He did not know how or why he did it any more than does the

philosopher know how or why he decides on mush and cream for
breakfast instead of two soft-boiled eggs.

What Jerry did was to yield in action to a brain impulse to do, not
what seemed the easier and more usual thing, but to do what seemed

the harder and more unusual thing. Since it is easier to endure the
known than to fly to the unknown; since both misery and fear love

company; the apparent easiest thing for Jerry to have done would
have been to follow the tribe of Somo into its fastnesses. Yet what

Jerry did was to diverge from the line of retreat and to start
northward, across the bounds of Somo, and continue northward into a

strange land of the unknown.
Had Nalasu not been struck down by the ultimate nothingness, Jerry

would have remained. This is true, and this, perhaps, to the one
who considers his action, might have been the way he reasoned. But

he did not reason it, did not reason at all; he acted on impulse.
He could count five objects, and pronounce them by name and number,

but he was capable" target="_blank" title="a.无能力的；不能的">incapable of reasoning that he would remain in Somo if
Nalasu lived, depart from Somo if Nalasu died. He merely departed

from Somo because Nalasu was dead, and the terrible shell-fire
passed quickly into the past of his consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness, while the present

became vivid after the way of the present. Almost on his toes did
he tread the wild bushmen's trails, tense with apprehension of the

lurking death he know infested such paths, his ears cocked alertly
for jungle sounds, his eyes following his ears to discern what made

the sounds.
No more doughty nor daring was Columbus, venturing all that he was

to the unknown, than was Jerry in venturing this jungle-darkness of
black Malaita. And this wonderful thing, this seeming great deed of

free will, he performed in much the same way that the itching of
feet and tickle of fancy have led the feet of men over all the

earth.
Though Jerry never laid eyes on Somo again, Bashti returned with his

tribe the same day, grinning and chuckling as he appraised the
damage. Only a few grass houses had been damaged by the shells.

Only a few coconuts had been chopped down. And as for the slain
pigs, lest they spoil, he made of their carcasses a great feast.

One shell had knocked a hole through his sea-wall. He enlarged it
for a launching-ways, faced the sides of it with dry-fitted coral

rock, and gave orders for the building of an additional canoe-house.
The only vexation he suffered was the death of Nalasu and the

disappearance of Jerry--his two experiments in primitive eugenics.
CHAPTER XX

A week Jerry spent in the bush, deterred always from penetrating to
the mountains by the bushmen who ever guarded the runways. And it

would have gone hard with him in the matter of food, had he not, on
the second day, encountered a lone small pig, evidently" target="_blank" title="ad.明显地">evidently lost from

its litter. It was his first hunting adventure for a living, and it
prevented him from travelling farther, for, true to his instinct, he

remained by his kill until it was nearly devoured.
True, he ranged widely about the neighbourhood, finding no other

food he could capture. But always, until it was gone, he returned
to the slain pig. Yet he was not happy in his freedom. He was too

domesticated, too civilized. Too many thousands of years had
elapsed since his ancestors had run freely wild. He was lonely. He

could not get along without man. Too long had he, and the
generations before him, lived in intimaterelationship with the two-

legged gods. Too long had his kind loved man, served him for love,
endured for love, died for love, and, in return, been partly

appreciated, less understood, and roughly loved.
So great was Jerry's loneliness that even a two-legged black-god was

desirable, since white-gods had long since faded into the limbo of
the past. For all he might have known, had he been capable of

conjecturing, the only white-gods in existence had perished. Acting
on the assumption that a black-god was better than no god, when he

had quite finished the little pig, he deflected his course to the
left, down-hill, toward the sea. He did this, again without

reasoning, merely because, in the subtle processes of his brain,
experience worked. His experience had been to live always close by

the sea; humans he had always encountered close by the sea; and
down-hill had invariably led to the sea.

He came out upon the shore of the reef-sheltered lagoon where ruined
grass houses told him men had lived. The jungle ran riot through

the place. Six-inch trees, throated with rotten remnants of
thatched roofs through which they had aspired toward the sun, rose

about him. Quick-growing trees had shadowed the kingposts so that
the idols and totems, seated in carved shark jaws, grinned greenly

and monstrously at the futility of man through a rime of moss and
mottled fungus. A poor little sea-wall, never much at its best,

sprawled in ruin from the coconut roots to the placid sea. Bananas,
plantains, and breadfruit lay rotting on the ground. Bones lay

about, human bones, and Jerry nosed them out, knowing them for what
they were, emblems of the nothingness of life. Skulls he did not

encounter, for the skulls that belonged to the scattered bones
ornamented the devil devil houses in the upland bush villages.

The salt tang of the sea gladdened his nostrils, and he snorted with
the pleasure of the stench of the mangrove swamp. But, another

Crusoe chancing upon the footprint of another man Friday, his nose,
not his eyes, shocked him electrically alert as he smelled the fresh

contact of a living man's foot with the ground. It was a nigger's
foot, but it was alive, it was immediate; and, as he traced it a

score of yards, he came upon another foot-scent, indubitably a white
man's.

Had there been an onlooker, he would have thought Jerry had gone
suddenly mad. He rushed frantically about, turning and twisting his

course, now his nose to the ground, now up in the air, whining as
frantically as he rushed, leaping abruptly at right angles as new

scents reached him, scurrying here and there and everywhere as if in
a game of tag with some invisible playfellow.

But he was reading the full report which many men had written on the
ground. A white man had been there, he learned, and a number of

blacks. Here a black had climbed a coconut tree and cast down the
nuts. There a banana tree had been despoiled of its clustered

fruit; and, beyond, it was evident that a similar event had happened
to a breadfruit tree. One thing, however, puzzled him--a scent new

to him that was neither black man's nor white man's. Had he had the
necessary knowledge and the wit of eye-observance, he would have

noted that the footprint was smaller than a man's and that the
toeprints were different from a Mary's in that they were close

together and did not press deeply into the earth. What bothered him
in his smelling was his ignorance of talcum powder. Pungent it was

in his nostrils, but never, since first he had smelled out the
footprints of man, had he encountered such a scent. And with this

were combined other and fainter scents that were equally strange to
him.

Not long did he interest himself in such mystery. A white man's
footprints he had smelled, and through the maze of all the other

prints he followed the one print down through a breach of sea-wall
to the sea-pounded coral sand lapped by the sea. Here the latest

freshness of many feet drew together where the nose of a boat had
rested on the beach and where men had disembarked and embarked

again. He smelled up all the story, and, his forelegs in the water
till it touched his shoulders, he gazed out across the lagoon where

the disappearing trail was lost to his nose.
Had he been half an hour sooner he would have seen a boat, without

oars, gasoline-propelled, shooting across the quiet water. What he
did see was an Arangi. True, it was far larger than the Arangi he

had known, but it was white, it was long, it had masts, and it
floated on the surface of the sea. It had three masts, sky-lofty