Hearing at length a little stir in the place,I walked through the next gate,and thence along a narrow street of tall houses to a little square,where I sat down on the base of a pillar with a hideous bat-like creature atop.Ere long,several of the inhabitants came sauntering past.I spoke to one:he gave me a rude stare and ruder word,and went on.
I got up and went through one narrow street after another,gradually filling with idlers,and was not surprised to see no children.By and by,near one of the gates,I encountered a group of young men who reminded me not a little of the bad giants.They came about me staring,and presently began to push and hustle me,then to throw things at me.I bore it as well as I could,wishing not to provoke enmity where wanted to remain for a while.Oftener than once or twice I appealed to passers-by whom I fancied more benevolent-looking,but none would halt a moment to listen to me.I looked poor,and that was enough:to the citizens of Bulika,as to house-dogs,poverty was an offence!Deformity and sickness were taxed;and no legislation of their princess was more heartily approved of than what tended to make poverty subserve wealth.
I took to my heels at last,and no one followed me beyond the gate.
A lumbering fellow,however,who sat by it eating a hunch of bread,picked up a stone to throw after me,and happily,in his stupid eagerness,threw,not the stone but the bread.I took it,and he did not dare follow to reclaim it:beyond the walls they were cowards every one.I went off a few hundred yards,threw myself down,ate the bread,fell asleep,and slept soundly in the grass,where the hot sunlight renewed my strength.
It was night when I woke.The moon looked down on me in friendly fashion,seeming to claim with me old acquaintance.She was very bright,and the same moon,I thought,that saw me through the terrors of my first night in that strange world.A cold wind blew from the gate,bringing with it an evil odour;but it did not chill me,for the sun had plenished me with warmth.I crept again into the city.
There I found the few that were still in the open air crouched in corners to escape the shivering blast.
I was walking slowly through the long narrow street,when,just before me,a huge white thing bounded across it,with a single flash in the moonlight,and disappeared.I turned down the next opening,eager to get sight of it again.
It was a narrow lane,almost too narrow to pass through,but it led me into a wider street.The moment I entered the latter,I saw on the opposite side,in the shadow,the creature I had followed,itself following like a dog what I took for a man.Over his shoulder,every other moment,he glanced at the animal behind him,but neither spoke to it,nor attempted to drive it away.At a place where he had to cross a patch of moonlight,I saw that he cast no shadow,and was himself but a flat superficial shadow,of two dimensions.
He was,nevertheless,an opaque shadow,for he not merely darkened any object on the other side of him,but rendered it,in fact,invisible.In the shadow he was blacker than the shadow;in the moonlight he looked like one who had drawn his shadow up about him,for not a suspicion of it moved beside or under him;while the gleaming animal,which followed so close at his heels as to seem the white shadow of his blackness,and which I now saw to be a leopardess,drew her own gliding shadow black over the ground by her side.When they passed together from the shadow into the moonlight,the Shadow deepened in blackness,the animal flashed into radiance.I was at the moment walking abreast of them on the opposite side,my bare feet sounding on the flat stones:the leopardess never turned head or twitched ear;the shadow seemed once to look at me,for I lost his profile,and saw for a second only a sharp upright line.That instant the wind found me and blew through me:I shuddered from head to foot,and my heart went from wall to wall of my bosom,like a pebble in a child's rattle.