In a few moments I began to realize the horror of my position.
"Must I die! must I die! Oh, my God, is there nothing that can save me ?" I cried in my heart.
She was still standing motionless in the same place: her eyes wandered back from me to the snake; gradually its swaying head was lowered again, and the coil unwound from her ankle; then it began to move away, slowly at first, and with the head a little raised, then faster, and in the end it glided out of sight.

Gone!--but it had left its venom in my blood--O cursed reptile! Back from watching its retreat, my eyes returned to her face, now strangely clouded with trouble; her eyes dropped before mine, while the palms of her hands were pressed together, and the fingers clasped and unclasped alternately.

How different she seemed now; the brilliant face grown so pallid and vague-looking! But not only because this tragic end to our meeting had pierced her with pain: that cloud in the west had grown up and now covered half the sky with vast lurid masses of vapour, blotting out the sun, and a great gloom had fallen on the earth.
That sudden twilight and a long roll of approaching thunder, reverberating from the hills, increased my anguish and desperation.
Death at that moment looked unutterably terrible.

The remembrance of all that made life dear pierced me to the core--all that nature was to me, all the pleasures of sense and intellect, the hopes I had cherished--all was revealed to me as by a flash of lightning.

Bitterest of all was the thought that I must now bid everlasting farewell to this beautiful being I had found in the solitude this lustrous daughter of the Didi--just when I had won her from her shyness--that I must go away into the cursed blackness of death and never know the mystery of her life! It was that which utterly unnerved me, and made my legs tremble under me, and brought great drops of sweat to my forehead, until I thought that the venom was already doing its swift, fatal work in my veins.
With uncertain steps I moved to a stone a yard or two away and sat down upon it.