?”
+
+“I was standing in the doorway,” said I.
+
+He came forward and took my arm. “Blood on the sleeve,” said he, and
+rolled back the flannel. He pocketed his weapon, felt my arm about
+painfully, and led me inside. “Your arm is broken,” he said, and then,
+“Tell me exactly how it happened—what happened?”
+
+I told him what I had seen; told him in broken sentences, with gasps of
+pain between them, and very dexterously and swiftly he bound my arm
+meanwhile. He slung it from my shoulder, stood back and looked at me.
+
+“You’ll do,” he said. “And now?”
+
+He thought. Then he went out and locked the gates of the enclosure. He
+was absent some time.
+
+I was chiefly concerned about my arm. The incident seemed merely one
+more of many horrible things. I sat down in the deck chair, and I must
+admit swore heartily at the island. The first dull feeling of injury in
+my arm had already given way to a burning pain when Montgomery
+reappeared. His face was rather pale, and he showed more of his lower
+gums than ever.
+
+“I can neither see nor hear anything of him,” he said. “I’ve been
+thinking he may want my help.” He stared at me with his expressionless
+eyes. “That was a strong brute,” he said. “It simply wrenched its
+fetter out of the wall.” He went to the window, then to the door, and
+there turned to me. “I shall go after him,” he said. “There’s another
+revolver I can leave with you. To tell you the truth, I feel anxious
+somehow.”
+
+He obtained the weapon, and put it ready to my hand on the table; then
+went out, leaving a restless contagion in the air. I did not sit long
+after he left, but took the revolver in hand and went to the doorway.
+
+The morning was as still as death. Not a whisper of wind was stirring;
+the sea was like polished glass, the sky empty, the beach desolate. In
+my half-excited, half-feverish state, this stillness of things
+oppressed me. I tried to whistle, and the tune died away. I swore
+again,—the second time that morning. Then I went to the corner of the
+enclosure and stared inland at the green bush that had swallowed up
+Moreau and Montgomery. When would they return, and how? Then far away
+up the beach a little grey Beast Man appeared, ran down to the water’s
+edge and began splashing about. I strolled back to the doorway, then to
+the corner again, and so began pacing to and fro like a sentinel upon
+duty. Once I was arrested by the distant voice of Montgomery bawling,
+“Coo-ee—Moreau!” My arm became less painful, but very hot. I got
+feverish and thirsty. My shadow grew shorter. I watched the distant
+figure until it went away again. Would Moreau and Montgomery never
+return? Three sea-birds began fighting for some stranded treasure.
+
+Then from far away behind the enclosure I heard a pistol-shot. A long
+silence, and then came another. Then a yelling cry nearer, and another
+dismal gap of silence. My unfortunate imagination set to work to
+torment me. Then suddenly a shot close by. I went to the corner,
+startled, and saw Montgomery,—his face scarlet, his hair disordered,
+and the knee of his trousers torn. His face expressed profound
+consternation. Behind him slouched the Beast Man, M’ling, and round
+M’ling’s jaws were some queer dark stains.
+
+“Has he come?” said Montgomery.
+
+“Moreau?” said I. “No.”
+
+“My God!” The man was panting, almost sobbing. “Go back in,” he said,
+taking my arm. “They’re mad. They’re all rushing about mad. What can
+have happened? I don’t know. I’ll tell you, when my breath comes.
+Where’s some brandy?”
+
+Montgomery limped before me into the room and sat down in the deck
+chair. M’ling flung himself down just outside the doorway and began
+panting like a dog. I got Montgomery some brandy-and-water. He sat
+staring in front of him at nothing, recovering his breath. After some
+minutes he began to tell me what had happened.
+
+He had followed their track for some way. It was plain enough at first
+on account of the crushed and broken bushes, white rags torn from the
+puma’s bandages, and occasional smears of blood on the leaves of the
+shrubs and undergrowth. He lost the track, however, on the stony ground
+beyond the stream where I had seen the Beast Man drinking, and went
+wandering aimlessly westward shouting Moreau’s name. Then M’ling had
+come to him carrying a light hatchet. M’ling had seen nothing of the
+puma affair; had been felling wood, and heard him calling. They went on
+shouting together. Two Beast Men came crouching and peering at them
+through the undergrowth, with gestures and a furtive carriage that
+alarmed Montgomery by their strangeness. He hailed them, and they fled
+guiltily. He stopped shouting after that, and after wandering some time
+farther in an undecided way, determined to visit the huts.
+
+He found the ravine deserted.
+
+Growing more alarmed every minute, he began to retrace his steps. Then
+it was he encountered the two Swine-men I had seen dancing on the night
+of my arrival; blood-stained they were about the mouth, and intensely
+excited. They came crashing through the ferns, and stopped with fierce
+faces when they saw him. He cracked his whip in some trepidation, and
+forthwith they rushed at him. Never before had a Beast Man dared to do
+that. One he shot through the head; M’ling flung himself upon the
+other, and the two rolled grappling. M’ling got his brute under and
+with his teeth in its throat, and Montgomery shot that too as it
+struggled in M’ling’s grip. He had some difficulty in inducing M’ling
+to come on with him. Thence they had hurried back to me. On the way,
+M’ling had suddenly rushed into a thicket and driven out an under-sized
+Ocelot-man, also blood-stained, and lame through a wound in the foot.
+This brute had run a little way and then turned savagely at bay, and
+Montgomery—with a certain wantonness, I thought—had shot him.
+
+“What does it all mean?” said I.
+
+He shook his head, and turned once more to the brandy.
diff --git a/chapters/Alone With the beast folk.tex b/chapters/Alone With the beast folk.tex
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+I faced these people, facing my fate in them, single-handed
+now,—literally single-handed, for I had a broken arm. In my pocket was
+a revolver with two empty chambers. Among the chips scattered about the
+beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The
+tide was creeping in behind me. There was nothing for it but courage. I
+looked squarely into the faces of the advancing monsters. They avoided
+my eyes, and their quivering nostrils investigated the bodies that lay
+beyond me on the beach. I took half-a-dozen steps, picked up the
+blood-stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf-man, and
+cracked it. They stopped and stared at me.
+
+“Salute!” said I. “Bow down!”
+
+They hesitated. One bent his knees. I repeated my command, with my
+heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them. One knelt, then the other
+two.
+
+I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards
+the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the
+stage faces the audience.
+
+“They broke the Law,” said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law.
+“They have been slain,—even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with
+the Whip. Great is the Law! Come and see.”
+
+“None escape,” said one of them, advancing and peering.
+
+“None escape,” said I. “Therefore hear and do as I command.” They stood
+up, looking questioningly at one another.
+
+“Stand there,” said I.
+
+I picked up the hatchets and swung them by their heads from the sling
+of my arm; turned Montgomery over; picked up his revolver still loaded
+in two chambers, and bending down to rummage, found half-a-dozen
+cartridges in his pocket.
+
+“Take him,” said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; “take
+him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea.”
+
+They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more
+afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and
+hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly,
+carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling
+welter of the sea.
+
+“On!” said I, “on! Carry him far.”
+
+They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
+
+“Let go,” said I; and the body of Montgomery vanished with a splash.
+Something seemed to tighten across my chest.
+
+“Good!” said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying
+and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in
+the silver. At the water’s edge they stopped, turning and glaring into
+the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom
+and exact vengeance.
+
+“Now these,” said I, pointing to the other bodies.
+
+They took care not to approach the place where they had thrown
+Montgomery into the water, but instead, carried the four dead Beast
+People slantingly along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards before
+they waded out and cast them away.
+
+As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M’ling, I heard a
+light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine
+perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes
+were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his
+side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a
+little averted.
+
+For a moment we stood eye to eye. I dropped the whip and snatched at
+the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most
+formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may
+seem treacherous, but so I was resolved. I was far more afraid of him
+than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew
+a threat against mine.
+
+I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then cried I, “Salute!
+Bow down!”
+
+His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl. “Who are \emph{you} that I should—”
+
+Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly
+and fired. I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had
+missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But
+he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared
+not risk another miss. Every now and then he looked back at me over his
+shoulder. He went slanting along the beach, and vanished beneath the
+driving masses of dense smoke that were still pouring out from the
+burning enclosure. For some time I stood staring after him. I turned to
+my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body
+they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the
+bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood-stains
+were absorbed and hidden.
+
+I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the
+beach into the thickets. I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust
+with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to
+think out the position in which I was now placed. A dreadful thing that
+I was only beginning to realise was, that over all this island there
+was now no safe place where I could be alone and secure to rest or
+sleep. I had recovered strength amazingly since my landing, but I was
+still inclined to be nervous and to break down under any great stress.
+I felt that I ought to cross the island and establish myself with the
+Beast People, and make myself secure in their confidence. But my heart
+failed me. I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the
+burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand
+ran out towards the reef. Here I could sit down and think, my back to
+the sea and my face against any surprise. And there I sat, chin on
+knees, the sun beating down upon my head and unspeakable dread in my
+mind, plotting how I could live on against the hour of my rescue (if
+ever rescue came). I tried to review the whole situation as calmly as I
+could, but it was difficult to clear the thing of emotion.
+
+I began turning over in my mind the reason of Montgomery’s despair.
+“They will change,” he said; “they are sure to change.” And Moreau,
+what was it that Moreau had said? “The stubborn beast-flesh grows day
+by day back again.” Then I came round to the Hyena-swine. I felt sure
+that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the
+Law was dead: worse luck. They knew now that we of the Whips could be
+killed even as they themselves were killed. Were they peering at me
+already out of the green masses of ferns and palms over yonder,
+watching until I came within their spring? Were they plotting against
+me? What was the Hyena-swine telling them? My imagination was running
+away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
+
+My thoughts were disturbed by a crying of sea-birds hurrying towards
+some black object that had been stranded by the waves on the beach near
+the enclosure. I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to
+go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the
+opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the
+island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the
+possible ambuscades of the thickets.
+
+Perhaps half a mile along the beach I became aware of one of my three
+Beast Folk advancing out of the landward bushes towards me. I was now
+so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver.
+Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He
+hesitated as he approached.
+
+“Go away!” cried I.
+
+There was something very suggestive of a dog in the cringing attitude
+of the creature. It retreated a little way, very like a dog being sent
+home, and stopped, looking at me imploringly with canine brown eyes.
+
+“Go away,” said I. “Do not come near me.”
+
+“May I not come near you?” it said.
+
+“No; go away,” I insisted, and snapped my whip. Then putting my whip in
+my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the
+creature away.
+
+So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and
+hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the
+sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their
+gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the
+destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the
+folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the
+dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might
+have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast
+People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a
+mere leader among my fellows.
+
+Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand.
+The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I
+came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards
+these seated figures. One, a Wolf-woman, turned her head and stared at
+me, and then the others. None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt
+too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
+
+“I want food,” said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
+
+“There is food in the huts,” said an Ox-boar-man, drowsily, and looking
+away from me.
+
+I passed them, and went down into the shadow and odours of the almost
+deserted ravine. In an empty hut I feasted on some specked and
+half-decayed fruit; and then after I had propped some branches and
+sticks about the opening, and placed myself with my face towards it and
+my hand upon my revolver, the exhaustion of the last thirty hours
+claimed its own, and I fell into a light slumber, hoping that the
+flimsy barricade I had erected would cause sufficient noise in its
+removal to save me from surprise.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/chapters/Concerning the beast folk.tex b/chapters/Concerning the beast folk.tex
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+++ b/chapters/Concerning the beast folk.tex	
@@ -0,0 +1,173 @@
+I woke early. Moreau’s explanation stood before my mind, clear and
+definite, from the moment of my awakening. I got out of the hammock and
+went to the door to assure myself that the key was turned. Then I tried
+the window-bar, and found it firmly fixed. That these man-like
+creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque
+travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their
+possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
+
+A tapping came at the door, and I heard the glutinous accents of M’ling
+speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers (keeping one hand upon it),
+and opened to him.
+
+“Good-morning, sair,” he said, bringing in, in addition to the
+customary herb-breakfast, an ill-cooked rabbit. Montgomery followed
+him. His roving eye caught the position of my arm and he smiled askew.
+
+The puma was resting to heal that day; but Moreau, who was singularly
+solitary in his habits, did not join us. I talked with Montgomery to
+clear my ideas of the way in which the Beast Folk lived. In particular,
+I was urgent to know how these inhuman monsters were kept from falling
+upon Moreau and Montgomery and from rending one another. He explained
+to me that the comparative safety of Moreau and himself was due to the
+limited mental scope of these monsters. In spite of their increased
+intelligence and the tendency of their animal instincts to reawaken,
+they had certain fixed ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which
+absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised; had
+been told that certain things were impossible, and that certain things
+were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture
+of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.
+
+Certain matters, however, in which old instinct was at war with
+Moreau’s convenience, were in a less stable condition. A series of
+propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited) battled
+in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their
+animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever
+breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed particular solicitude to
+keep them ignorant of the taste of blood; they feared the inevitable
+suggestions of that flavour. Montgomery told me that the Law,
+especially among the feline Beast People, became oddly weakened about
+nightfall; that then the animal was at its strongest; that a spirit of
+adventure sprang up in them at the dusk, when they would dare things
+they never seemed to dream about by day. To that I owed my stalking by
+the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival. But during these earlier
+days of my stay they broke the Law only furtively and after dark; in
+the daylight there was a general atmosphere of respect for its
+multifarious prohibitions.
+
+And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island and
+the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline and lay
+low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight
+square miles.\footnote{This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.—C.
+E. P.} It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on
+three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot
+spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since
+originated it. Now and then a faint quiver of earthquake would be
+sensible, and sometimes the ascent of the spire of smoke would be
+rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam; but that was all. The population
+of the island, Montgomery informed me, now numbered rather more than
+sixty of these strange creations of Moreau’s art, not counting the
+smaller monstrosities which lived in the undergrowth and were without
+human form. Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but
+many had died, and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he
+had told me—had come by violent ends. In answer to my question,
+Montgomery said that they actually bore offspring, but that these
+generally died. When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human
+form upon them. There was no evidence of the inheritance of their
+acquired human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the
+males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy
+the Law enjoined.
+
+ 
+
+
+It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;
+my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.
+Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the
+disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of
+their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—my eye became
+habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their
+persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly. Another point was the
+forward carriage of the head and the clumsy and inhuman curvature of
+the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked that inward sinuous curve of the
+back which makes the human figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders
+hunched clumsily, and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides.
+Few of them were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time
+upon the island.
+
+The next most obvious deformity was in their faces, almost all of which
+were prognathous, malformed about the ears, with large and protuberant
+noses, very furry or very bristly hair, and often strangely-coloured or
+strangely-placed eyes. None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a
+chattering titter. Beyond these general characters their heads had
+little in common; each preserved the quality of its particular species:
+the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox, or the
+sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been
+moulded. The voices, too, varied exceedingly. The hands were always
+malformed; and though some surprised me by their unexpected human
+appearance, almost all were deficient in the number of the digits,
+clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any tactile sensibility.
+
+The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature
+made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were the three
+bull-creatures who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man,
+who was also the Sayer of the Law, M’ling, and a satyr-like creature of
+ape and goat. There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a
+mare-rhinoceros-creature, and several other females whose sources I did
+not ascertain. There were several wolf-creatures, a bear-bull, and a
+Saint-Bernard-man. I have already described the Ape-man, and there was
+a particularly hateful (and evil-smelling) old woman made of vixen and
+bear, whom I hated from the beginning. She was said to be a passionate
+votary of the Law. Smaller creatures were certain dappled youths and my
+little sloth-creature. But enough of this catalogue.
+
+At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly
+that they were still brutes; but insensibly I became a little
+habituated to the idea of them, and moreover I was affected by
+Montgomery’s attitude towards them. He had been with them so long that
+he had come to regard them as almost normal human beings. His London
+days seemed a glorious, impossible past to him. Only once in a year or
+so did he go to Africa to deal with Moreau’s agent, a trader in animals
+there. He hardly met the finest type of mankind in that seafaring
+village of Spanish mongrels. The men aboard-ship, he told me, seemed at
+first just as strange to him as the Beast Men seemed to me,—unnaturally
+long in the leg, flat in the face, prominent in the forehead,
+suspicious, dangerous, and cold-hearted. In fact, he did not like men:
+his heart had warmed to me, he thought, because he had saved my life. I
+fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these
+metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but
+that he attempted to veil it from me at first.
+
+M’ling, the black-faced man, Montgomery’s attendant, the first of the
+Beast Folk I had encountered, did not live with the others across the
+island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure. The
+creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape-man, but far more
+docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk; and
+Montgomery had trained it to prepare food, and indeed to discharge all
+the trivial domestic offices that were required. It was a complex
+trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill,—a bear, tainted with dog and ox, and
+one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures. It treated
+Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion. Sometimes he would
+notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular names, and so
+make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he would ill-treat
+it, especially after he had been at the whiskey, kicking it, beating
+it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees. But whether he treated it
+well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be near him.
+
+I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things
+which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and
+ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from
+the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too
+peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well
+defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the
+launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself
+asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human
+yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the
+Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its
+speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city
+byway.
+
+Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond doubt
+or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage to all
+appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens, would stretch
+his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged
+incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives. Or in
+some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory daring into the eyes of
+some lithe, white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see (with a
+spasmodic revulsion) that she had slit-like pupils, or glancing down
+note the curving nail with which she held her shapeless wrap about her.
+It is a curious thing, by the bye, for which I am quite unable to
+account, that these weird creatures—the females, I mean—had in the
+earlier days of my stay an instinctive sense of their own repulsive
+clumsiness, and displayed in consequence a more than human regard for
+the decency and decorum of extensive costume.
diff --git a/chapters/How the beast folk taste blood.tex b/chapters/How the beast folk taste blood.tex
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@@ -0,0 +1,465 @@
+My inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of
+my story.
+
+After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across the island
+to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring into whose
+scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day. Both of us carried
+whips and loaded revolvers. While going through a leafy jungle on our
+road thither, we heard a rabbit squealing. We stopped and listened, but
+we heard no more; and presently we went on our way, and the incident
+dropped out of our minds. Montgomery called my attention to certain
+little pink animals with long hind-legs, that went leaping through the
+undergrowth. He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of
+the Beast People, that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might
+serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had
+defeated this intention. I had already encountered some of these
+creatures,—once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard-man, and
+once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day. By chance, one
+hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused by the uprooting of a
+wind-blown tree; before it could extricate itself we managed to catch
+it. It spat like a cat, scratched and kicked vigorously with its
+hind-legs, and made an attempt to bite; but its teeth were too feeble
+to inflict more than a painless pinch. It seemed to me rather a pretty
+little creature; and as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the
+turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine
+it might prove a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in
+gentlemen’s parks.
+
+We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and
+splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this. “Not to claw
+bark of trees,\emph{that} is the Law,” he said. “Much some of them care for
+it!” It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape-man.
+The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau,—his
+face ovine in expression, like the coarser Hebrew type; his voice a
+harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic. He was gnawing the husk of
+a pod-like fruit as he passed us. Both of them saluted Montgomery.
+
+“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”
+
+“There’s a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you’d better
+mind!”
+
+“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said—he said he was made.”
+
+The Satyr-man looked curiously at me. “The Third with the Whip, he that
+walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”
+
+“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.
+
+“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor
+weep. The Master does not bleed or weep.”
+
+“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you
+don’t look out!”
+
+“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
+
+“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on
+with him.
+
+The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to
+each other.
+
+“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
+
+“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not
+know.”
+
+Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
+
+It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit. The red body
+of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs
+stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
+
+At that Montgomery stopped. “Good God!” said he, stooping down, and
+picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely.
+“Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”
+
+“Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” I said after a
+pause. “This backbone has been bitten through.”
+
+He stood staring, with his face white and his lip pulled askew. “I
+don’t like this,” he said slowly.
+
+“I saw something of the same kind,” said I, “the first day I came
+here.”
+
+“The devil you did! What was it?”
+
+“A rabbit with its head twisted off.”
+
+“The day you came here?”
+
+“The day I came here. In the undergrowth at the back of the enclosure,
+when I went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”
+
+He gave a long, low whistle.
+
+“And what is more, I have an idea which of your brutes did the thing.
+It’s only a suspicion, you know. Before I came on the rabbit I saw one
+of your monsters drinking in the stream.”
+
+“Sucking his drink?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“‘Not to suck your drink; that is the Law.’ Much the brutes care for
+the Law, eh? when Moreau’s not about!”
+
+“It was the brute who chased me.”
+
+“Of course,” said Montgomery; “it’s just the way with carnivores. After
+a kill, they drink. It’s the taste of blood, you know.—What was the
+brute like?” he continued. “Would you know him again?” He glanced about
+us, standing astride over the mess of dead rabbit, his eyes roving
+among the shadows and screens of greenery, the lurking-places and
+ambuscades of the forest that bounded us in. “The taste of blood,” he
+said again.
+
+He took out his revolver, examined the cartridges in it and replaced
+it. Then he began to pull at his dropping lip.
+
+“I think I should know the brute again,” I said. “I stunned him. He
+ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”
+
+“But then we have to \emph{prove} that he killed the rabbit,” said
+Montgomery. “I wish I’d never brought the things here.”
+
+I should have gone on, but he stayed there thinking over the mangled
+rabbit in a puzzle-headed way. As it was, I went to such a distance
+that the rabbit’s remains were hidden.
+
+“Come on!” I said.
+
+Presently he woke up and came towards me. “You see,” he said, almost in
+a whisper, “they are all supposed to have a fixed idea against eating
+anything that runs on land. If some brute has by any accident tasted
+blood—”
+
+We went on some way in silence. “I wonder what can have happened,” he
+said to himself. Then, after a pause again: “I did a foolish thing the
+other day. That servant of mine—I showed him how to skin and cook a
+rabbit. It’s odd—I saw him licking his hands—It never occurred to me.”
+
+Then: “We must put a stop to this. I must tell Moreau.”
+
+He could think of nothing else on our homeward journey.
+
+Moreau took the matter even more seriously than Montgomery, and I need
+scarcely say that I was affected by their evident consternation.
+
+“We must make an example,” said Moreau. “I’ve no doubt in my own mind
+that the Leopard-man was the sinner. But how can we prove it? I wish,
+Montgomery, you had kept your taste for meat in hand, and gone without
+these exciting novelties. We may find ourselves in a mess yet, through
+it.”
+
+“I was a silly ass,” said Montgomery. “But the thing’s done now; and
+you said I might have them, you know.”
+
+“We must see to the thing at once,” said Moreau. “I suppose if anything
+should turn up, M’ling can take care of himself?”
+
+“I’m not so sure of M’ling,” said Montgomery. “I think I ought to know
+him.”
+
+In the afternoon, Moreau, Montgomery, myself, and M’ling went across
+the island to the huts in the ravine. We three were armed; M’ling
+carried the little hatchet he used in chopping firewood, and some coils
+of wire. Moreau had a huge cowherd’s horn slung over his shoulder.
+
+“You will see a gathering of the Beast People,” said Montgomery. “It is
+a pretty sight!”
+
+Moreau said not a word on the way, but the expression of his heavy,
+white-fringed face was grimly set.
+
+We crossed the ravine down which smoked the stream of hot water, and
+followed the winding pathway through the canebrakes until we reached a
+wide area covered over with a thick, powdery yellow substance which I
+believe was sulphur. Above the shoulder of a weedy bank the sea
+glittered. We came to a kind of shallow natural amphitheatre, and here
+the four of us halted. Then Moreau sounded the horn, and broke the
+sleeping stillness of the tropical afternoon. He must have had strong
+lungs. The hooting note rose and rose amidst its echoes, to at last an
+ear-penetrating intensity.
+
+“Ah!” said Moreau, letting the curved instrument fall to his side
+again.
+
+Immediately there was a crashing through the yellow canes, and a sound
+of voices from the dense green jungle that marked the morass through
+which I had run on the previous day. Then at three or four points on
+the edge of the sulphurous area appeared the grotesque forms of the
+Beast People hurrying towards us. I could not help a creeping horror,
+as I perceived first one and then another trot out from the trees or
+reeds and come shambling along over the hot dust. But Moreau and
+Montgomery stood calmly enough; and, perforce, I stuck beside them.
+
+First to arrive was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast a
+shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from the brake
+came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw
+as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the
+Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then
+others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe
+towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of
+the latter half of the litany of the Law,—“His is the Hand that wounds;
+His is the Hand that heals,” and so forth. As soon as they had
+approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and
+bowing on knees and elbows began flinging the white dust upon their
+heads.
+
+Imagine the scene if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our
+misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit
+yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle
+of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,—some almost human save in
+their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so
+strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our
+wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one
+direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees on the other, separating us
+from the ravine with the huts, and to the north the hazy horizon of the
+Pacific Ocean.
+
+“Sixty-two, sixty-three,” counted Moreau. “There are four more.”
+
+“I do not see the Leopard-man,” said I.
+
+Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, and at the sound of it
+all the Beast People writhed and grovelled in the dust. Then, slinking
+out of the canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the
+dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard-man. The
+last of the Beast People to arrive was the little Ape-man. The earlier
+animals, hot and weary with their grovelling, shot vicious glances at
+him.
+
+“Cease!” said Moreau, in his firm, loud voice; and the Beast People sat
+back upon their hams and rested from their worshipping.
+
+“Where is the Sayer of the Law?” said Moreau, and the hairy-grey
+monster bowed his face in the dust.
+
+“Say the words!” said Moreau.
+
+Forthwith all in the kneeling assembly, swaying from side to side and
+dashing up the sulphur with their hands,—first the right hand and a
+puff of dust, and then the left,—began once more to chant their strange
+litany. When they reached, “Not to eat Flesh or Fish, that is the Law,”
+Moreau held up his lank white hand.
+
+“Stop!” he cried, and there fell absolute silence upon them all.
+
+I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at
+their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive
+dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to
+be men.
+
+“That Law has been broken!” said Moreau.
+
+“None escape,” from the faceless creature with the silvery hair. “None
+escape,” repeated the kneeling circle of Beast People.
+
+“Who is he?” cried Moreau, and looked round at their faces, cracking
+his whip. I fancied the Hyena-swine looked dejected, so too did the
+Leopard-man. Moreau stopped, facing this creature, who cringed towards
+him with the memory and dread of infinite torment.
+
+“Who is he?” repeated Moreau, in a voice of thunder.
+
+“Evil is he who breaks the Law,” chanted the Sayer of the Law.
+
+Moreau looked into the eyes of the Leopard-man, and seemed to be
+dragging the very soul out of the creature.
+
+“Who breaks the Law—” said Moreau, taking his eyes off his victim, and
+turning towards us (it seemed to me there was a touch of exultation in
+his voice).
+
+“Goes back to the House of Pain,” they all clamoured,—“goes back to the
+House of Pain, O Master!”
+
+“Back to the House of Pain,—back to the House of Pain,” gabbled the
+Ape-man, as though the idea was sweet to him.
+
+“Do you hear?” said Moreau, turning back to the criminal, “my
+friend—Hullo!”
+
+For the Leopard-man, released from Moreau’s eye, had risen straight
+from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks
+flashing out from under his curling lips, leapt towards his tormentor.
+I am convinced that only the madness of unendurable fear could have
+prompted this attack. The whole circle of threescore monsters seemed to
+rise about us. I drew my revolver. The two figures collided. I saw
+Moreau reeling back from the Leopard-man’s blow. There was a furious
+yelling and howling all about us. Every one was moving rapidly. For a
+moment I thought it was a general revolt. The furious face of the
+Leopard-man flashed by mine, with M’ling close in pursuit. I saw the
+yellow eyes of the Hyena-swine blazing with excitement, his attitude as
+if he were half resolved to attack me. The Satyr, too, glared at me
+over the Hyena-swine’s hunched shoulders. I heard the crack of Moreau’s
+pistol, and saw the pink flash dart across the tumult. The whole crowd
+seemed to swing round in the direction of the glint of fire, and I too
+was swung round by the magnetism of the movement. In another second I
+was running, one of a tumultuous shouting crowd, in pursuit of the
+escaping Leopard-man.
+
+That is all I can tell definitely. I saw the Leopard-man strike Moreau,
+and then everything spun about me until I was running headlong. M’ling
+was ahead, close in pursuit of the fugitive. Behind, their tongues
+already lolling out, ran the Wolf-women in great leaping strides. The
+Swine folk followed, squealing with excitement, and the two Bull-men in
+their swathings of white. Then came Moreau in a cluster of the Beast
+People, his wide-brimmed straw hat blown off, his revolver in hand, and
+his lank white hair streaming out. The Hyena-swine ran beside me,
+keeping pace with me and glancing furtively at me out of his feline
+eyes, and the others came pattering and shouting behind us.
+
+The Leopard-man went bursting his way through the long canes, which
+sprang back as he passed, and rattled in M’ling’s face. We others in
+the rear found a trampled path for us when we reached the brake. The
+chase lay through the brake for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then
+plunged into a dense thicket, which retarded our movements exceedingly,
+though we went through it in a crowd together,—fronds flicking into our
+faces, ropy creepers catching us under the chin or gripping our ankles,
+thorny plants hooking into and tearing cloth and flesh together.
+
+“He has gone on all-fours through this,” panted Moreau, now just ahead
+of me.
+
+“None escape,” said the Wolf-bear, laughing into my face with the
+exultation of hunting. We burst out again among rocks, and saw the
+quarry ahead running lightly on all-fours and snarling at us over his
+shoulder. At that the Wolf Folk howled with delight. The Thing was
+still clothed, and at a distance its face still seemed human; but the
+carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its
+shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal. It leapt over some
+thorny yellow-flowering bushes, and was hidden. M’ling was halfway
+across the space.
+
+Most of us now had lost the first speed of the chase, and had fallen
+into a longer and steadier stride. I saw as we traversed the open that
+the pursuit was now spreading from a column into a line. The
+Hyena-swine still ran close to me, watching me as it ran, every now and
+then puckering its muzzle with a snarling laugh. At the edge of the
+rocks the Leopard-man, realising that he was making for the projecting
+cape upon which he had stalked me on the night of my arrival, had
+doubled in the undergrowth; but Montgomery had seen the manoeuvre, and
+turned him again. So, panting, tumbling against rocks, torn by
+brambles, impeded by ferns and reeds, I helped to pursue the
+Leopard-man who had broken the Law, and the Hyena-swine ran, laughing
+savagely, by my side. I staggered on, my head reeling and my heart
+beating against my ribs, tired almost to death, and yet not daring to
+lose sight of the chase lest I should be left alone with this horrible
+companion. I staggered on in spite of infinite fatigue and the dense
+heat of the tropical afternoon.
+
+At last the fury of the hunt slackened. We had pinned the wretched
+brute into a corner of the island. Moreau, whip in hand, marshalled us
+all into an irregular line, and we advanced now slowly, shouting to one
+another as we advanced and tightening the cordon about our victim. He
+lurked noiseless and invisible in the bushes through which I had run
+from him during that midnight pursuit.
+
+“Steady!” cried Moreau, “steady!” as the ends of the line crept round
+the tangle of undergrowth and hemmed the brute in.
+
+“Ware a rush!” came the voice of Montgomery from beyond the thicket.
+
+I was on the slope above the bushes; Montgomery and Moreau beat along
+the beach beneath. Slowly we pushed in among the fretted network of
+branches and leaves. The quarry was silent.
+
+“Back to the House of Pain, the House of Pain, the House of Pain!”
+yelped the voice of the Ape-man, some twenty yards to the right.
+
+When I heard that, I forgave the poor wretch all the fear he had
+inspired in me. I heard the twigs snap and the boughs swish aside
+before the heavy tread of the Horse-rhinoceros upon my right. Then
+suddenly through a polygon of green, in the half darkness under the
+luxuriant growth, I saw the creature we were hunting. I halted. He was
+crouched together into the smallest possible compass, his luminous
+green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.
+
+It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the
+fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal
+attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human
+face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity.
+In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be
+overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures
+of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its
+terror-struck eyes, and fired. As I did so, the Hyena-swine saw the
+Thing, and flung itself upon it with an eager cry, thrusting thirsty
+teeth into its neck. All about me the green masses of the thicket were
+swaying and cracking as the Beast People came rushing together. One
+face and then another appeared.
+
+“Don’t kill it, Prendick!” cried Moreau. “Don’t kill it!” and I saw him
+stooping as he pushed through under the fronds of the big ferns.
+
+In another moment he had beaten off the Hyena-swine with the handle of
+his whip, and he and Montgomery were keeping away the excited
+carnivorous Beast People, and particularly M’ling, from the still
+quivering body. The hairy-grey Thing came sniffing at the corpse under
+my arm. The other animals, in their animal ardour, jostled me to get a
+nearer view.
+
+“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said I, though I was not. “It was the impulse of the
+moment.” I felt sick with exertion and excitement. Turning, I pushed my
+way out of the crowding Beast People and went on alone up the slope
+towards the higher part of the headland. Under the shouted directions
+of Moreau I heard the three white-swathed Bull-men begin dragging the
+victim down towards the water.
+
+It was easy now for me to be alone. The Beast People manifested a quite
+human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot,
+sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach.
+I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the
+evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like
+a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable
+aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks
+beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several other of the
+Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still
+intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their
+loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind
+that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange
+persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the
+grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of
+human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and
+fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under:
+that was all the difference. Poor brute!
+
+Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had
+not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor
+victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only
+at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to
+me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly
+adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now
+they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never
+died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human
+existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long
+dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred
+me.
+
+Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at
+least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I
+could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.
+But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his
+mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown
+out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at
+last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal
+hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a
+brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.
+
+In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal
+fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring,
+and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must
+confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it
+suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast
+pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and
+I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for
+drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions,
+were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite
+complexity of its incessant wheels. But this condition did not come all
+at once: I think indeed that I anticipate a little in speaking of it
+now.
diff --git a/chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday.tex b/chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday.tex
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+++ b/chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday.tex	
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+When this was accomplished, and we had washed and eaten, Montgomery and
+I went into my little room and seriously discussed our position for the
+first time. It was then near midnight. He was almost sober, but greatly
+disturbed in his mind. He had been strangely under the influence of
+Moreau’s personality: I do not think it had ever occurred to him that
+Moreau could die. This disaster was the sudden collapse of the habits
+that had become part of his nature in the ten or more monotonous years
+he had spent on the island. He talked vaguely, answered my questions
+crookedly, wandered into general questions.
+
+“This silly ass of a world,” he said; “what a muddle it all is! I
+haven’t had any life. I wonder when it’s going to begin. Sixteen years
+being bullied by nurses and schoolmasters at their own sweet will; five
+in London grinding hard at medicine, bad food, shabby lodgings, shabby
+clothes, shabby vice, a blunder,—\emph{I} didn’t know any better,—and
+hustled off to this beastly island. Ten years here! What’s it all for,
+Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?”
+
+It was hard to deal with such ravings. “The thing we have to think of
+now,” said I, “is how to get away from this island.”
+
+“What’s the good of getting away? I’m an outcast. Where am \emph{I} to join
+on? It’s all very well for \emph{you}, Prendick. Poor old Moreau! We can’t
+leave him here to have his bones picked. As it is—And besides, what
+will become of the decent part of the Beast Folk?”
+
+“Well,” said I, “that will do to-morrow. I’ve been thinking we might
+make the brushwood into a pyre and burn his body—and those other
+things. Then what will happen with the Beast Folk?”
+
+“\emph{I} don’t know. I suppose those that were made of beasts of prey will
+make silly asses of themselves sooner or later. We can’t massacre the
+lot—can we? I suppose that’s what \emph{your} humanity would suggest? But
+they’ll change. They are sure to change.”
+
+He talked thus inconclusively until at last I felt my temper going.
+
+“Damnation!” he exclaimed at some petulance of mine; “can’t you see I’m
+in a worse hole than you are?” And he got up, and went for the brandy.
+“Drink!” he said returning, “you logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of
+an atheist, drink!”
+
+“Not I,” said I, and sat grimly watching his face under the yellow
+paraffine flare, as he drank himself into a garrulous misery.
+
+I have a memory of infinite tedium. He wandered into a maudlin defence
+of the Beast People and of M’ling. M’ling, he said, was the only thing
+that had ever really cared for him. And suddenly an idea came to him.
+
+“I’m damned!” said he, staggering to his feet and clutching the brandy
+bottle.
+
+By some flash of intuition I knew what it was he intended. “You don’t
+give drink to that beast!” I said, rising and facing him.
+
+“Beast!” said he. “You’re the beast. He takes his liquor like a
+Christian. Come out of the way, Prendick!”
+
+“For God’s sake,” said I.
+
+“Get—out of the way!” he roared, and suddenly whipped out his revolver.
+
+“Very well,” said I, and stood aside, half-minded to fall upon him as
+he put his hand upon the latch, but deterred by the thought of my
+useless arm. “You’ve made a beast of yourself,—to the beasts you may
+go.”
+
+He flung the doorway open, and stood half facing me between the yellow
+lamp-light and the pallid glare of the moon; his eye-sockets were
+blotches of black under his stubbly eyebrows.
+
+“You’re a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You’re always fearing and
+fancying. We’re on the edge of things. I’m bound to cut my throat
+to-morrow. I’m going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night.” He turned
+and went out into the moonlight. “M’ling!” he cried; “M’ling, old
+friend!”
+
+Three dim creatures in the silvery light came along the edge of the wan
+beach,—one a white-wrapped creature, the other two blotches of
+blackness following it. They halted, staring. Then I saw M’ling’s
+hunched shoulders as he came round the corner of the house.
+
+“Drink!” cried Montgomery, “drink, you brutes! Drink and be men! Damme,
+I’m the cleverest. Moreau forgot this; this is the last touch. Drink, I
+tell you!” And waving the bottle in his hand he started off at a kind
+of quick trot to the westward, M’ling ranging himself between him and
+the three dim creatures who followed.
+
+I went to the doorway. They were already indistinct in the mist of the
+moonlight before Montgomery halted. I saw him administer a dose of the
+raw brandy to M’ling, and saw the five figures melt into one vague
+patch.
+
+“Sing!” I heard Montgomery shout,—“sing all together, ‘Confound old
+Prendick!’ That’s right; now again, ‘Confound old Prendick!’”
+
+The black group broke up into five separate figures, and wound slowly
+away from me along the band of shining beach. Each went howling at his
+own sweet will, yelping insults at me, or giving whatever other vent
+this new inspiration of brandy demanded. Presently I heard Montgomery’s
+voice shouting, “Right turn!” and they passed with their shouts and
+howls into the blackness of the landward trees. Slowly, very slowly,
+they receded into silence.
+
+The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past
+the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very
+bright riding through the empty blue sky. The shadow of the wall lay, a
+yard wide and of inky blackness, at my feet. The eastward sea was a
+featureless grey, dark and mysterious; and between the sea and the
+shadow the grey sands (of volcanic glass and crystals) flashed and
+shone like a beach of diamonds. Behind me the paraffine lamp flared hot
+and ruddy.
+
+Then I shut the door, locked it, and went into the enclosure where
+Moreau lay beside his latest victims,—the staghounds and the llama and
+some other wretched brutes,—with his massive face calm even after his
+terrible death, and with the hard eyes open, staring at the dead white
+moon above. I sat down upon the edge of the sink, and with my eyes upon
+that ghastly pile of silvery light and ominous shadows began to turn
+over my plans. In the morning I would gather some provisions in the
+dingey, and after setting fire to the pyre before me, push out into the
+desolation of the high sea once more. I felt that for Montgomery there
+was no help; that he was, in truth, half akin to these Beast Folk,
+unfitted for human kindred.
+
+I do not know how long I sat there scheming. It must have been an hour
+or so. Then my planning was interrupted by the return of Montgomery to
+my neighbourhood. I heard a yelling from many throats, a tumult of
+exultant cries passing down towards the beach, whooping and howling,
+and excited shrieks that seemed to come to a stop near the water’s
+edge. The riot rose and fell; I heard heavy blows and the splintering
+smash of wood, but it did not trouble me then. A discordant chanting
+began.
+
+My thoughts went back to my means of escape. I got up, brought the
+lamp, and went into a shed to look at some kegs I had seen there. Then
+I became interested in the contents of some biscuit-tins, and opened
+one. I saw something out of the tail of my eye,—a red figure,—and
+turned sharply.
+
+Behind me lay the yard, vividly black-and-white in the moonlight, and
+the pile of wood and faggots on which Moreau and his mutilated victims
+lay, one over another. They seemed to be gripping one another in one
+last revengeful grapple. His wounds gaped, black as night, and the
+blood that had dripped lay in black patches upon the sand. Then I saw,
+without understanding, the cause of my phantom,—a ruddy glow that came
+and danced and went upon the wall opposite. I misinterpreted this,
+fancied it was a reflection of my flickering lamp, and turned again to
+the stores in the shed. I went on rummaging among them, as well as a
+one-armed man could, finding this convenient thing and that, and
+putting them aside for to-morrow’s launch. My movements were slow, and
+the time passed quickly. Insensibly the daylight crept upon me.
+
+The chanting died down, giving place to a clamour; then it began again,
+and suddenly broke into a tumult. I heard cries of, “More! more!” a
+sound like quarrelling, and a sudden wild shriek. The quality of the
+sounds changed so greatly that it arrested my attention. I went out
+into the yard and listened. Then cutting like a knife across the
+confusion came the crack of a revolver.
+
+I rushed at once through my room to the little doorway. As I did so I
+heard some of the packing-cases behind me go sliding down and smash
+together with a clatter of glass on the floor of the shed. But I did
+not heed these. I flung the door open and looked out.
+
+Up the beach by the boathouse a bonfire was burning, raining up sparks
+into the indistinctness of the dawn. Around this struggled a mass of
+black figures. I heard Montgomery call my name. I began to run at once
+towards this fire, revolver in hand. I saw the pink tongue of
+Montgomery’s pistol lick out once, close to the ground. He was down. I
+shouted with all my strength and fired into the air. I heard some one
+cry, “The Master!” The knotted black struggle broke into scattering
+units, the fire leapt and sank down. The crowd of Beast People fled in
+sudden panic before me, up the beach. In my excitement I fired at their
+retreating backs as they disappeared among the bushes. Then I turned to
+the black heaps upon the ground.
+
+Montgomery lay on his back, with the hairy-grey Beast-man sprawling
+across his body. The brute was dead, but still gripping Montgomery’s
+throat with its curving claws. Near by lay M’ling on his face and quite
+still, his neck bitten open and the upper part of the smashed
+brandy-bottle in his hand. Two other figures lay near the fire,—the one
+motionless, the other groaning fitfully, every now and then raising its
+head slowly, then dropping it again.
+
+I caught hold of the grey man and pulled him off Montgomery’s body; his
+claws drew down the torn coat reluctantly as I dragged him away.
+Montgomery was dark in the face and scarcely breathing. I splashed
+sea-water on his face and pillowed his head on my rolled-up coat.
+M’ling was dead. The wounded creature by the fire—it was a Wolf-brute
+with a bearded grey face—lay, I found, with the fore part of its body
+upon the still glowing timber. The wretched thing was injured so
+dreadfully that in mercy I blew its brains out at once. The other brute
+was one of the Bull-men swathed in white. He too was dead. The rest of
+the Beast People had vanished from the beach.
+
+I went to Montgomery again and knelt beside him, cursing my ignorance
+of medicine. The fire beside me had sunk down, and only charred beams
+of timber glowing at the central ends and mixed with a grey ash of
+brushwood remained. I wondered casually where Montgomery had got his
+wood. Then I saw that the dawn was upon us. The sky had grown brighter,
+the setting moon was becoming pale and opaque in the luminous blue of
+the day. The sky to the eastward was rimmed with red.
+
+Suddenly I heard a thud and a hissing behind me, and, looking round,
+sprang to my feet with a cry of horror. Against the warm dawn great
+tumultuous masses of black smoke were boiling up out of the enclosure,
+and through their stormy darkness shot flickering threads of blood-red
+flame. Then the thatched roof caught. I saw the curving charge of the
+flames across the sloping straw. A spurt of fire jetted from the window
+of my room.
+
+I knew at once what had happened. I remembered the crash I had heard.
+When I had rushed out to Montgomery’s assistance, I had overturned the
+lamp.
+
+The hopelessness of saving any of the contents of the enclosure stared
+me in the face. My mind came back to my plan of flight, and turning
+swiftly I looked to see where the two boats lay upon the beach. They
+were gone! Two axes lay upon the sands beside me; chips and splinters
+were scattered broadcast, and the ashes of the bonfire were blackening
+and smoking under the dawn. Montgomery had burnt the boats to revenge
+himself upon me and prevent our return to mankind!
+
+A sudden convulsion of rage shook me. I was almost moved to batter his
+foolish head in, as he lay there helpless at my feet. Then suddenly his
+hand moved, so feebly, so pitifully, that my wrath vanished. He
+groaned, and opened his eyes for a minute. I knelt down beside him and
+raised his head. He opened his eyes again, staring silently at the
+dawn, and then they met mine. The lids fell.
+
+“Sorry,” he said presently, with an effort. He seemed trying to think.
+“The last,” he murmured, “the last of this silly universe. What a
+mess—”
+
+I listened. His head fell helplessly to one side. I thought some drink
+might revive him; but there was neither drink nor vessel in which to
+bring drink at hand. He seemed suddenly heavier. My heart went cold. I
+bent down to his face, put my hand through the rent in his blouse. He
+was dead; and even as he died a line of white heat, the limb of the
+sun, rose eastward beyond the projection of the bay, splashing its
+radiance across the sky and turning the dark sea into a weltering
+tumult of dazzling light. It fell like a glory upon his death-shrunken
+face.
+
+I let his head fall gently upon the rough pillow I had made for him,
+and stood up. Before me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the
+awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the
+island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The
+enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with
+sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash.
+The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the
+distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the
+charred vestiges of the boats and these five dead bodies.
+
+Then out of the bushes came three Beast People, with hunched shoulders,
+protruding heads, misshapen hands awkwardly held, and inquisitive,
+unfriendly eyes and advanced towards me with hesitating gestures.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/chapters/The Finding of Moreau.tex b/chapters/The Finding of Moreau.tex
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+++ b/chapters/The Finding of Moreau.tex	
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+When I saw Montgomery swallow a third dose of brandy, I took it upon
+myself to interfere. He was already more than half fuddled. I told him
+that some serious thing must have happened to Moreau by this time, or
+he would have returned before this, and that it behoved us to ascertain
+what that catastrophe was. Montgomery raised some feeble objections,
+and at last agreed. We had some food, and then all three of us started.
+
+It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time, but even now
+that start into the hot stillness of the tropical afternoon is a
+singularly vivid impression. M’ling went first, his shoulder hunched,
+his strange black head moving with quick starts as he peered first on
+this side of the way and then on that. He was unarmed; his axe he had
+dropped when he encountered the Swine-man. Teeth were \emph{his} weapons,
+when it came to fighting. Montgomery followed with stumbling footsteps,
+his hands in his pockets, his face downcast; he was in a state of
+muddled sullenness with me on account of the brandy. My left arm was in
+a sling (it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my
+right. Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of the
+island, going northwestward; and presently M’ling stopped, and became
+rigid with watchfulness. Montgomery almost staggered into him, and then
+stopped too. Then, listening intently, we heard coming through the
+trees the sound of voices and footsteps approaching us.
+
+“He is dead,” said a deep, vibrating voice.
+
+“He is not dead; he is not dead,” jabbered another.
+
+“We saw, we saw,” said several voices.
+
+“\emph{Hul}-lo!” suddenly shouted Montgomery, “Hullo, there!”
+
+“Confound you!” said I, and gripped my pistol.
+
+There was a silence, then a crashing among the interlacing vegetation,
+first here, then there, and then half-a-dozen faces appeared,—strange
+faces, lit by a strange light. M’ling made a growling noise in his
+throat. I recognised the Ape-man: I had indeed already identified his
+voice, and two of the white-swathed brown-featured creatures I had seen
+in Montgomery’s boat. With these were the two dappled brutes and that
+grey, horribly crooked creature who said the Law, with grey hair
+streaming down its cheeks, heavy grey eyebrows, and grey locks pouring
+off from a central parting upon its sloping forehead,—a heavy, faceless
+thing, with strange red eyes, looking at us curiously from amidst the
+green.
+
+For a space no one spoke. Then Montgomery hiccoughed, “Who—said he was
+dead?”
+
+The Monkey-man looked guiltily at the hairy-grey Thing. “He is dead,”
+said this monster. “They saw.”
+
+There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate. They
+seemed awestricken and puzzled.
+
+“Where is he?” said Montgomery.
+
+“Beyond,” and the grey creature pointed.
+
+“Is there a Law now?” asked the Monkey-man. “Is it still to be this and
+that? Is he dead indeed?”
+
+“Is there a Law?” repeated the man in white. “Is there a Law, thou
+Other with the Whip?”
+
+“He is dead,” said the hairy-grey Thing. And they all stood watching
+us.
+
+“Prendick,” said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me. “He’s dead,
+evidently.”
+
+I had been standing behind him during this colloquy. I began to see how
+things lay with them. I suddenly stepped in front of Montgomery and
+lifted up my voice:—“Children of the Law,” I said, “he is \emph{not} dead!”
+M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. “He has changed his shape; he has
+changed his body,” I went on. “For a time you will not see him. He
+is—there,” I pointed upward, “where he can watch you. You cannot see
+him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!”
+
+I looked at them squarely. They flinched.
+
+“He is great, he is good,” said the Ape-man, peering fearfully upward
+among the dense trees.
+
+“And the other Thing?” I demanded.
+
+“The Thing that bled, and ran screaming and sobbing,—that is dead too,”
+said the grey Thing, still regarding me.
+
+“That’s well,” grunted Montgomery.
+
+“The Other with the Whip—” began the grey Thing.
+
+“Well?” said I.
+
+“Said he was dead.”
+
+But Montgomery was still sober enough to understand my motive in
+denying Moreau’s death. “He is not dead,” he said slowly, “not dead at
+all. No more dead than I am.”
+
+“Some,” said I, “have broken the Law: they will die. Some have died.
+Show us now where his old body lies,—the body he cast away because he
+had no more need of it.”
+
+“It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea,” said the grey Thing.
+
+And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult of
+ferns and creepers and tree-stems towards the northwest. Then came a
+yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus
+rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared a monster in
+headlong pursuit, blood-bedabbled, who was amongst us almost before he
+could stop his career. The grey Thing leapt aside. M’ling, with a
+snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside. Montgomery fired and missed,
+bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the
+Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into its ugly face. I
+saw its features vanish in a flash: its face was driven in. Yet it
+passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside
+him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death-agony.
+
+I found myself alone with M’ling, the dead brute, and the prostrate
+man. Montgomery raised himself slowly and stared in a muddled way at
+the shattered Beast Man beside him. It more than half sobered him. He
+scrambled to his feet. Then I saw the grey Thing returning cautiously
+through the trees.
+
+“See,” said I, pointing to the dead brute, “is the Law not alive? This
+came of breaking the Law.”
+
+He peered at the body. “He sends the Fire that kills,” said he, in his
+deep voice, repeating part of the Ritual. The others gathered round and
+stared for a space.
+
+At last we drew near the westward extremity of the island. We came upon
+the gnawed and mutilated body of the puma, its shoulder-bone smashed by
+a bullet, and perhaps twenty yards farther found at last what we
+sought. Moreau lay face downward in a trampled space in a canebrake.
+One hand was almost severed at the wrist and his silvery hair was
+dabbled in blood. His head had been battered in by the fetters of the
+puma. The broken canes beneath him were smeared with blood. His
+revolver we could not find. Montgomery turned him over. Resting at
+intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People (for he was a
+heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure. The night was
+darkling. Twice we heard unseen creatures howling and shrieking past
+our little band, and once the little pink sloth-creature appeared and
+stared at us, and vanished again. But we were not attacked again. At
+the gates of the enclosure our company of Beast People left us, M’ling
+going with the rest. We locked ourselves in, and then took Moreau’s
+mangled body into the yard and laid it upon a pile of brushwood. Then
+we went into the laboratory and put an end to all we found living
+there.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk.tex b/chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk.tex
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+++ b/chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk.tex	
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+In this way I became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor
+Moreau. When I awoke, it was dark about me. My arm ached in its
+bandages. I sat up, wondering at first where I might be. I heard coarse
+voices talking outside. Then I saw that my barricade had gone, and that
+the opening of the hut stood clear. My revolver was still in my hand.
+
+I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close
+beside me. I held my breath, trying to see what it was. It began to
+move slowly, interminably. Then something soft and warm and moist
+passed across my hand. All my muscles contracted. I snatched my hand
+away. A cry of alarm began and was stifled in my throat. Then I just
+realised what had happened sufficiently to stay my fingers on the
+revolver.
+
+“Who is that?” I said in a hoarse whisper, the revolver still pointed.
+
+“\emph{I}—Master.”
+
+“Who are \emph{you?}”
+
+“They say there is no Master now. But I know, I know. I carried the
+bodies into the sea, O Walker in the Sea! the bodies of those you slew.
+I am your slave, Master.”
+
+“Are you the one I met on the beach?” I asked.
+
+“The same, Master.”
+
+The Thing was evidently faithful enough, for it might have fallen upon
+me as I slept. “It is well,” I said, extending my hand for another
+licking kiss. I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide
+of my courage flowed. “Where are the others?” I asked.
+
+“They are mad; they are fools,” said the Dog-man. “Even now they talk
+together beyond there. They say, ‘The Master is dead. The Other with
+the Whip is dead. That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are. We
+have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.
+We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no
+Whips for ever again.’ So they say. But I know, Master, I know.”
+
+I felt in the darkness, and patted the Dog-man’s head. “It is well,” I
+said again.
+
+“Presently you will slay them all,” said the Dog-man.
+
+“Presently,” I answered, “I will slay them all,—after certain days and
+certain things have come to pass. Every one of them save those you
+spare, every one of them shall be slain.”
+
+“What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills,” said the Dog-man
+with a certain satisfaction in his voice.
+
+“And that their sins may grow,” I said, “let them live in their folly
+until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.”
+
+“The Master’s will is sweet,” said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of
+his canine blood.
+
+“But one has sinned,” said I. “Him I will kill, whenever I may meet
+him. When I say to you, ‘\emph{That is he},’ see that you fall upon him. And
+now I will go to the men and women who are assembled together.”
+
+For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the
+Dog-man. Then I followed and stood up, almost in the exact spot where I
+had been when I had heard Moreau and his staghound pursuing me. But now
+it was night, and all the miasmatic ravine about me was black; and
+beyond, instead of a green, sunlit slope, I saw a red fire, before
+which hunched, grotesque figures moved to and fro. Farther were the
+thick trees, a bank of darkness, fringed above with the black lace of
+the upper branches. The moon was just riding up on the edge of the
+ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that
+was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.
+
+“Walk by me,” said I, nerving myself; and side by side we walked down
+the narrow way, taking little heed of the dim Things that peered at us
+out of the huts.
+
+None about the fire attempted to salute me. Most of them disregarded
+me, ostentatiously. I looked round for the Hyena-swine, but he was not
+there. Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring
+into the fire or talking to one another.
+
+“He is dead, he is dead! the Master is dead!” said the voice of the
+Ape-man to the right of me. “The House of Pain—there is no House of
+Pain!”
+
+“He is not dead,” said I, in a loud voice. “Even now he watches us!”
+
+This startled them. Twenty pairs of eyes regarded me.
+
+“The House of Pain is gone,” said I. “It will come again. The Master
+you cannot see; yet even now he listens among you.”
+
+“True, true!” said the Dog-man.
+
+They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and
+cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
+
+“The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing,” said one of the
+Beast Folk.
+
+“I tell you it is so,” I said. “The Master and the House of Pain will
+come again. Woe be to him who breaks the Law!”
+
+They looked curiously at one another. With an affectation of
+indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my
+hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.
+
+Then the Satyr raised a doubt. I answered him. Then one of the dappled
+things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire.
+Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I
+talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of
+my excitement, that had troubled me at first. In the course of about an
+hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of
+my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I
+kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena-swine, but he never appeared.
+Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my
+confidence grew rapidly. Then as the moon crept down from the zenith,
+one by one the listeners began to yawn (showing the oddest teeth in the
+light of the sinking fire), and first one and then another retired
+towards the dens in the ravine; and I, dreading the silence and
+darkness, went with them, knowing I was safer with several of them than
+with one alone.
+
+In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon this Island of
+Doctor Moreau. But from that night until the end came, there was but
+one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small
+unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that
+I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one
+cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these
+half-humanised brutes. There is much that sticks in my memory that I
+could write,—things that I would cheerfully give my right hand to
+forget; but they do not help the telling of the story.
+
+In the retrospect it is strange to remember how soon I fell in with
+these monsters’ ways, and gained my confidence again. I had my quarrels
+with them of course, and could show some of their teeth-marks still;
+but they soon gained a wholesome respect for my trick of throwing
+stones and for the bite of my hatchet. And my Saint-Bernard-man’s
+loyalty was of infinite service to me. I found their simple scale of
+honour was based mainly on the capacity for inflicting trenchant
+wounds. Indeed, I may say—without vanity, I hope—that I held something
+like pre-eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high
+spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented
+itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles,
+in grimaces.
+
+The Hyena-swine avoided me, and I was always on the alert for him. My
+inseparable Dog-man hated and dreaded him intensely. I really believe
+that was at the root of the brute’s attachment to me. It was soon
+evident to me that the former monster had tasted blood, and gone the
+way of the Leopard-man. He formed a lair somewhere in the forest, and
+became solitary. Once I tried to induce the Beast Folk to hunt him, but
+I lacked the authority to make them co-operate for one end. Again and
+again I tried to approach his den and come upon him unaware; but always
+he was too acute for me, and saw or winded me and got away. He too made
+every forest pathway dangerous to me and my ally with his lurking
+ambuscades. The Dog-man scarcely dared to leave my side.
+
+In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter
+condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine
+friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink
+sloth-creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following
+me about. The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength
+of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at
+me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained
+me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an
+idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the
+proper use of speech. He called it “Big Thinks” to distinguish it from
+“Little Thinks,” the sane every-day interests of life. If ever I made a
+remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to
+say it again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it, with a word
+wrong here or there, to all the milder of the Beast People. He thought
+nothing of what was plain and comprehensible. I invented some very
+curious “Big Thinks” for his especial use. I think now that he was the
+silliest creature I ever met; he had developed in the most wonderful
+way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the
+natural folly of a monkey.
+
+This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these
+brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the
+Law, and behaved with general decorum. Once I found another rabbit torn
+to pieces,—by the Hyena-swine, I am assured,—but that was all. It was
+about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in
+their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a
+growing disinclination to talk. My Monkey-man’s jabber multiplied in
+volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian.
+Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech,
+though they still understood what I said to them at that time. (Can you
+imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering,
+losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?) And they
+walked erect with an increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt
+ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or
+another running on toes and finger-tips, and quite unable to recover
+the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by
+suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more
+keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the “stubborn
+beast-flesh.” They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
+
+Some of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were
+all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately
+for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the
+institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing
+its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
+
+My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he
+became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy. I scarcely noticed the transition from
+the companion on my right hand to the lurching dog at my side.
+
+As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the
+lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome
+that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of
+boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau’s enclosure. Some memory of pain,
+I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.
+
+It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these
+monsters,—to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how
+they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch
+of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how
+their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the
+quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the
+first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall.
+
+The change was slow and inevitable. For them and for me it came without
+any definite shock. I still went among them in safety, because no jolt
+in the downward glide had released the increasing charge of explosive
+animalism that ousted the human day by day. But I began to fear that
+soon now that shock must come. My Saint-Bernard-brute followed me to
+the enclosure every night, and his vigilance enabled me to sleep at
+times in something like peace. The little pink sloth-thing became shy
+and left me, to crawl back to its natural life once more among the
+tree-branches. We were in just the state of equilibrium that would
+remain in one of those “Happy Family” cages which animal-tamers
+exhibit, if the tamer were to leave it for ever.
+
+Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as the
+reader has seen in zoological gardens,—into ordinary bears, wolves,
+tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about
+each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was
+ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but
+each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism
+appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds
+of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary
+recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the
+fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect.
+
+I too must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as
+yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew
+long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have
+a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.
+
+At first I spent the daylight hours on the southward beach watching for
+a ship, hoping and praying for a ship. I counted on the \emph{Ipecacuanha}
+returning as the year wore on; but she never came. Five times I saw
+sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island. I always
+had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island
+was taken to account for that.
+
+It was only about September or October that I began to think of making
+a raft. By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my
+service again. At first, I found my helplessness appalling. I had never
+done any carpentry or such-like work in my life, and I spent day after
+day in experimental chopping and binding among the trees. I had no
+ropes, and could hit on nothing wherewith to make ropes; none of the
+abundant creepers seemed limber or strong enough, and with all my
+litter of scientific education I could not devise any way of making
+them so. I spent more than a fortnight grubbing among the black ruins
+of the enclosure and on the beach where the boats had been burnt,
+looking for nails and other stray pieces of metal that might prove of
+service. Now and then some Beast-creature would watch me, and go
+leaping off when I called to it. There came a season of thunder-storms
+and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft
+was completed.
+
+I was delighted with it. But with a certain lack of practical sense
+which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the
+sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen
+to pieces. Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it;
+but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days
+I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of
+death.
+
+I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned
+me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,—for each
+fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.
+
+I was lying in the shade of the enclosure wall, staring out to sea,
+when I was startled by something cold touching the skin of my heel, and
+starting round found the little pink sloth-creature blinking into my
+face. He had long since lost speech and active movement, and the lank
+hair of the little brute grew thicker every day and his stumpy claws
+more askew. He made a moaning noise when he saw he had attracted my
+attention, went a little way towards the bushes and looked back at me.
+
+At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he
+wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,—slowly, for the day
+was hot. When we reached the trees he clambered into them, for he could
+travel better among their swinging creepers than on the ground. And
+suddenly in a trampled space I came upon a ghastly group. My
+Saint-Bernard-creature lay on the ground, dead; and near his body
+crouched the Hyena-swine, gripping the quivering flesh with its
+misshapen claws, gnawing at it, and snarling with delight. As I
+approached, the monster lifted its glaring eyes to mine, its lips went
+trembling back from its red-stained teeth, and it growled menacingly.
+It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint
+had vanished. I advanced a step farther, stopped, and pulled out my
+revolver. At last I had him face to face.
+
+The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair
+bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and
+fired. As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was
+knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand,
+and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me. I fell under
+the hind part of its body; but luckily I had hit as I meant, and it had
+died even as it leapt. I crawled out from under its unclean weight and
+stood up trembling, staring at its quivering body. That danger at least
+was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses
+that must come.
+
+I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw
+that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The
+Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the
+ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the
+thickets of the island. Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the
+island might have seemed deserted to a new-comer; but at night the air
+was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a
+massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife. Had I
+possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin
+the killing. There could now be scarcely a score left of the dangerous
+carnivores; the braver of these were already dead. After the death of
+this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the
+practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at
+night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a
+narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make
+a considerable noise. The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and
+recovered their fear of it. I turned once more, almost passionately
+now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my
+escape.
+
+I found a thousand difficulties. I am an extremely unhandy man (my
+schooling was over before the days of Slöjd); but most of the
+requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or
+other, and this time I took care of the strength. The only
+insurmountable obstacle was that I had no vessel to contain the water I
+should need if I floated forth upon these untravelled seas. I would
+have even tried pottery, but the island contained no clay. I used to go
+moping about the island trying with all my might to solve this one last
+difficulty. Sometimes I would give way to wild outbursts of rage, and
+hack and splinter some unlucky tree in my intolerable vexation. But I
+could think of nothing.
+
+And then came a day, a wonderful day, which I spent in ecstasy. I saw a
+sail to the southwest, a small sail like that of a little schooner; and
+forthwith I lit a great pile of brushwood, and stood by it in the heat
+of it, and the heat of the midday sun, watching. All day I watched that
+sail, eating or drinking nothing, so that my head reeled; and the
+Beasts came and glared at me, and seemed to wonder, and went away. It
+was still distant when night came and swallowed it up; and all night I
+toiled to keep my blaze bright and high, and the eyes of the Beasts
+shone out of the darkness, marvelling. In the dawn the sail was nearer,
+and I saw it was the dirty lug-sail of a small boat. But it sailed
+strangely. My eyes were weary with watching, and I peered and could not
+believe them. Two men were in the boat, sitting low down,—one by the
+bows, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept to the wind; it
+yawed and fell away.
+
+As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to
+them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other. I
+went to the lowest point of the low headland, and gesticulated and
+shouted. There was no response, and the boat kept on her aimless
+course, making slowly, very slowly, for the bay. Suddenly a great white
+bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor
+noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its
+strong wings outspread.
+
+Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my
+chin on my hands and stared. Slowly, slowly, the boat drove past
+towards the west. I would have swum out to it, but something—a cold,
+vague fear—kept me back. In the afternoon the tide stranded the boat,
+and left it a hundred yards or so to the westward of the ruins of the
+enclosure. The men in it were dead, had been dead so long that they
+fell to pieces when I tilted the boat on its side and dragged them out.
+One had a shock of red hair, like the captain of the \emph{Ipecacuanha}, and
+a dirty white cap lay in the bottom of the boat.
+
+As I stood beside the boat, three of the Beasts came slinking out of
+the bushes and sniffing towards me. One of my spasms of disgust came
+upon me. I thrust the little boat down the beach and clambered on board
+her. Two of the brutes were Wolf-beasts, and came forward with
+quivering nostrils and glittering eyes; the third was the horrible
+nondescript of bear and bull. When I saw them approaching those
+wretched remains, heard them snarling at one another and caught the
+gleam of their teeth, a frantic horror succeeded my repulsion. I turned
+my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea. I
+could not bring myself to look behind me.
+
+I lay, however, between the reef and the island that night, and the
+next morning went round to the stream and filled the empty keg aboard
+with water. Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a
+quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last
+three cartridges. While I was doing this I left the boat moored to an
+inward projection of the reef, for fear of the Beast People.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/main.tex b/main.tex
index f2ea382..b8e9208 100644
--- a/main.tex
+++ b/main.tex
@@ -150,1826 +150,38 @@
 
 \chapter{CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK}
 \cleardoublepage
-I woke early. Moreau’s explanation stood before my mind, clear and
-definite, from the moment of my awakening. I got out of the hammock and
-went to the door to assure myself that the key was turned. Then I tried
-the window-bar, and found it firmly fixed. That these man-like
-creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque
-travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their
-possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
 
-A tapping came at the door, and I heard the glutinous accents of M’ling
-speaking. I pocketed one of the revolvers (keeping one hand upon it),
-and opened to him.
-
-“Good-morning, sair,” he said, bringing in, in addition to the
-customary herb-breakfast, an ill-cooked rabbit. Montgomery followed
-him. His roving eye caught the position of my arm and he smiled askew.
-
-The puma was resting to heal that day; but Moreau, who was singularly
-solitary in his habits, did not join us. I talked with Montgomery to
-clear my ideas of the way in which the Beast Folk lived. In particular,
-I was urgent to know how these inhuman monsters were kept from falling
-upon Moreau and Montgomery and from rending one another. He explained
-to me that the comparative safety of Moreau and himself was due to the
-limited mental scope of these monsters. In spite of their increased
-intelligence and the tendency of their animal instincts to reawaken,
-they had certain fixed ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds, which
-absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really hypnotised; had
-been told that certain things were impossible, and that certain things
-were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the texture
-of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.
-
-Certain matters, however, in which old instinct was at war with
-Moreau’s convenience, were in a less stable condition. A series of
-propositions called the Law (I had already heard them recited) battled
-in their minds with the deep-seated, ever-rebellious cravings of their
-animal natures. This Law they were ever repeating, I found, and ever
-breaking. Both Montgomery and Moreau displayed particular solicitude to
-keep them ignorant of the taste of blood; they feared the inevitable
-suggestions of that flavour. Montgomery told me that the Law,
-especially among the feline Beast People, became oddly weakened about
-nightfall; that then the animal was at its strongest; that a spirit of
-adventure sprang up in them at the dusk, when they would dare things
-they never seemed to dream about by day. To that I owed my stalking by
-the Leopard-man, on the night of my arrival. But during these earlier
-days of my stay they broke the Law only furtively and after dark; in
-the daylight there was a general atmosphere of respect for its
-multifarious prohibitions.
-
-And here perhaps I may give a few general facts about the island and
-the Beast People. The island, which was of irregular outline and lay
-low upon the wide sea, had a total area, I suppose, of seven or eight
-square miles.\footnote{This description corresponds in every respect to Noble’s Isle.—C.
-E. P.} It was volcanic in origin, and was now fringed on
-three sides by coral reefs; some fumaroles to the northward, and a hot
-spring, were the only vestiges of the forces that had long since
-originated it. Now and then a faint quiver of earthquake would be
-sensible, and sometimes the ascent of the spire of smoke would be
-rendered tumultuous by gusts of steam; but that was all. The population
-of the island, Montgomery informed me, now numbered rather more than
-sixty of these strange creations of Moreau’s art, not counting the
-smaller monstrosities which lived in the undergrowth and were without
-human form. Altogether he had made nearly a hundred and twenty; but
-many had died, and others—like the writhing Footless Thing of which he
-had told me—had come by violent ends. In answer to my question,
-Montgomery said that they actually bore offspring, but that these
-generally died. When they lived, Moreau took them and stamped the human
-form upon them. There was no evidence of the inheritance of their
-acquired human characteristics. The females were less numerous than the
-males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the monogamy
-the Law enjoined.
-
- 
-
-
-It would be impossible for me to describe these Beast People in detail;
-my eye has had no training in details, and unhappily I cannot sketch.
-Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the
-disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of
-their bodies; and yet—so relative is our idea of grace—my eye became
-habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their
-persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly. Another point was the
-forward carriage of the head and the clumsy and inhuman curvature of
-the spine. Even the Ape-man lacked that inward sinuous curve of the
-back which makes the human figure so graceful. Most had their shoulders
-hunched clumsily, and their short forearms hung weakly at their sides.
-Few of them were conspicuously hairy, at least until the end of my time
-upon the island.
-
-The next most obvious deformity was in their faces, almost all of which
-were prognathous, malformed about the ears, with large and protuberant
-noses, very furry or very bristly hair, and often strangely-coloured or
-strangely-placed eyes. None could laugh, though the Ape-man had a
-chattering titter. Beyond these general characters their heads had
-little in common; each preserved the quality of its particular species:
-the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox, or the
-sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been
-moulded. The voices, too, varied exceedingly. The hands were always
-malformed; and though some surprised me by their unexpected human
-appearance, almost all were deficient in the number of the digits,
-clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any tactile sensibility.
-
-The two most formidable Animal Men were my Leopard-man and a creature
-made of hyena and swine. Larger than these were the three
-bull-creatures who pulled in the boat. Then came the silvery-hairy-man,
-who was also the Sayer of the Law, M’ling, and a satyr-like creature of
-ape and goat. There were three Swine-men and a Swine-woman, a
-mare-rhinoceros-creature, and several other females whose sources I did
-not ascertain. There were several wolf-creatures, a bear-bull, and a
-Saint-Bernard-man. I have already described the Ape-man, and there was
-a particularly hateful (and evil-smelling) old woman made of vixen and
-bear, whom I hated from the beginning. She was said to be a passionate
-votary of the Law. Smaller creatures were certain dappled youths and my
-little sloth-creature. But enough of this catalogue.
-
-At first I had a shivering horror of the brutes, felt all too keenly
-that they were still brutes; but insensibly I became a little
-habituated to the idea of them, and moreover I was affected by
-Montgomery’s attitude towards them. He had been with them so long that
-he had come to regard them as almost normal human beings. His London
-days seemed a glorious, impossible past to him. Only once in a year or
-so did he go to Africa to deal with Moreau’s agent, a trader in animals
-there. He hardly met the finest type of mankind in that seafaring
-village of Spanish mongrels. The men aboard-ship, he told me, seemed at
-first just as strange to him as the Beast Men seemed to me,—unnaturally
-long in the leg, flat in the face, prominent in the forehead,
-suspicious, dangerous, and cold-hearted. In fact, he did not like men:
-his heart had warmed to me, he thought, because he had saved my life. I
-fancied even then that he had a sneaking kindness for some of these
-metamorphosed brutes, a vicious sympathy with some of their ways, but
-that he attempted to veil it from me at first.
-
-M’ling, the black-faced man, Montgomery’s attendant, the first of the
-Beast Folk I had encountered, did not live with the others across the
-island, but in a small kennel at the back of the enclosure. The
-creature was scarcely so intelligent as the Ape-man, but far more
-docile, and the most human-looking of all the Beast Folk; and
-Montgomery had trained it to prepare food, and indeed to discharge all
-the trivial domestic offices that were required. It was a complex
-trophy of Moreau’s horrible skill,—a bear, tainted with dog and ox, and
-one of the most elaborately made of all his creatures. It treated
-Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion. Sometimes he would
-notice it, pat it, call it half-mocking, half-jocular names, and so
-make it caper with extraordinary delight; sometimes he would ill-treat
-it, especially after he had been at the whiskey, kicking it, beating
-it, pelting it with stones or lighted fusees. But whether he treated it
-well or ill, it loved nothing so much as to be near him.
-
-I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things
-which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and
-ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from
-the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too
-peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well
-defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the
-launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself
-asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human
-yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the
-Fox-bear woman’s vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its
-speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city
-byway.
-
-Yet every now and then the beast would flash out upon me beyond doubt
-or denial. An ugly-looking man, a hunch-backed human savage to all
-appearance, squatting in the aperture of one of the dens, would stretch
-his arms and yawn, showing with startling suddenness scissor-edged
-incisors and sabre-like canines, keen and brilliant as knives. Or in
-some narrow pathway, glancing with a transitory daring into the eyes of
-some lithe, white-swathed female figure, I would suddenly see (with a
-spasmodic revulsion) that she had slit-like pupils, or glancing down
-note the curving nail with which she held her shapeless wrap about her.
-It is a curious thing, by the bye, for which I am quite unable to
-account, that these weird creatures—the females, I mean—had in the
-earlier days of my stay an instinctive sense of their own repulsive
-clumsiness, and displayed in consequence a more than human regard for
-the decency and decorum of extensive costume.
+\include{chapters/Concerning the beast folk}
 
 \chapter{HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTE BLOOD}
 \cleardoublepage
-My inexperience as a writer betrays me, and I wander from the thread of
-my story.
 
-After I had breakfasted with Montgomery, he took me across the island
-to see the fumarole and the source of the hot spring into whose
-scalding waters I had blundered on the previous day. Both of us carried
-whips and loaded revolvers. While going through a leafy jungle on our
-road thither, we heard a rabbit squealing. We stopped and listened, but
-we heard no more; and presently we went on our way, and the incident
-dropped out of our minds. Montgomery called my attention to certain
-little pink animals with long hind-legs, that went leaping through the
-undergrowth. He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of
-the Beast People, that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might
-serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had
-defeated this intention. I had already encountered some of these
-creatures,—once during my moonlight flight from the Leopard-man, and
-once during my pursuit by Moreau on the previous day. By chance, one
-hopping to avoid us leapt into the hole caused by the uprooting of a
-wind-blown tree; before it could extricate itself we managed to catch
-it. It spat like a cat, scratched and kicked vigorously with its
-hind-legs, and made an attempt to bite; but its teeth were too feeble
-to inflict more than a painless pinch. It seemed to me rather a pretty
-little creature; and as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the
-turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine
-it might prove a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in
-gentlemen’s parks.
-
-We also saw on our way the trunk of a tree barked in long strips and
-splintered deeply. Montgomery called my attention to this. “Not to claw
-bark of trees,\emph{that} is the Law,” he said. “Much some of them care for
-it!” It was after this, I think, that we met the Satyr and the Ape-man.
-The Satyr was a gleam of classical memory on the part of Moreau,—his
-face ovine in expression, like the coarser Hebrew type; his voice a
-harsh bleat, his nether extremities Satanic. He was gnawing the husk of
-a pod-like fruit as he passed us. Both of them saluted Montgomery.
-
-“Hail,” said they, “to the Other with the Whip!”
-
-“There’s a Third with a Whip now,” said Montgomery. “So you’d better
-mind!”
-
-“Was he not made?” said the Ape-man. “He said—he said he was made.”
-
-The Satyr-man looked curiously at me. “The Third with the Whip, he that
-walks weeping into the sea, has a thin white face.”
-
-“He has a thin long whip,” said Montgomery.
-
-“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr. “You never bleed nor
-weep. The Master does not bleed or weep.”
-
-“Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you
-don’t look out!”
-
-“He has five fingers, he is a five-man like me,” said the Ape-man.
-
-“Come along, Prendick,” said Montgomery, taking my arm; and I went on
-with him.
-
-The Satyr and the Ape-man stood watching us and making other remarks to
-each other.
-
-“He says nothing,” said the Satyr. “Men have voices.”
-
-“Yesterday he asked me of things to eat,” said the Ape-man. “He did not
-know.”
-
-Then they spoke inaudible things, and I heard the Satyr laughing.
-
-It was on our way back that we came upon the dead rabbit. The red body
-of the wretched little beast was rent to pieces, many of the ribs
-stripped white, and the backbone indisputably gnawed.
-
-At that Montgomery stopped. “Good God!” said he, stooping down, and
-picking up some of the crushed vertebrae to examine them more closely.
-“Good God!” he repeated, “what can this mean?”
-
-“Some carnivore of yours has remembered its old habits,” I said after a
-pause. “This backbone has been bitten through.”
-
-He stood staring, with his face white and his lip pulled askew. “I
-don’t like this,” he said slowly.
-
-“I saw something of the same kind,” said I, “the first day I came
-here.”
-
-“The devil you did! What was it?”
-
-“A rabbit with its head twisted off.”
-
-“The day you came here?”
-
-“The day I came here. In the undergrowth at the back of the enclosure,
-when I went out in the evening. The head was completely wrung off.”
-
-He gave a long, low whistle.
-
-“And what is more, I have an idea which of your brutes did the thing.
-It’s only a suspicion, you know. Before I came on the rabbit I saw one
-of your monsters drinking in the stream.”
-
-“Sucking his drink?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“‘Not to suck your drink; that is the Law.’ Much the brutes care for
-the Law, eh? when Moreau’s not about!”
-
-“It was the brute who chased me.”
-
-“Of course,” said Montgomery; “it’s just the way with carnivores. After
-a kill, they drink. It’s the taste of blood, you know.—What was the
-brute like?” he continued. “Would you know him again?” He glanced about
-us, standing astride over the mess of dead rabbit, his eyes roving
-among the shadows and screens of greenery, the lurking-places and
-ambuscades of the forest that bounded us in. “The taste of blood,” he
-said again.
-
-He took out his revolver, examined the cartridges in it and replaced
-it. Then he began to pull at his dropping lip.
-
-“I think I should know the brute again,” I said. “I stunned him. He
-ought to have a handsome bruise on the forehead of him.”
-
-“But then we have to \emph{prove} that he killed the rabbit,” said
-Montgomery. “I wish I’d never brought the things here.”
-
-I should have gone on, but he stayed there thinking over the mangled
-rabbit in a puzzle-headed way. As it was, I went to such a distance
-that the rabbit’s remains were hidden.
-
-“Come on!” I said.
-
-Presently he woke up and came towards me. “You see,” he said, almost in
-a whisper, “they are all supposed to have a fixed idea against eating
-anything that runs on land. If some brute has by any accident tasted
-blood—”
-
-We went on some way in silence. “I wonder what can have happened,” he
-said to himself. Then, after a pause again: “I did a foolish thing the
-other day. That servant of mine—I showed him how to skin and cook a
-rabbit. It’s odd—I saw him licking his hands—It never occurred to me.”
-
-Then: “We must put a stop to this. I must tell Moreau.”
-
-He could think of nothing else on our homeward journey.
-
-Moreau took the matter even more seriously than Montgomery, and I need
-scarcely say that I was affected by their evident consternation.
-
-“We must make an example,” said Moreau. “I’ve no doubt in my own mind
-that the Leopard-man was the sinner. But how can we prove it? I wish,
-Montgomery, you had kept your taste for meat in hand, and gone without
-these exciting novelties. We may find ourselves in a mess yet, through
-it.”
-
-“I was a silly ass,” said Montgomery. “But the thing’s done now; and
-you said I might have them, you know.”
-
-“We must see to the thing at once,” said Moreau. “I suppose if anything
-should turn up, M’ling can take care of himself?”
-
-“I’m not so sure of M’ling,” said Montgomery. “I think I ought to know
-him.”
-
-In the afternoon, Moreau, Montgomery, myself, and M’ling went across
-the island to the huts in the ravine. We three were armed; M’ling
-carried the little hatchet he used in chopping firewood, and some coils
-of wire. Moreau had a huge cowherd’s horn slung over his shoulder.
-
-“You will see a gathering of the Beast People,” said Montgomery. “It is
-a pretty sight!”
-
-Moreau said not a word on the way, but the expression of his heavy,
-white-fringed face was grimly set.
-
-We crossed the ravine down which smoked the stream of hot water, and
-followed the winding pathway through the canebrakes until we reached a
-wide area covered over with a thick, powdery yellow substance which I
-believe was sulphur. Above the shoulder of a weedy bank the sea
-glittered. We came to a kind of shallow natural amphitheatre, and here
-the four of us halted. Then Moreau sounded the horn, and broke the
-sleeping stillness of the tropical afternoon. He must have had strong
-lungs. The hooting note rose and rose amidst its echoes, to at last an
-ear-penetrating intensity.
-
-“Ah!” said Moreau, letting the curved instrument fall to his side
-again.
-
-Immediately there was a crashing through the yellow canes, and a sound
-of voices from the dense green jungle that marked the morass through
-which I had run on the previous day. Then at three or four points on
-the edge of the sulphurous area appeared the grotesque forms of the
-Beast People hurrying towards us. I could not help a creeping horror,
-as I perceived first one and then another trot out from the trees or
-reeds and come shambling along over the hot dust. But Moreau and
-Montgomery stood calmly enough; and, perforce, I stuck beside them.
-
-First to arrive was the Satyr, strangely unreal for all that he cast a
-shadow and tossed the dust with his hoofs. After him from the brake
-came a monstrous lout, a thing of horse and rhinoceros, chewing a straw
-as it came; then appeared the Swine-woman and two Wolf-women; then the
-Fox-bear witch, with her red eyes in her peaked red face, and then
-others,—all hurrying eagerly. As they came forward they began to cringe
-towards Moreau and chant, quite regardless of one another, fragments of
-the latter half of the litany of the Law,—“His is the Hand that wounds;
-His is the Hand that heals,” and so forth. As soon as they had
-approached within a distance of perhaps thirty yards they halted, and
-bowing on knees and elbows began flinging the white dust upon their
-heads.
-
-Imagine the scene if you can! We three blue-clad men, with our
-misshapen black-faced attendant, standing in a wide expanse of sunlit
-yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and surrounded by this circle
-of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,—some almost human save in
-their subtle expression and gestures, some like cripples, some so
-strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the denizens of our
-wildest dreams; and, beyond, the reedy lines of a canebrake in one
-direction, a dense tangle of palm-trees on the other, separating us
-from the ravine with the huts, and to the north the hazy horizon of the
-Pacific Ocean.
-
-“Sixty-two, sixty-three,” counted Moreau. “There are four more.”
-
-“I do not see the Leopard-man,” said I.
-
-Presently Moreau sounded the great horn again, and at the sound of it
-all the Beast People writhed and grovelled in the dust. Then, slinking
-out of the canebrake, stooping near the ground and trying to join the
-dust-throwing circle behind Moreau’s back, came the Leopard-man. The
-last of the Beast People to arrive was the little Ape-man. The earlier
-animals, hot and weary with their grovelling, shot vicious glances at
-him.
-
-“Cease!” said Moreau, in his firm, loud voice; and the Beast People sat
-back upon their hams and rested from their worshipping.
-
-“Where is the Sayer of the Law?” said Moreau, and the hairy-grey
-monster bowed his face in the dust.
-
-“Say the words!” said Moreau.
-
-Forthwith all in the kneeling assembly, swaying from side to side and
-dashing up the sulphur with their hands,—first the right hand and a
-puff of dust, and then the left,—began once more to chant their strange
-litany. When they reached, “Not to eat Flesh or Fish, that is the Law,”
-Moreau held up his lank white hand.
-
-“Stop!” he cried, and there fell absolute silence upon them all.
-
-I think they all knew and dreaded what was coming. I looked round at
-their strange faces. When I saw their wincing attitudes and the furtive
-dread in their bright eyes, I wondered that I had ever believed them to
-be men.
-
-“That Law has been broken!” said Moreau.
-
-“None escape,” from the faceless creature with the silvery hair. “None
-escape,” repeated the kneeling circle of Beast People.
-
-“Who is he?” cried Moreau, and looked round at their faces, cracking
-his whip. I fancied the Hyena-swine looked dejected, so too did the
-Leopard-man. Moreau stopped, facing this creature, who cringed towards
-him with the memory and dread of infinite torment.
-
-“Who is he?” repeated Moreau, in a voice of thunder.
-
-“Evil is he who breaks the Law,” chanted the Sayer of the Law.
-
-Moreau looked into the eyes of the Leopard-man, and seemed to be
-dragging the very soul out of the creature.
-
-“Who breaks the Law—” said Moreau, taking his eyes off his victim, and
-turning towards us (it seemed to me there was a touch of exultation in
-his voice).
-
-“Goes back to the House of Pain,” they all clamoured,—“goes back to the
-House of Pain, O Master!”
-
-“Back to the House of Pain,—back to the House of Pain,” gabbled the
-Ape-man, as though the idea was sweet to him.
-
-“Do you hear?” said Moreau, turning back to the criminal, “my
-friend—Hullo!”
-
-For the Leopard-man, released from Moreau’s eye, had risen straight
-from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks
-flashing out from under his curling lips, leapt towards his tormentor.
-I am convinced that only the madness of unendurable fear could have
-prompted this attack. The whole circle of threescore monsters seemed to
-rise about us. I drew my revolver. The two figures collided. I saw
-Moreau reeling back from the Leopard-man’s blow. There was a furious
-yelling and howling all about us. Every one was moving rapidly. For a
-moment I thought it was a general revolt. The furious face of the
-Leopard-man flashed by mine, with M’ling close in pursuit. I saw the
-yellow eyes of the Hyena-swine blazing with excitement, his attitude as
-if he were half resolved to attack me. The Satyr, too, glared at me
-over the Hyena-swine’s hunched shoulders. I heard the crack of Moreau’s
-pistol, and saw the pink flash dart across the tumult. The whole crowd
-seemed to swing round in the direction of the glint of fire, and I too
-was swung round by the magnetism of the movement. In another second I
-was running, one of a tumultuous shouting crowd, in pursuit of the
-escaping Leopard-man.
-
-That is all I can tell definitely. I saw the Leopard-man strike Moreau,
-and then everything spun about me until I was running headlong. M’ling
-was ahead, close in pursuit of the fugitive. Behind, their tongues
-already lolling out, ran the Wolf-women in great leaping strides. The
-Swine folk followed, squealing with excitement, and the two Bull-men in
-their swathings of white. Then came Moreau in a cluster of the Beast
-People, his wide-brimmed straw hat blown off, his revolver in hand, and
-his lank white hair streaming out. The Hyena-swine ran beside me,
-keeping pace with me and glancing furtively at me out of his feline
-eyes, and the others came pattering and shouting behind us.
-
-The Leopard-man went bursting his way through the long canes, which
-sprang back as he passed, and rattled in M’ling’s face. We others in
-the rear found a trampled path for us when we reached the brake. The
-chase lay through the brake for perhaps a quarter of a mile, and then
-plunged into a dense thicket, which retarded our movements exceedingly,
-though we went through it in a crowd together,—fronds flicking into our
-faces, ropy creepers catching us under the chin or gripping our ankles,
-thorny plants hooking into and tearing cloth and flesh together.
-
-“He has gone on all-fours through this,” panted Moreau, now just ahead
-of me.
-
-“None escape,” said the Wolf-bear, laughing into my face with the
-exultation of hunting. We burst out again among rocks, and saw the
-quarry ahead running lightly on all-fours and snarling at us over his
-shoulder. At that the Wolf Folk howled with delight. The Thing was
-still clothed, and at a distance its face still seemed human; but the
-carriage of its four limbs was feline, and the furtive droop of its
-shoulder was distinctly that of a hunted animal. It leapt over some
-thorny yellow-flowering bushes, and was hidden. M’ling was halfway
-across the space.
-
-Most of us now had lost the first speed of the chase, and had fallen
-into a longer and steadier stride. I saw as we traversed the open that
-the pursuit was now spreading from a column into a line. The
-Hyena-swine still ran close to me, watching me as it ran, every now and
-then puckering its muzzle with a snarling laugh. At the edge of the
-rocks the Leopard-man, realising that he was making for the projecting
-cape upon which he had stalked me on the night of my arrival, had
-doubled in the undergrowth; but Montgomery had seen the manoeuvre, and
-turned him again. So, panting, tumbling against rocks, torn by
-brambles, impeded by ferns and reeds, I helped to pursue the
-Leopard-man who had broken the Law, and the Hyena-swine ran, laughing
-savagely, by my side. I staggered on, my head reeling and my heart
-beating against my ribs, tired almost to death, and yet not daring to
-lose sight of the chase lest I should be left alone with this horrible
-companion. I staggered on in spite of infinite fatigue and the dense
-heat of the tropical afternoon.
-
-At last the fury of the hunt slackened. We had pinned the wretched
-brute into a corner of the island. Moreau, whip in hand, marshalled us
-all into an irregular line, and we advanced now slowly, shouting to one
-another as we advanced and tightening the cordon about our victim. He
-lurked noiseless and invisible in the bushes through which I had run
-from him during that midnight pursuit.
-
-“Steady!” cried Moreau, “steady!” as the ends of the line crept round
-the tangle of undergrowth and hemmed the brute in.
-
-“Ware a rush!” came the voice of Montgomery from beyond the thicket.
-
-I was on the slope above the bushes; Montgomery and Moreau beat along
-the beach beneath. Slowly we pushed in among the fretted network of
-branches and leaves. The quarry was silent.
-
-“Back to the House of Pain, the House of Pain, the House of Pain!”
-yelped the voice of the Ape-man, some twenty yards to the right.
-
-When I heard that, I forgave the poor wretch all the fear he had
-inspired in me. I heard the twigs snap and the boughs swish aside
-before the heavy tread of the Horse-rhinoceros upon my right. Then
-suddenly through a polygon of green, in the half darkness under the
-luxuriant growth, I saw the creature we were hunting. I halted. He was
-crouched together into the smallest possible compass, his luminous
-green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.
-
-It may seem a strange contradiction in me,—I cannot explain the
-fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal
-attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human
-face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity.
-In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be
-overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures
-of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its
-terror-struck eyes, and fired. As I did so, the Hyena-swine saw the
-Thing, and flung itself upon it with an eager cry, thrusting thirsty
-teeth into its neck. All about me the green masses of the thicket were
-swaying and cracking as the Beast People came rushing together. One
-face and then another appeared.
-
-“Don’t kill it, Prendick!” cried Moreau. “Don’t kill it!” and I saw him
-stooping as he pushed through under the fronds of the big ferns.
-
-In another moment he had beaten off the Hyena-swine with the handle of
-his whip, and he and Montgomery were keeping away the excited
-carnivorous Beast People, and particularly M’ling, from the still
-quivering body. The hairy-grey Thing came sniffing at the corpse under
-my arm. The other animals, in their animal ardour, jostled me to get a
-nearer view.
-
-“Confound you, Prendick!” said Moreau. “I wanted him.”
-
-“I’m sorry,” said I, though I was not. “It was the impulse of the
-moment.” I felt sick with exertion and excitement. Turning, I pushed my
-way out of the crowding Beast People and went on alone up the slope
-towards the higher part of the headland. Under the shouted directions
-of Moreau I heard the three white-swathed Bull-men begin dragging the
-victim down towards the water.
-
-It was easy now for me to be alone. The Beast People manifested a quite
-human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot,
-sniffing and growling at it as the Bull-men dragged it down the beach.
-I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the
-evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like
-a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable
-aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks
-beneath me were the Ape-man, the Hyena-swine, and several other of the
-Beast People, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still
-intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their
-loyalty to the Law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind
-that the Hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange
-persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the
-grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of
-human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and
-fate in its simplest form. The Leopard-man had happened to go under:
-that was all the difference. Poor brute!
-
-Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had
-not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor
-victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only
-at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to
-me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly
-adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now
-they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never
-died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human
-existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long
-dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred
-me.
-
-Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathised at
-least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I
-could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate.
-But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his
-mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown
-out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at
-last to die painfully. They were wretched in themselves; the old animal
-hate moved them to trouble one another; the Law held them back from a
-brief hot struggle and a decisive end to their natural animosities.
-
-In those days my fear of the Beast People went the way of my personal
-fear for Moreau. I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring,
-and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must
-confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it
-suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast
-pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and
-I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for
-drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions,
-were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite
-complexity of its incessant wheels. But this condition did not come all
-at once: I think indeed that I anticipate a little in speaking of it
-now.
+\include{chapters/How the beast folk taste blood}
 
 \chapter{A CATASTROPHE}
 \cleardoublepage
-Scarcely six weeks passed before I had lost every feeling but dislike
-and abhorrence for this infamous experiment of Moreau’s. My one idea
-was to get away from these horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image,
-back to the sweet and wholesome intercourse of men. My
-fellow-creatures, from whom I was thus separated, began to assume
-idyllic virtue and beauty in my memory. My first friendship with
-Montgomery did not increase. His long separation from humanity, his
-secret vice of drunkenness, his evident sympathy with the Beast People,
-tainted him to me. Several times I let him go alone among them. I
-avoided intercourse with them in every possible way. I spent an
-increasing proportion of my time upon the beach, looking for some
-liberating sail that never appeared,—until one day there fell upon us
-an appalling disaster, which put an altogether different aspect upon my
-strange surroundings.
 
-It was about seven or eight weeks after my landing,—rather more, I
-think, though I had not troubled to keep account of the time,—when this
-catastrophe occurred. It happened in the early morning—I should think
-about six. I had risen and breakfasted early, having been aroused by
-the noise of three Beast Men carrying wood into the enclosure.
-
-After breakfast I went to the open gateway of the enclosure, and stood
-there smoking a cigarette and enjoying the freshness of the early
-morning. Moreau presently came round the corner of the enclosure and
-greeted me. He passed by me, and I heard him behind me unlock and enter
-his laboratory. So indurated was I at that time to the abomination of
-the place, that I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim
-begin another day of torture. It met its persecutor with a shriek,
-almost exactly like that of an angry virago.
-
-Then suddenly something happened,—I do not know what, to this day. I
-heard a short, sharp cry behind me, a fall, and turning saw an awful
-face rushing upon me,—not human, not animal, but hellish, brown, seamed
-with red branching scars, red drops starting out upon it, and the
-lidless eyes ablaze. I threw up my arm to defend myself from the blow
-that flung me headlong with a broken forearm; and the great monster,
-swathed in lint and with red-stained bandages fluttering about it,
-leapt over me and passed. I rolled over and over down the beach, tried
-to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, his
-massive white face all the more terrible for the blood that trickled
-from his forehead. He carried a revolver in one hand. He scarcely
-glanced at me, but rushed off at once in pursuit of the puma.
-
-I tried the other arm and sat up. The muffled figure in front ran in
-great striding leaps along the beach, and Moreau followed her. She
-turned her head and saw him, then doubling abruptly made for the
-bushes. She gained upon him at every stride. I saw her plunge into
-them, and Moreau, running slantingly to intercept her, fired and missed
-as she disappeared. Then he too vanished in the green confusion. I
-stared after them, and then the pain in my arm flamed up, and with a
-groan I staggered to my feet. Montgomery appeared in the doorway,
-dressed, and with his revolver in his hand.
-
-“Great God, Prendick!” he said, not noticing that I was hurt, “that
-brute’s loose! Tore the fetter out of the wall! Have you seen them?”
-Then sharply, seeing I gripped my arm, “What’s the matter?”
-
-“I was standing in the doorway,” said I.
-
-He came forward and took my arm. “Blood on the sleeve,” said he, and
-rolled back the flannel. He pocketed his weapon, felt my arm about
-painfully, and led me inside. “Your arm is broken,” he said, and then,
-“Tell me exactly how it happened—what happened?”
-
-I told him what I had seen; told him in broken sentences, with gasps of
-pain between them, and very dexterously and swiftly he bound my arm
-meanwhile. He slung it from my shoulder, stood back and looked at me.
-
-“You’ll do,” he said. “And now?”
-
-He thought. Then he went out and locked the gates of the enclosure. He
-was absent some time.
-
-I was chiefly concerned about my arm. The incident seemed merely one
-more of many horrible things. I sat down in the deck chair, and I must
-admit swore heartily at the island. The first dull feeling of injury in
-my arm had already given way to a burning pain when Montgomery
-reappeared. His face was rather pale, and he showed more of his lower
-gums than ever.
-
-“I can neither see nor hear anything of him,” he said. “I’ve been
-thinking he may want my help.” He stared at me with his expressionless
-eyes. “That was a strong brute,” he said. “It simply wrenched its
-fetter out of the wall.” He went to the window, then to the door, and
-there turned to me. “I shall go after him,” he said. “There’s another
-revolver I can leave with you. To tell you the truth, I feel anxious
-somehow.”
-
-He obtained the weapon, and put it ready to my hand on the table; then
-went out, leaving a restless contagion in the air. I did not sit long
-after he left, but took the revolver in hand and went to the doorway.
-
-The morning was as still as death. Not a whisper of wind was stirring;
-the sea was like polished glass, the sky empty, the beach desolate. In
-my half-excited, half-feverish state, this stillness of things
-oppressed me. I tried to whistle, and the tune died away. I swore
-again,—the second time that morning. Then I went to the corner of the
-enclosure and stared inland at the green bush that had swallowed up
-Moreau and Montgomery. When would they return, and how? Then far away
-up the beach a little grey Beast Man appeared, ran down to the water’s
-edge and began splashing about. I strolled back to the doorway, then to
-the corner again, and so began pacing to and fro like a sentinel upon
-duty. Once I was arrested by the distant voice of Montgomery bawling,
-“Coo-ee—Moreau!” My arm became less painful, but very hot. I got
-feverish and thirsty. My shadow grew shorter. I watched the distant
-figure until it went away again. Would Moreau and Montgomery never
-return? Three sea-birds began fighting for some stranded treasure.
-
-Then from far away behind the enclosure I heard a pistol-shot. A long
-silence, and then came another. Then a yelling cry nearer, and another
-dismal gap of silence. My unfortunate imagination set to work to
-torment me. Then suddenly a shot close by. I went to the corner,
-startled, and saw Montgomery,—his face scarlet, his hair disordered,
-and the knee of his trousers torn. His face expressed profound
-consternation. Behind him slouched the Beast Man, M’ling, and round
-M’ling’s jaws were some queer dark stains.
-
-“Has he come?” said Montgomery.
-
-“Moreau?” said I. “No.”
-
-“My God!” The man was panting, almost sobbing. “Go back in,” he said,
-taking my arm. “They’re mad. They’re all rushing about mad. What can
-have happened? I don’t know. I’ll tell you, when my breath comes.
-Where’s some brandy?”
-
-Montgomery limped before me into the room and sat down in the deck
-chair. M’ling flung himself down just outside the doorway and began
-panting like a dog. I got Montgomery some brandy-and-water. He sat
-staring in front of him at nothing, recovering his breath. After some
-minutes he began to tell me what had happened.
-
-He had followed their track for some way. It was plain enough at first
-on account of the crushed and broken bushes, white rags torn from the
-puma’s bandages, and occasional smears of blood on the leaves of the
-shrubs and undergrowth. He lost the track, however, on the stony ground
-beyond the stream where I had seen the Beast Man drinking, and went
-wandering aimlessly westward shouting Moreau’s name. Then M’ling had
-come to him carrying a light hatchet. M’ling had seen nothing of the
-puma affair; had been felling wood, and heard him calling. They went on
-shouting together. Two Beast Men came crouching and peering at them
-through the undergrowth, with gestures and a furtive carriage that
-alarmed Montgomery by their strangeness. He hailed them, and they fled
-guiltily. He stopped shouting after that, and after wandering some time
-farther in an undecided way, determined to visit the huts.
-
-He found the ravine deserted.
-
-Growing more alarmed every minute, he began to retrace his steps. Then
-it was he encountered the two Swine-men I had seen dancing on the night
-of my arrival; blood-stained they were about the mouth, and intensely
-excited. They came crashing through the ferns, and stopped with fierce
-faces when they saw him. He cracked his whip in some trepidation, and
-forthwith they rushed at him. Never before had a Beast Man dared to do
-that. One he shot through the head; M’ling flung himself upon the
-other, and the two rolled grappling. M’ling got his brute under and
-with his teeth in its throat, and Montgomery shot that too as it
-struggled in M’ling’s grip. He had some difficulty in inducing M’ling
-to come on with him. Thence they had hurried back to me. On the way,
-M’ling had suddenly rushed into a thicket and driven out an under-sized
-Ocelot-man, also blood-stained, and lame through a wound in the foot.
-This brute had run a little way and then turned savagely at bay, and
-Montgomery—with a certain wantonness, I thought—had shot him.
-
-“What does it all mean?” said I.
-
-He shook his head, and turned once more to the brandy.
+\include{chapters/A Catastrophe}
 
 \chapter{THE FINDING OF MOREAU}
 \cleardoublepage
 
-When I saw Montgomery swallow a third dose of brandy, I took it upon
-myself to interfere. He was already more than half fuddled. I told him
-that some serious thing must have happened to Moreau by this time, or
-he would have returned before this, and that it behoved us to ascertain
-what that catastrophe was. Montgomery raised some feeble objections,
-and at last agreed. We had some food, and then all three of us started.
+\include{chapters/The Finding of Moreau}
 
-It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time, but even now
-that start into the hot stillness of the tropical afternoon is a
-singularly vivid impression. M’ling went first, his shoulder hunched,
-his strange black head moving with quick starts as he peered first on
-this side of the way and then on that. He was unarmed; his axe he had
-dropped when he encountered the Swine-man. Teeth were \emph{his} weapons,
-when it came to fighting. Montgomery followed with stumbling footsteps,
-his hands in his pockets, his face downcast; he was in a state of
-muddled sullenness with me on account of the brandy. My left arm was in
-a sling (it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my
-right. Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of the
-island, going northwestward; and presently M’ling stopped, and became
-rigid with watchfulness. Montgomery almost staggered into him, and then
-stopped too. Then, listening intently, we heard coming through the
-trees the sound of voices and footsteps approaching us.
-
-“He is dead,” said a deep, vibrating voice.
-
-“He is not dead; he is not dead,” jabbered another.
-
-“We saw, we saw,” said several voices.
-
-“\emph{Hul}-lo!” suddenly shouted Montgomery, “Hullo, there!”
-
-“Confound you!” said I, and gripped my pistol.
-
-There was a silence, then a crashing among the interlacing vegetation,
-first here, then there, and then half-a-dozen faces appeared,—strange
-faces, lit by a strange light. M’ling made a growling noise in his
-throat. I recognised the Ape-man: I had indeed already identified his
-voice, and two of the white-swathed brown-featured creatures I had seen
-in Montgomery’s boat. With these were the two dappled brutes and that
-grey, horribly crooked creature who said the Law, with grey hair
-streaming down its cheeks, heavy grey eyebrows, and grey locks pouring
-off from a central parting upon its sloping forehead,—a heavy, faceless
-thing, with strange red eyes, looking at us curiously from amidst the
-green.
-
-For a space no one spoke. Then Montgomery hiccoughed, “Who—said he was
-dead?”
-
-The Monkey-man looked guiltily at the hairy-grey Thing. “He is dead,”
-said this monster. “They saw.”
-
-There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate. They
-seemed awestricken and puzzled.
-
-“Where is he?” said Montgomery.
-
-“Beyond,” and the grey creature pointed.
-
-“Is there a Law now?” asked the Monkey-man. “Is it still to be this and
-that? Is he dead indeed?”
-
-“Is there a Law?” repeated the man in white. “Is there a Law, thou
-Other with the Whip?”
-
-“He is dead,” said the hairy-grey Thing. And they all stood watching
-us.
-
-“Prendick,” said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me. “He’s dead,
-evidently.”
-
-I had been standing behind him during this colloquy. I began to see how
-things lay with them. I suddenly stepped in front of Montgomery and
-lifted up my voice:—“Children of the Law,” I said, “he is \emph{not} dead!”
-M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. “He has changed his shape; he has
-changed his body,” I went on. “For a time you will not see him. He
-is—there,” I pointed upward, “where he can watch you. You cannot see
-him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!”
-
-I looked at them squarely. They flinched.
-
-“He is great, he is good,” said the Ape-man, peering fearfully upward
-among the dense trees.
-
-“And the other Thing?” I demanded.
-
-“The Thing that bled, and ran screaming and sobbing,—that is dead too,”
-said the grey Thing, still regarding me.
-
-“That’s well,” grunted Montgomery.
-
-“The Other with the Whip—” began the grey Thing.
-
-“Well?” said I.
-
-“Said he was dead.”
-
-But Montgomery was still sober enough to understand my motive in
-denying Moreau’s death. “He is not dead,” he said slowly, “not dead at
-all. No more dead than I am.”
-
-“Some,” said I, “have broken the Law: they will die. Some have died.
-Show us now where his old body lies,—the body he cast away because he
-had no more need of it.”
-
-“It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea,” said the grey Thing.
-
-And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult of
-ferns and creepers and tree-stems towards the northwest. Then came a
-yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus
-rushed by us shrieking. Immediately after appeared a monster in
-headlong pursuit, blood-bedabbled, who was amongst us almost before he
-could stop his career. The grey Thing leapt aside. M’ling, with a
-snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside. Montgomery fired and missed,
-bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the
-Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into its ugly face. I
-saw its features vanish in a flash: its face was driven in. Yet it
-passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside
-him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death-agony.
-
-I found myself alone with M’ling, the dead brute, and the prostrate
-man. Montgomery raised himself slowly and stared in a muddled way at
-the shattered Beast Man beside him. It more than half sobered him. He
-scrambled to his feet. Then I saw the grey Thing returning cautiously
-through the trees.
-
-“See,” said I, pointing to the dead brute, “is the Law not alive? This
-came of breaking the Law.”
-
-He peered at the body. “He sends the Fire that kills,” said he, in his
-deep voice, repeating part of the Ritual. The others gathered round and
-stared for a space.
-
-At last we drew near the westward extremity of the island. We came upon
-the gnawed and mutilated body of the puma, its shoulder-bone smashed by
-a bullet, and perhaps twenty yards farther found at last what we
-sought. Moreau lay face downward in a trampled space in a canebrake.
-One hand was almost severed at the wrist and his silvery hair was
-dabbled in blood. His head had been battered in by the fetters of the
-puma. The broken canes beneath him were smeared with blood. His
-revolver we could not find. Montgomery turned him over. Resting at
-intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People (for he was a
-heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure. The night was
-darkling. Twice we heard unseen creatures howling and shrieking past
-our little band, and once the little pink sloth-creature appeared and
-stared at us, and vanished again. But we were not attacked again. At
-the gates of the enclosure our company of Beast People left us, M’ling
-going with the rest. We locked ourselves in, and then took Moreau’s
-mangled body into the yard and laid it upon a pile of brushwood. Then
-we went into the laboratory and put an end to all we found living
-there.
 \chapter{MONTGOMERY’S \emph{BANK HOLIDAY}}
 \cleardoublepage
-When this was accomplished, and we had washed and eaten, Montgomery and
-I went into my little room and seriously discussed our position for the
-first time. It was then near midnight. He was almost sober, but greatly
-disturbed in his mind. He had been strangely under the influence of
-Moreau’s personality: I do not think it had ever occurred to him that
-Moreau could die. This disaster was the sudden collapse of the habits
-that had become part of his nature in the ten or more monotonous years
-he had spent on the island. He talked vaguely, answered my questions
-crookedly, wandered into general questions.
 
-“This silly ass of a world,” he said; “what a muddle it all is! I
-haven’t had any life. I wonder when it’s going to begin. Sixteen years
-being bullied by nurses and schoolmasters at their own sweet will; five
-in London grinding hard at medicine, bad food, shabby lodgings, shabby
-clothes, shabby vice, a blunder,—\emph{I} didn’t know any better,—and
-hustled off to this beastly island. Ten years here! What’s it all for,
-Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?”
-
-It was hard to deal with such ravings. “The thing we have to think of
-now,” said I, “is how to get away from this island.”
-
-“What’s the good of getting away? I’m an outcast. Where am \emph{I} to join
-on? It’s all very well for \emph{you}, Prendick. Poor old Moreau! We can’t
-leave him here to have his bones picked. As it is—And besides, what
-will become of the decent part of the Beast Folk?”
-
-“Well,” said I, “that will do to-morrow. I’ve been thinking we might
-make the brushwood into a pyre and burn his body—and those other
-things. Then what will happen with the Beast Folk?”
-
-“\emph{I} don’t know. I suppose those that were made of beasts of prey will
-make silly asses of themselves sooner or later. We can’t massacre the
-lot—can we? I suppose that’s what \emph{your} humanity would suggest? But
-they’ll change. They are sure to change.”
-
-He talked thus inconclusively until at last I felt my temper going.
-
-“Damnation!” he exclaimed at some petulance of mine; “can’t you see I’m
-in a worse hole than you are?” And he got up, and went for the brandy.
-“Drink!” he said returning, “you logic-chopping, chalky-faced saint of
-an atheist, drink!”
-
-“Not I,” said I, and sat grimly watching his face under the yellow
-paraffine flare, as he drank himself into a garrulous misery.
-
-I have a memory of infinite tedium. He wandered into a maudlin defence
-of the Beast People and of M’ling. M’ling, he said, was the only thing
-that had ever really cared for him. And suddenly an idea came to him.
-
-“I’m damned!” said he, staggering to his feet and clutching the brandy
-bottle.
-
-By some flash of intuition I knew what it was he intended. “You don’t
-give drink to that beast!” I said, rising and facing him.
-
-“Beast!” said he. “You’re the beast. He takes his liquor like a
-Christian. Come out of the way, Prendick!”
-
-“For God’s sake,” said I.
-
-“Get—out of the way!” he roared, and suddenly whipped out his revolver.
-
-“Very well,” said I, and stood aside, half-minded to fall upon him as
-he put his hand upon the latch, but deterred by the thought of my
-useless arm. “You’ve made a beast of yourself,—to the beasts you may
-go.”
-
-He flung the doorway open, and stood half facing me between the yellow
-lamp-light and the pallid glare of the moon; his eye-sockets were
-blotches of black under his stubbly eyebrows.
-
-“You’re a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You’re always fearing and
-fancying. We’re on the edge of things. I’m bound to cut my throat
-to-morrow. I’m going to have a damned Bank Holiday to-night.” He turned
-and went out into the moonlight. “M’ling!” he cried; “M’ling, old
-friend!”
-
-Three dim creatures in the silvery light came along the edge of the wan
-beach,—one a white-wrapped creature, the other two blotches of
-blackness following it. They halted, staring. Then I saw M’ling’s
-hunched shoulders as he came round the corner of the house.
-
-“Drink!” cried Montgomery, “drink, you brutes! Drink and be men! Damme,
-I’m the cleverest. Moreau forgot this; this is the last touch. Drink, I
-tell you!” And waving the bottle in his hand he started off at a kind
-of quick trot to the westward, M’ling ranging himself between him and
-the three dim creatures who followed.
-
-I went to the doorway. They were already indistinct in the mist of the
-moonlight before Montgomery halted. I saw him administer a dose of the
-raw brandy to M’ling, and saw the five figures melt into one vague
-patch.
-
-“Sing!” I heard Montgomery shout,—“sing all together, ‘Confound old
-Prendick!’ That’s right; now again, ‘Confound old Prendick!’”
-
-The black group broke up into five separate figures, and wound slowly
-away from me along the band of shining beach. Each went howling at his
-own sweet will, yelping insults at me, or giving whatever other vent
-this new inspiration of brandy demanded. Presently I heard Montgomery’s
-voice shouting, “Right turn!” and they passed with their shouts and
-howls into the blackness of the landward trees. Slowly, very slowly,
-they receded into silence.
-
-The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past
-the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very
-bright riding through the empty blue sky. The shadow of the wall lay, a
-yard wide and of inky blackness, at my feet. The eastward sea was a
-featureless grey, dark and mysterious; and between the sea and the
-shadow the grey sands (of volcanic glass and crystals) flashed and
-shone like a beach of diamonds. Behind me the paraffine lamp flared hot
-and ruddy.
-
-Then I shut the door, locked it, and went into the enclosure where
-Moreau lay beside his latest victims,—the staghounds and the llama and
-some other wretched brutes,—with his massive face calm even after his
-terrible death, and with the hard eyes open, staring at the dead white
-moon above. I sat down upon the edge of the sink, and with my eyes upon
-that ghastly pile of silvery light and ominous shadows began to turn
-over my plans. In the morning I would gather some provisions in the
-dingey, and after setting fire to the pyre before me, push out into the
-desolation of the high sea once more. I felt that for Montgomery there
-was no help; that he was, in truth, half akin to these Beast Folk,
-unfitted for human kindred.
-
-I do not know how long I sat there scheming. It must have been an hour
-or so. Then my planning was interrupted by the return of Montgomery to
-my neighbourhood. I heard a yelling from many throats, a tumult of
-exultant cries passing down towards the beach, whooping and howling,
-and excited shrieks that seemed to come to a stop near the water’s
-edge. The riot rose and fell; I heard heavy blows and the splintering
-smash of wood, but it did not trouble me then. A discordant chanting
-began.
-
-My thoughts went back to my means of escape. I got up, brought the
-lamp, and went into a shed to look at some kegs I had seen there. Then
-I became interested in the contents of some biscuit-tins, and opened
-one. I saw something out of the tail of my eye,—a red figure,—and
-turned sharply.
-
-Behind me lay the yard, vividly black-and-white in the moonlight, and
-the pile of wood and faggots on which Moreau and his mutilated victims
-lay, one over another. They seemed to be gripping one another in one
-last revengeful grapple. His wounds gaped, black as night, and the
-blood that had dripped lay in black patches upon the sand. Then I saw,
-without understanding, the cause of my phantom,—a ruddy glow that came
-and danced and went upon the wall opposite. I misinterpreted this,
-fancied it was a reflection of my flickering lamp, and turned again to
-the stores in the shed. I went on rummaging among them, as well as a
-one-armed man could, finding this convenient thing and that, and
-putting them aside for to-morrow’s launch. My movements were slow, and
-the time passed quickly. Insensibly the daylight crept upon me.
-
-The chanting died down, giving place to a clamour; then it began again,
-and suddenly broke into a tumult. I heard cries of, “More! more!” a
-sound like quarrelling, and a sudden wild shriek. The quality of the
-sounds changed so greatly that it arrested my attention. I went out
-into the yard and listened. Then cutting like a knife across the
-confusion came the crack of a revolver.
-
-I rushed at once through my room to the little doorway. As I did so I
-heard some of the packing-cases behind me go sliding down and smash
-together with a clatter of glass on the floor of the shed. But I did
-not heed these. I flung the door open and looked out.
-
-Up the beach by the boathouse a bonfire was burning, raining up sparks
-into the indistinctness of the dawn. Around this struggled a mass of
-black figures. I heard Montgomery call my name. I began to run at once
-towards this fire, revolver in hand. I saw the pink tongue of
-Montgomery’s pistol lick out once, close to the ground. He was down. I
-shouted with all my strength and fired into the air. I heard some one
-cry, “The Master!” The knotted black struggle broke into scattering
-units, the fire leapt and sank down. The crowd of Beast People fled in
-sudden panic before me, up the beach. In my excitement I fired at their
-retreating backs as they disappeared among the bushes. Then I turned to
-the black heaps upon the ground.
-
-Montgomery lay on his back, with the hairy-grey Beast-man sprawling
-across his body. The brute was dead, but still gripping Montgomery’s
-throat with its curving claws. Near by lay M’ling on his face and quite
-still, his neck bitten open and the upper part of the smashed
-brandy-bottle in his hand. Two other figures lay near the fire,—the one
-motionless, the other groaning fitfully, every now and then raising its
-head slowly, then dropping it again.
-
-I caught hold of the grey man and pulled him off Montgomery’s body; his
-claws drew down the torn coat reluctantly as I dragged him away.
-Montgomery was dark in the face and scarcely breathing. I splashed
-sea-water on his face and pillowed his head on my rolled-up coat.
-M’ling was dead. The wounded creature by the fire—it was a Wolf-brute
-with a bearded grey face—lay, I found, with the fore part of its body
-upon the still glowing timber. The wretched thing was injured so
-dreadfully that in mercy I blew its brains out at once. The other brute
-was one of the Bull-men swathed in white. He too was dead. The rest of
-the Beast People had vanished from the beach.
-
-I went to Montgomery again and knelt beside him, cursing my ignorance
-of medicine. The fire beside me had sunk down, and only charred beams
-of timber glowing at the central ends and mixed with a grey ash of
-brushwood remained. I wondered casually where Montgomery had got his
-wood. Then I saw that the dawn was upon us. The sky had grown brighter,
-the setting moon was becoming pale and opaque in the luminous blue of
-the day. The sky to the eastward was rimmed with red.
-
-Suddenly I heard a thud and a hissing behind me, and, looking round,
-sprang to my feet with a cry of horror. Against the warm dawn great
-tumultuous masses of black smoke were boiling up out of the enclosure,
-and through their stormy darkness shot flickering threads of blood-red
-flame. Then the thatched roof caught. I saw the curving charge of the
-flames across the sloping straw. A spurt of fire jetted from the window
-of my room.
-
-I knew at once what had happened. I remembered the crash I had heard.
-When I had rushed out to Montgomery’s assistance, I had overturned the
-lamp.
-
-The hopelessness of saving any of the contents of the enclosure stared
-me in the face. My mind came back to my plan of flight, and turning
-swiftly I looked to see where the two boats lay upon the beach. They
-were gone! Two axes lay upon the sands beside me; chips and splinters
-were scattered broadcast, and the ashes of the bonfire were blackening
-and smoking under the dawn. Montgomery had burnt the boats to revenge
-himself upon me and prevent our return to mankind!
-
-A sudden convulsion of rage shook me. I was almost moved to batter his
-foolish head in, as he lay there helpless at my feet. Then suddenly his
-hand moved, so feebly, so pitifully, that my wrath vanished. He
-groaned, and opened his eyes for a minute. I knelt down beside him and
-raised his head. He opened his eyes again, staring silently at the
-dawn, and then they met mine. The lids fell.
-
-“Sorry,” he said presently, with an effort. He seemed trying to think.
-“The last,” he murmured, “the last of this silly universe. What a
-mess—”
-
-I listened. His head fell helplessly to one side. I thought some drink
-might revive him; but there was neither drink nor vessel in which to
-bring drink at hand. He seemed suddenly heavier. My heart went cold. I
-bent down to his face, put my hand through the rent in his blouse. He
-was dead; and even as he died a line of white heat, the limb of the
-sun, rose eastward beyond the projection of the bay, splashing its
-radiance across the sky and turning the dark sea into a weltering
-tumult of dazzling light. It fell like a glory upon his death-shrunken
-face.
-
-I let his head fall gently upon the rough pillow I had made for him,
-and stood up. Before me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the
-awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the
-island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The
-enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with
-sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash.
-The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the
-distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the
-charred vestiges of the boats and these five dead bodies.
-
-Then out of the bushes came three Beast People, with hunched shoulders,
-protruding heads, misshapen hands awkwardly held, and inquisitive,
-unfriendly eyes and advanced towards me with hesitating gestures.
+\include{chapters/Montgomerys Bank holiday}
 
 \chapter{ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK}
 \cleardoublepage
-I faced these people, facing my fate in them, single-handed
-now,—literally single-handed, for I had a broken arm. In my pocket was
-a revolver with two empty chambers. Among the chips scattered about the
-beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The
-tide was creeping in behind me. There was nothing for it but courage. I
-looked squarely into the faces of the advancing monsters. They avoided
-my eyes, and their quivering nostrils investigated the bodies that lay
-beyond me on the beach. I took half-a-dozen steps, picked up the
-blood-stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf-man, and
-cracked it. They stopped and stared at me.
 
-“Salute!” said I. “Bow down!”
+\include{chapters/Alone With the beast folk}
 
-They hesitated. One bent his knees. I repeated my command, with my
-heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them. One knelt, then the other
-two.
-
-I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards
-the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the
-stage faces the audience.
-
-“They broke the Law,” said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law.
-“They have been slain,—even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with
-the Whip. Great is the Law! Come and see.”
-
-“None escape,” said one of them, advancing and peering.
-
-“None escape,” said I. “Therefore hear and do as I command.” They stood
-up, looking questioningly at one another.
-
-“Stand there,” said I.
-
-I picked up the hatchets and swung them by their heads from the sling
-of my arm; turned Montgomery over; picked up his revolver still loaded
-in two chambers, and bending down to rummage, found half-a-dozen
-cartridges in his pocket.
-
-“Take him,” said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; “take
-him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea.”
-
-They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more
-afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and
-hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly,
-carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling
-welter of the sea.
-
-“On!” said I, “on! Carry him far.”
-
-They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
-
-“Let go,” said I; and the body of Montgomery vanished with a splash.
-Something seemed to tighten across my chest.
-
-“Good!” said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying
-and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in
-the silver. At the water’s edge they stopped, turning and glaring into
-the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom
-and exact vengeance.
-
-“Now these,” said I, pointing to the other bodies.
-
-They took care not to approach the place where they had thrown
-Montgomery into the water, but instead, carried the four dead Beast
-People slantingly along the beach for perhaps a hundred yards before
-they waded out and cast them away.
-
-As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M’ling, I heard a
-light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine
-perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes
-were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his
-side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a
-little averted.
-
-For a moment we stood eye to eye. I dropped the whip and snatched at
-the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most
-formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may
-seem treacherous, but so I was resolved. I was far more afraid of him
-than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew
-a threat against mine.
-
-I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself. Then cried I, “Salute!
-Bow down!”
-
-His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl. “Who are \emph{you} that I should—”
-
-Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly
-and fired. I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had
-missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But
-he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared
-not risk another miss. Every now and then he looked back at me over his
-shoulder. He went slanting along the beach, and vanished beneath the
-driving masses of dense smoke that were still pouring out from the
-burning enclosure. For some time I stood staring after him. I turned to
-my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body
-they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the
-bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood-stains
-were absorbed and hidden.
-
-I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the
-beach into the thickets. I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust
-with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to
-think out the position in which I was now placed. A dreadful thing that
-I was only beginning to realise was, that over all this island there
-was now no safe place where I could be alone and secure to rest or
-sleep. I had recovered strength amazingly since my landing, but I was
-still inclined to be nervous and to break down under any great stress.
-I felt that I ought to cross the island and establish myself with the
-Beast People, and make myself secure in their confidence. But my heart
-failed me. I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the
-burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand
-ran out towards the reef. Here I could sit down and think, my back to
-the sea and my face against any surprise. And there I sat, chin on
-knees, the sun beating down upon my head and unspeakable dread in my
-mind, plotting how I could live on against the hour of my rescue (if
-ever rescue came). I tried to review the whole situation as calmly as I
-could, but it was difficult to clear the thing of emotion.
-
-I began turning over in my mind the reason of Montgomery’s despair.
-“They will change,” he said; “they are sure to change.” And Moreau,
-what was it that Moreau had said? “The stubborn beast-flesh grows day
-by day back again.” Then I came round to the Hyena-swine. I felt sure
-that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the
-Law was dead: worse luck. They knew now that we of the Whips could be
-killed even as they themselves were killed. Were they peering at me
-already out of the green masses of ferns and palms over yonder,
-watching until I came within their spring? Were they plotting against
-me? What was the Hyena-swine telling them? My imagination was running
-away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
-
-My thoughts were disturbed by a crying of sea-birds hurrying towards
-some black object that had been stranded by the waves on the beach near
-the enclosure. I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to
-go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the
-opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the
-island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the
-possible ambuscades of the thickets.
-
-Perhaps half a mile along the beach I became aware of one of my three
-Beast Folk advancing out of the landward bushes towards me. I was now
-so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver.
-Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He
-hesitated as he approached.
-
-“Go away!” cried I.
-
-There was something very suggestive of a dog in the cringing attitude
-of the creature. It retreated a little way, very like a dog being sent
-home, and stopped, looking at me imploringly with canine brown eyes.
-
-“Go away,” said I. “Do not come near me.”
-
-“May I not come near you?” it said.
-
-“No; go away,” I insisted, and snapped my whip. Then putting my whip in
-my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the
-creature away.
-
-So in solitude I came round by the ravine of the Beast People, and
-hiding among the weeds and reeds that separated this crevice from the
-sea I watched such of them as appeared, trying to judge from their
-gestures and appearance how the death of Moreau and Montgomery and the
-destruction of the House of Pain had affected them. I know now the
-folly of my cowardice. Had I kept my courage up to the level of the
-dawn, had I not allowed it to ebb away in solitary thought, I might
-have grasped the vacant sceptre of Moreau and ruled over the Beast
-People. As it was I lost the opportunity, and sank to the position of a
-mere leader among my fellows.
-
-Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand.
-The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I
-came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards
-these seated figures. One, a Wolf-woman, turned her head and stared at
-me, and then the others. None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt
-too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
-
-“I want food,” said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
-
-“There is food in the huts,” said an Ox-boar-man, drowsily, and looking
-away from me.
-
-I passed them, and went down into the shadow and odours of the almost
-deserted ravine. In an empty hut I feasted on some specked and
-half-decayed fruit; and then after I had propped some branches and
-sticks about the opening, and placed myself with my face towards it and
-my hand upon my revolver, the exhaustion of the last thirty hours
-claimed its own, and I fell into a light slumber, hoping that the
-flimsy barricade I had erected would cause sufficient noise in its
-removal to save me from surprise.
 \chapter{THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK}
 \cleardoublepage
-In this way I became one among the Beast People in the Island of Doctor
-Moreau. When I awoke, it was dark about me. My arm ached in its
-bandages. I sat up, wondering at first where I might be. I heard coarse
-voices talking outside. Then I saw that my barricade had gone, and that
-the opening of the hut stood clear. My revolver was still in my hand.
 
-I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close
-beside me. I held my breath, trying to see what it was. It began to
-move slowly, interminably. Then something soft and warm and moist
-passed across my hand. All my muscles contracted. I snatched my hand
-away. A cry of alarm began and was stifled in my throat. Then I just
-realised what had happened sufficiently to stay my fingers on the
-revolver.
-
-“Who is that?” I said in a hoarse whisper, the revolver still pointed.
-
-“\emph{I}—Master.”
-
-“Who are \emph{you?}”
-
-“They say there is no Master now. But I know, I know. I carried the
-bodies into the sea, O Walker in the Sea! the bodies of those you slew.
-I am your slave, Master.”
-
-“Are you the one I met on the beach?” I asked.
-
-“The same, Master.”
-
-The Thing was evidently faithful enough, for it might have fallen upon
-me as I slept. “It is well,” I said, extending my hand for another
-licking kiss. I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide
-of my courage flowed. “Where are the others?” I asked.
-
-“They are mad; they are fools,” said the Dog-man. “Even now they talk
-together beyond there. They say, ‘The Master is dead. The Other with
-the Whip is dead. That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are. We
-have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.
-We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no
-Whips for ever again.’ So they say. But I know, Master, I know.”
-
-I felt in the darkness, and patted the Dog-man’s head. “It is well,” I
-said again.
-
-“Presently you will slay them all,” said the Dog-man.
-
-“Presently,” I answered, “I will slay them all,—after certain days and
-certain things have come to pass. Every one of them save those you
-spare, every one of them shall be slain.”
-
-“What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills,” said the Dog-man
-with a certain satisfaction in his voice.
-
-“And that their sins may grow,” I said, “let them live in their folly
-until their time is ripe. Let them not know that I am the Master.”
-
-“The Master’s will is sweet,” said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of
-his canine blood.
-
-“But one has sinned,” said I. “Him I will kill, whenever I may meet
-him. When I say to you, ‘\emph{That is he},’ see that you fall upon him. And
-now I will go to the men and women who are assembled together.”
-
-For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the
-Dog-man. Then I followed and stood up, almost in the exact spot where I
-had been when I had heard Moreau and his staghound pursuing me. But now
-it was night, and all the miasmatic ravine about me was black; and
-beyond, instead of a green, sunlit slope, I saw a red fire, before
-which hunched, grotesque figures moved to and fro. Farther were the
-thick trees, a bank of darkness, fringed above with the black lace of
-the upper branches. The moon was just riding up on the edge of the
-ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that
-was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.
-
-“Walk by me,” said I, nerving myself; and side by side we walked down
-the narrow way, taking little heed of the dim Things that peered at us
-out of the huts.
-
-None about the fire attempted to salute me. Most of them disregarded
-me, ostentatiously. I looked round for the Hyena-swine, but he was not
-there. Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring
-into the fire or talking to one another.
-
-“He is dead, he is dead! the Master is dead!” said the voice of the
-Ape-man to the right of me. “The House of Pain—there is no House of
-Pain!”
-
-“He is not dead,” said I, in a loud voice. “Even now he watches us!”
-
-This startled them. Twenty pairs of eyes regarded me.
-
-“The House of Pain is gone,” said I. “It will come again. The Master
-you cannot see; yet even now he listens among you.”
-
-“True, true!” said the Dog-man.
-
-They were staggered at my assurance. An animal may be ferocious and
-cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
-
-“The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing,” said one of the
-Beast Folk.
-
-“I tell you it is so,” I said. “The Master and the House of Pain will
-come again. Woe be to him who breaks the Law!”
-
-They looked curiously at one another. With an affectation of
-indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my
-hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.
-
-Then the Satyr raised a doubt. I answered him. Then one of the dappled
-things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire.
-Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I
-talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of
-my excitement, that had troubled me at first. In the course of about an
-hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of
-my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I
-kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena-swine, but he never appeared.
-Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my
-confidence grew rapidly. Then as the moon crept down from the zenith,
-one by one the listeners began to yawn (showing the oddest teeth in the
-light of the sinking fire), and first one and then another retired
-towards the dens in the ravine; and I, dreading the silence and
-darkness, went with them, knowing I was safer with several of them than
-with one alone.
-
-In this manner began the longer part of my sojourn upon this Island of
-Doctor Moreau. But from that night until the end came, there was but
-one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small
-unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that
-I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one
-cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these
-half-humanised brutes. There is much that sticks in my memory that I
-could write,—things that I would cheerfully give my right hand to
-forget; but they do not help the telling of the story.
-
-In the retrospect it is strange to remember how soon I fell in with
-these monsters’ ways, and gained my confidence again. I had my quarrels
-with them of course, and could show some of their teeth-marks still;
-but they soon gained a wholesome respect for my trick of throwing
-stones and for the bite of my hatchet. And my Saint-Bernard-man’s
-loyalty was of infinite service to me. I found their simple scale of
-honour was based mainly on the capacity for inflicting trenchant
-wounds. Indeed, I may say—without vanity, I hope—that I held something
-like pre-eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high
-spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented
-itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles,
-in grimaces.
-
-The Hyena-swine avoided me, and I was always on the alert for him. My
-inseparable Dog-man hated and dreaded him intensely. I really believe
-that was at the root of the brute’s attachment to me. It was soon
-evident to me that the former monster had tasted blood, and gone the
-way of the Leopard-man. He formed a lair somewhere in the forest, and
-became solitary. Once I tried to induce the Beast Folk to hunt him, but
-I lacked the authority to make them co-operate for one end. Again and
-again I tried to approach his den and come upon him unaware; but always
-he was too acute for me, and saw or winded me and got away. He too made
-every forest pathway dangerous to me and my ally with his lurking
-ambuscades. The Dog-man scarcely dared to leave my side.
-
-In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter
-condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine
-friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink
-sloth-creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following
-me about. The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength
-of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at
-me,—jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained
-me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words. He had an
-idea, I believe, that to gabble about names that meant nothing was the
-proper use of speech. He called it “Big Thinks” to distinguish it from
-“Little Thinks,” the sane every-day interests of life. If ever I made a
-remark he did not understand, he would praise it very much, ask me to
-say it again, learn it by heart, and go off repeating it, with a word
-wrong here or there, to all the milder of the Beast People. He thought
-nothing of what was plain and comprehensible. I invented some very
-curious “Big Thinks” for his especial use. I think now that he was the
-silliest creature I ever met; he had developed in the most wonderful
-way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the
-natural folly of a monkey.
-
-This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these
-brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the
-Law, and behaved with general decorum. Once I found another rabbit torn
-to pieces,—by the Hyena-swine, I am assured,—but that was all. It was
-about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in
-their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a
-growing disinclination to talk. My Monkey-man’s jabber multiplied in
-volume but grew less and less comprehensible, more and more simian.
-Some of the others seemed altogether slipping their hold upon speech,
-though they still understood what I said to them at that time. (Can you
-imagine language, once clear-cut and exact, softening and guttering,
-losing shape and import, becoming mere lumps of sound again?) And they
-walked erect with an increasing difficulty. Though they evidently felt
-ashamed of themselves, every now and then I would come upon one or
-another running on toes and finger-tips, and quite unable to recover
-the vertical attitude. They held things more clumsily; drinking by
-suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more
-keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the “stubborn
-beast-flesh.” They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
-
-Some of them—the pioneers in this, I noticed with some surprise, were
-all females—began to disregard the injunction of decency, deliberately
-for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the
-institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing
-its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
-
-My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he
-became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy. I scarcely noticed the transition from
-the companion on my right hand to the lurching dog at my side.
-
-As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the
-lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome
-that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of
-boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau’s enclosure. Some memory of pain,
-I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.
-
-It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of these
-monsters,—to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how
-they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch
-of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how
-their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the
-quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the
-first month of my loneliness became a shuddering horror to recall.
-
-The change was slow and inevitable. For them and for me it came without
-any definite shock. I still went among them in safety, because no jolt
-in the downward glide had released the increasing charge of explosive
-animalism that ousted the human day by day. But I began to fear that
-soon now that shock must come. My Saint-Bernard-brute followed me to
-the enclosure every night, and his vigilance enabled me to sleep at
-times in something like peace. The little pink sloth-thing became shy
-and left me, to crawl back to its natural life once more among the
-tree-branches. We were in just the state of equilibrium that would
-remain in one of those “Happy Family” cages which animal-tamers
-exhibit, if the tamer were to leave it for ever.
-
-Of course these creatures did not decline into such beasts as the
-reader has seen in zoological gardens,—into ordinary bears, wolves,
-tigers, oxen, swine, and apes. There was still something strange about
-each; in each Moreau had blended this animal with that. One perhaps was
-ursine chiefly, another feline chiefly, another bovine chiefly; but
-each was tainted with other creatures,—a kind of generalised animalism
-appearing through the specific dispositions. And the dwindling shreds
-of the humanity still startled me every now and then,—a momentary
-recrudescence of speech perhaps, an unexpected dexterity of the
-fore-feet, a pitiful attempt to walk erect.
-
-I too must have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as
-yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew
-long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have
-a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.
-
-At first I spent the daylight hours on the southward beach watching for
-a ship, hoping and praying for a ship. I counted on the \emph{Ipecacuanha}
-returning as the year wore on; but she never came. Five times I saw
-sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island. I always
-had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island
-was taken to account for that.
-
-It was only about September or October that I began to think of making
-a raft. By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my
-service again. At first, I found my helplessness appalling. I had never
-done any carpentry or such-like work in my life, and I spent day after
-day in experimental chopping and binding among the trees. I had no
-ropes, and could hit on nothing wherewith to make ropes; none of the
-abundant creepers seemed limber or strong enough, and with all my
-litter of scientific education I could not devise any way of making
-them so. I spent more than a fortnight grubbing among the black ruins
-of the enclosure and on the beach where the boats had been burnt,
-looking for nails and other stray pieces of metal that might prove of
-service. Now and then some Beast-creature would watch me, and go
-leaping off when I called to it. There came a season of thunder-storms
-and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft
-was completed.
-
-I was delighted with it. But with a certain lack of practical sense
-which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the
-sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen
-to pieces. Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it;
-but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days
-I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of
-death.
-
-I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned
-me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,—for each
-fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.
-
-I was lying in the shade of the enclosure wall, staring out to sea,
-when I was startled by something cold touching the skin of my heel, and
-starting round found the little pink sloth-creature blinking into my
-face. He had long since lost speech and active movement, and the lank
-hair of the little brute grew thicker every day and his stumpy claws
-more askew. He made a moaning noise when he saw he had attracted my
-attention, went a little way towards the bushes and looked back at me.
-
-At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he
-wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,—slowly, for the day
-was hot. When we reached the trees he clambered into them, for he could
-travel better among their swinging creepers than on the ground. And
-suddenly in a trampled space I came upon a ghastly group. My
-Saint-Bernard-creature lay on the ground, dead; and near his body
-crouched the Hyena-swine, gripping the quivering flesh with its
-misshapen claws, gnawing at it, and snarling with delight. As I
-approached, the monster lifted its glaring eyes to mine, its lips went
-trembling back from its red-stained teeth, and it growled menacingly.
-It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint
-had vanished. I advanced a step farther, stopped, and pulled out my
-revolver. At last I had him face to face.
-
-The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair
-bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and
-fired. As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was
-knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand,
-and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me. I fell under
-the hind part of its body; but luckily I had hit as I meant, and it had
-died even as it leapt. I crawled out from under its unclean weight and
-stood up trembling, staring at its quivering body. That danger at least
-was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses
-that must come.
-
-I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw
-that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The
-Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the
-ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the
-thickets of the island. Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the
-island might have seemed deserted to a new-comer; but at night the air
-was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a
-massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife. Had I
-possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin
-the killing. There could now be scarcely a score left of the dangerous
-carnivores; the braver of these were already dead. After the death of
-this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the
-practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at
-night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a
-narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make
-a considerable noise. The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and
-recovered their fear of it. I turned once more, almost passionately
-now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my
-escape.
-
-I found a thousand difficulties. I am an extremely unhandy man (my
-schooling was over before the days of Slöjd); but most of the
-requirements of a raft I met at last in some clumsy, circuitous way or
-other, and this time I took care of the strength. The only
-insurmountable obstacle was that I had no vessel to contain the water I
-should need if I floated forth upon these untravelled seas. I would
-have even tried pottery, but the island contained no clay. I used to go
-moping about the island trying with all my might to solve this one last
-difficulty. Sometimes I would give way to wild outbursts of rage, and
-hack and splinter some unlucky tree in my intolerable vexation. But I
-could think of nothing.
-
-And then came a day, a wonderful day, which I spent in ecstasy. I saw a
-sail to the southwest, a small sail like that of a little schooner; and
-forthwith I lit a great pile of brushwood, and stood by it in the heat
-of it, and the heat of the midday sun, watching. All day I watched that
-sail, eating or drinking nothing, so that my head reeled; and the
-Beasts came and glared at me, and seemed to wonder, and went away. It
-was still distant when night came and swallowed it up; and all night I
-toiled to keep my blaze bright and high, and the eyes of the Beasts
-shone out of the darkness, marvelling. In the dawn the sail was nearer,
-and I saw it was the dirty lug-sail of a small boat. But it sailed
-strangely. My eyes were weary with watching, and I peered and could not
-believe them. Two men were in the boat, sitting low down,—one by the
-bows, the other at the rudder. The head was not kept to the wind; it
-yawed and fell away.
-
-As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to
-them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other. I
-went to the lowest point of the low headland, and gesticulated and
-shouted. There was no response, and the boat kept on her aimless
-course, making slowly, very slowly, for the bay. Suddenly a great white
-bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor
-noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its
-strong wings outspread.
-
-Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my
-chin on my hands and stared. Slowly, slowly, the boat drove past
-towards the west. I would have swum out to it, but something—a cold,
-vague fear—kept me back. In the afternoon the tide stranded the boat,
-and left it a hundred yards or so to the westward of the ruins of the
-enclosure. The men in it were dead, had been dead so long that they
-fell to pieces when I tilted the boat on its side and dragged them out.
-One had a shock of red hair, like the captain of the \emph{Ipecacuanha}, and
-a dirty white cap lay in the bottom of the boat.
-
-As I stood beside the boat, three of the Beasts came slinking out of
-the bushes and sniffing towards me. One of my spasms of disgust came
-upon me. I thrust the little boat down the beach and clambered on board
-her. Two of the brutes were Wolf-beasts, and came forward with
-quivering nostrils and glittering eyes; the third was the horrible
-nondescript of bear and bull. When I saw them approaching those
-wretched remains, heard them snarling at one another and caught the
-gleam of their teeth, a frantic horror succeeded my repulsion. I turned
-my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea. I
-could not bring myself to look behind me.
-
-I lay, however, between the reef and the island that night, and the
-next morning went round to the stream and filled the empty keg aboard
-with water. Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a
-quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last
-three cartridges. While I was doing this I left the boat moored to an
-inward projection of the reef, for fear of the Beast People.
+\include{chapters/The Reversion of the beast folk}
 
 \chapter{THE MAN ALONE}
 \cleardoublepage