Four years later, the boy was undergoing Puberty at its best.
There was no mistaking it, the first, deep, measured yawn of a man, a man stretching himself after sleep.
No other creature could have made it; and falling, as it did, distinctly on the extreme silence, it expressed more of a man than any other single sound could have expressed. It was full of a luxurious sleepiness, not inconsistent with the time and the place. And it was loud enough to startle every animal in the glen.
The curious thing was that not one of them was startled. Incredibly, it seemed, the population of the lost garden was accustomed to the noises of man-incredibly, because sixteen years had passed since a man had tilled the place. Not even when the creepers that framed what was left of the low doorway of the house quivered and parted was there any sign of interest, much less of uneasiness. Not a Yeti stirred. Not a doe glanced up from her drinking.
Then, as if it were the most natural event in the world of the Indian Subcontinent, the amazing thing happened. With that unobtrusive suddenness that belongs only to the movements of the utterly wild, there appeared in the opening a black, tousled head, brown shoulders, long brown arms. Bone-naked almost, peeping out on the world like a fox from its earth, crouched a son of man.
So, for a moment. Then, with a peculiar spring, he jumped to his feet and stretched his arms above his head-a boy, newly awakened. Yet even at that there was no alarm. The apes sat stolidly. The does browsed on the surface of the stream as before.
His body was indubitably a boy's body, smooth for the most part, if the strange lumpy weals on elbows and knees, and the stranger scars crisscrossed on his chest, be excepted. Evidently his home was in the trees rather than on the ground, for his shins were rubbed almost to a polish with climbing, and his toes and fingers curved like blunt talons. The face, curtained with black hair, was an enigma yet. But the most arresting thing about him was his poise, standing. It did not belong to man, nor yet, quite, to beast. It was a poise self-evolved, alert as an animal's, unconscious as a child's-grace run wild.
A little breeze rustled along the Ridge, and a breath of it fluttered down into the glen. So the lean face, whipped with strands of hair, was fitfully revealed. The features clearly belonged to youth, for they lacked that coarseness that comes early in a land where all growth is forced. Cut out, as it were, cleanly and on a neat scale, they would have been handsome enough but for the hollows in cheeks destined to be plump, the sharpness of the nose, and the dryness of lips that were meant to be curved and comely. Had a spectator been able to approach at that moment, he might well have thought that he was in the presence of one of those half-wild, half-fed striplings who drive the cattle-carts on all the roads of India; but had he looked into the eyes that scanned the dusk so intently, he would assuredly, and with something of a start, have revised his opinion.
For he would have missed something, an animation common even to the dullest in humanity, and he would have found in its stead something baffling a wonder, a puzzlement hardly of this earth. It lurked behind the eyes, which were singularly beautiful, like a perpetual question; and with a shock the stranger would have realized that they had never before looked into a human face. They lacked utterly the subtle something light, maybe which makes the eyes the most expressive thing about us. They had never smiled nor cried. Save for that lurking bewilderment, they were empty. And they proclaimed, far more clearly than the matted hair or the thin body or the scars, that they belonged to an outcast, a starveling, a waif.
A waif of the forest, without one mark or sign of caste, or of family, or of human care-what name should be given to him but Nanga?
Nanga the naked one.