The moon was near the zenith,and her present silver seemed brighter than the gold of the absent sun.She brought me through the trees to the tallest of them,the one in the centre.It was not quite like the rest,for its branches,drawing their ends together at the top,made a clump that looked from beneath like a fir-cone.The princess stood close under it,gazing up,and said,as if talking to herself,"On the summit of that tree grows a tiny blossom which would at once heal my scratches!I might be a dove for a moment and fetch it,but I see a little snake in the leaves whose bite would be worse to a dove than the bite of a tiger to me!--How I hate that cat-woman!"She turned to me quickly,saying with one of her sweetest smiles,"Can you climb?"The smile vanished with the brief question,and her face changed to a look of sadness and suffering.I ought to have left her to suffer,but the way she put her hand to her wounded neck went to my heart.
I considered the tree.All the way up to the branches,were projections on the stem like the remnants on a palm of its fallen leaves.
"I can climb that tree,"I answered.
"Not with bare feet!"she returned.
In my haste to follow the leopardess disappearing,I had left my sandals in my room.
"It is no matter,"I said;"I have long gone barefoot!"Again I looked at the tree,and my eyes went wandering up the stem until my sight lost itself in the branches.The moon shone like silvery foam here and there on the rugged bole,and a little rush of wind went through the top with a murmurous sound as of water falling softly into water.I approached the tree to begin my ascent of it.The princess stopped me.
"I cannot let you attempt it with your feet bare!"she insisted.
"A fall from the top would kill you!"
"So would a bite from the snake!"I answered--not believing,Iconfess,that there was any snake.
"It would not hurt YOU!"she replied."--Wait a moment."She tore from her garment the two wide borders that met in front,and kneeling on one knee,made me put first my left foot,then my right on the other,and bound them about with the thick embroidered strips.
"You have left the ends hanging,princess!"I said.
"I have nothing to cut them off with;but they are not long enough to get entangled,"she replied.
I turned to the tree,and began to climb.
Now in Bulika the cold after sundown was not so great as in certain other parts of the country--especially about the ***ton's cottage;yet when I had climbed a little way,I began to feel very cold,grew still colder as I ascended,and became coldest of all when I got among the branches.Then I shivered,and seemed to have lost my hands and feet.
There was hardly any wind,and the branches did not sway in the least,yet,as I approached the summit,I became aware of a peculiar unsteadiness:every branch on which I placed foot or laid hold,seemed on the point of giving way.When my head rose above the branches near the top,and in the open moonlight I began to look about for the blossom,that instant I found myself drenched from head to foot.The next,as if plunged in a stormy water,I was flung about wildly,and felt myself sinking.Tossed up and down,tossed this way and tossed that way,rolled over and over,checked,rolled the other way and tossed up again,I was sinking lower and lower.Gasping and gurgling and choking,I fell at last upon a solid bottom.
"I told you so!"croaked a voice in my ear.