It was easy now for me to be alone. The beast people manifested a quite human curiosity about the dead body, and followed it in a thick knot, sniffing and growling at it as the bull-men dragged it down the beach. I went to the headland and watched the bull-men, black against the evening sky as they carried the weighted dead body out to sea; and like a wave across my mind came the realisation of the unspeakable aimlessness of things upon the island. Upon the beach among the rocks beneath me were the ape-man, the hyena-swine, and several other of the beast people, standing about Montgomery and Moreau. They were all still intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the law; yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the hyena-swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. The leopard-man had happened to go under: that was all the difference. Poor brute!