Lawrence Teck was not in the gorges of the waterfalls.
While marching in through the lowlands he had been seized with a fever that he had failed to shake off on the plateaux. Every day he had grown a little worse, indeed, till finally the choice had seemed to lie between resignation of his work and serious illness. Turning back toward the coast, he had now regained the forests of the Mambava. Here, in his second night's camp, he had suffered a collapse.
He lay abed in his tent. On the waterproof floor cloth squatted a Mambava warrior, a messenger from King Muene-Motapa.
"Give the word, Bangana. Give the word, Brother of the King. We will carry you to the King's town on a litter as soft as the clouds. The wizards shall work their charms to make you well. The Dances of the Moon are about to begin: it is the time of answered prayers. Your medicines have failed; now try ours. One word, Bangana! Gladden the heart of the King!"
The messenger's almost Semitic visage, upturned in the lamplight, was smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer; his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, as he repeated the conjuration:
"Speak! Speak the word!"
Lawrence Teck returned:
"Say this to Muene-Motapa. The medicine that might cure me is far beyond the sea. I thought I might do without it; but see what the lack of it has brought me to. A little chill, a headache—the strong man rejoicing in the world shakes his shoulders and they are gone. But death in one of its multitude of forms stands at the door of the heart that has ceased to take pleasure in life."
His voice was feeble. His bearded face, bending forward under the net, was blank from exhaustion and unnaturally flushed. His teeth clashed together, as he concluded:
"There is no medicine in this land to cure this sickness."
The messenger groaned, and said compassionately:
"It is sad to see the great deserted by their gods. Yet our gods remain!" He pressed his palms on the floor sheet and leaned forward, his filmy headdress drifting over his glittering eyes. "Surely, Bangana, now is the time to renounce the old, to embrace the true! To cast the spear of scorn and come in behind our shields till you are strong again. We will make you forget! Give yourself up but once to our ancient mysteries! Have you forgotten the Dances of the Moon?"
There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their appearance and actions, to be human—beings that danced in regiments with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums, that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest stronghold; it was that which hovers like an echo over the suave, ordered landscapes of civilization; it was the seductive horror that invades the modern brain in dreams, or in some moment of utter bitterness and despair.
For a moment he still leaned forward, peering into those glittering, dark eyes, though what he saw was something beyond that face—the destruction of all the toil of fifty thousand years, the suicide of a soul. With a shudder he lay back upon the bed.
"Return to the King."
For five minutes the messenger sat motionless; but Lawrence Teck did not speak again. Rising at last, in a fluff of his marabout plumes, he armed himself with his spear and his oval shield covered with an heraldic design.
"The King will weep," he said. "And the little sisters of the King, and all those who loved you, oh, dead man."
He raised the curtain, and stalked away through the camp, clashing superbly between the fires, while the clustered askaris and porters regarded him dismally.
A white man in a fleece-lined coat, who had been waiting in the open for the messenger to depart, entered the tent and sat down beside the bed.
He was Cornelius Rysbroek.
"Shall you try to march to-morrow?"
Lawrence Teck did not reply. There was no strength in him even to move his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek, believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.
In his eyes appeared, perfected, the light that had made them exceptional for years, a flash from that psychical lake of fire and brimstone in which his heart had so long been burning up. For the tables were turned at last: the weak one, the inferior, had become the stronger, the better. A thousand wounds seemed to heal themselves in him as he contemplated the prostration of the enemy whom he had hated, just from premonition, even before his appearance. There was true madness in that look, arising from the long privation, the interminable jealousy, the consequent monomania of revenge. "He will die," he reflected, gloating with half-shut eyes, his face, that had once been puerile, now dignified by triumph. "He will never leave this forest," he sang to himself, curling up his mouse-colored mustaches as if at a mirror before sallying out to some pleasure in which there was no sting. But suddenly he remembered that this prostrate rival was still his conqueror, had won what he had not been able to win, would recall, no doubt, in his last moment of consciousness, that love in all its details.
Out of the silent night the spirit of Africa crept into the dim tent, completing his madness.
To one of the little fires came softly Lawrence Teck's tent boy, a turbaned Persian, lemon-hued, with the beak of a parrot and the mouth of a cruel woman. He sat down close beside a Swahili gun bearer, who was frying a mess of white ants.
"Our Bwana has fallen asleep," he uttered in a voice that would have been inaudible to white men. "The other Bwana is sitting by the bed." He waited till the ants were cooked to a turn, then murmured, in a tone like aeolian harp strings caressed by the faintest zephyr, "If our Bwana does not die of the fever the other Bwana will kill him."
The brown Swahili, his pan half raised, turned his face which seemed to have been smashed flat, and gave the speaker a slow, fierce look of inquiry. The Persian breathed:
"With our Bwana's own pistol. As if he had killed himself. I peeped through the curtain. The pistol was hanging from the tent-pole. When he looked at it, and then at our Bwana, I read everything in his mind. But if this also is the will of God it will not happen until some hour when the camp is still—when we are all asleep."
The safari that was seeking him marched and camped, marched and camped, marched and camped.
Every afternoon the northeastern monsoon wafted in its sticky moisture, releasing in the jungles the nauseating sweetness of incredible flowers. Smoky-brown flies were seen on the necks of the sheep. The beasts began to sicken and die. The porters ate fresh meat.
But the porters no longer sang. The Wasena, who bore the hammock, muttered to one another dolefully as they shuffled along. All knew by this time that they were not headed for Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Avoiding that last outpost of civilization, they were approaching the country of the Mambava, which lay behind the steamy sunshine, below the blue and lavender battlements of granite, in the uplands covered with forests.
The askaris alone, the lean, khaki-clad Somalia, remained indifferent to this atmosphere of disquiet that was more debilitating to the porters than the fever-laden mists. For these fierce, restless men from the northern deserts were of a breed that found its true contentment in danger and violence. They were cheered, perhaps, by the possibility of bloodshed, sustained by the automatism resulting from their faith, and, despite their disdain of women, inspired by their admiration of this frail personage who was always urging more speed toward the fabulous regions of peril.
As for her, she no longer saw anything except that deep green zone which quivered behind the heat.
"I shall find him not in the gorges, but in those forests."
For the scene of Anna Zanidov's prophecy was laid in a forest.
She lay in the machilla like a tightly drawn bow. Her skin, now ashen, now bright from a touch of fever, stretched over a visage of apparently new contours: round her cheekbones and jaws were suggestions of previously unsuspected strength. Her tender lips had assumed an almost cruel aspect; her sunken eyes, growing ever larger in her diminishing face, were harder than gems. She was the personification of will.
And Parr, sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the camp boys, were only the instrument that her will had welded together. They were wraiths obediently advancing her dream of one fleeting moment of triumph over fate. They were nothing, since she had summoned them out of the void of this world by an imperious cry. They were everything; for without them her dream would fade.
Sometimes the green zone of the uplands was lost in a blur not of heat, but of fever. Sharp pains stabbed her temples, and, when the dream became distinct again, she saw black men walking like giants, their heads in the white-hot sky. But just as she had conquered fear, so, by a supreme resolution, she conquered her vertigo, the burning of her emaciated limbs, the quaking of her body which a moment before had been bathed in moisture. At sunset she descended from the machilla to give Hamoud a look of astonishment, while replying:
"No, I am well."
Yet she cast a look of dread at the rising tent, thinking of the hours of sleeplessness, of appalling thoughts on the borderline between nightmares and flashes of fever.
Now and then, as she escaped shivering from the hot bath, she lost hold of her new strength.
"If you knew!" she whimpered.
The lost, safe life rose before her. She saw against the green tent walls the painting by Bronzino, the jeweled perspective of Fifth Avenue at night, Fanny Brassfield's necklace sparkling in the blaze of the opera house. The music of waltzes mingled with the strains of David's tone poem; and she smelled at the same time the tanbark of the horse show, the pastilles at Brantome's, and the flowers surrounding the marble warrior and the marble nymph. She was seized with panic, on realizing the remoteness of security.
"Where am I? Africa! But why?"
She stood motionless, aghast at her inability to remember why she was here.
Hamoud's voice came to her from beyond the curtain:
"There is going to be a shauri, a talk with these porters of yours."
"Ah, my God! What is it now?"
Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:
"Rebellion."
She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.
Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:
"Madam, all is ready."
She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed, her eyes as cold as ice.
On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above this spectacle.
Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance, persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.
An askari spat to the left contemptuously.
The leader of the porters from Tete sprang forward with a cry of exasperation. For this occasion he had bound round his waist the pelt of one of the slaughtered sheep, and had made a head-dress of draggled turaco feathers. He waved his sinewy arms, crouched, postured, tossed back his head. His oration was less coherent than the Wasena's, but more dramatic.
"The first moon since the rains! The season when the Mambava hold their great dances! It is now that their forest will be full of music, while their warriors gather in the place that they know of, to dance to the moon. We will not enter the country of the Mambava while they dance to the moon!"
A hoarse outcry rose toward the multitude of stars:
"We will not enter the country of the Mambava when they dance to the moon!"
The askaris, their fezzes cocked jauntily, impatiently shuffled their sandals of giraffe hide, and hitched up their belts in which were thrust broad-bladed Somali knives.
"They are rabbits," the askaris affirmed. "Even this lady shames them. They are less than women." They turned their fierce eyes toward Lilla, calling out to her, "Here we stand, Ya Bibi!" There was a savage insinuation in that cry.
In order to respond, Parr sat down in a chair, the immemorial symbol of authority. He spoke in Swahili. After each sentence he paused, so that his words might be translated by the headmen of the porters into their tribal dialects. His voice rose faintly, almost ineffectually contending against the sounds of the insects. He looked very small and ghastly in the firelight; he was sick to his bones, feeling just as he had felt before the black-water fever. The great semicircle of hostile eyes perceived all his weakness. In the opinion of his antagonists his face bore the seal of death. This representative of the white-skinned super-race was revealed as weaker than they—no trace of the white man's conquering will was to be discerned in his feeble countenance. Why listen any more?
Their leaders no longer troubled to translate his words.
He went on, however, with the last of his strength holding fast to the thought of paying his debt in full.
In that land, he declared, none would dare to hurt the friends of Muene-Motapa's friend. They should return telling how they had passed unharmed, even honored, through the country of the Mambava. He promised them double pay—while groping for some further argument, he seemed to be sinking in upon himself. His face drooped forward.
From the horde of porters came scattered shouts:
"Enough! The shauri is over! In the morning we return!"
"What do they say, Hamoud?"
"They say that in the morning they will return to the coast."
She sat stunned.
The orator from Tete moved with a kind of spasmodic dancing gait toward Parr. Never thus had the white man's genius lain prostrate before him. He was the symbol of a race abruptly exalted from inferiority to dominance. There came over him a frenzy of pride and malice; it was the realization of the dreams that burn the brains of all the dark people of the earth. "Do you hear?" he howled, and brandished his fists as though about to strike that lowered head.
An askari glided forward reversing his rifle. There was a cracking sound as the gun butt struck the orator from Tete in the middle of the forehead. With a drowsy look the smitten man sank down as gently as if falling into a mound of feathers, and deliberately composed himself in sleep, his brown face against the brown earth.
In all that throng there was suddenly not the slightest movement, and no sound was to be heard except the trill of the insects.
She was standing, staring from the prostrate body to the mass of porters, whose eyes were fixed upon the victim with one look, of mournful awakening. Then they saw her whom they had forgotten, or, in their transport, considered negligible. But when they had read her face it was they who were frightened.
"You! You! To stop me!"
And a homicidal gesture completed her appearance of fury.
"Wallahi!" the askaris called out to one another. "She has given the order!"
They spread out to right and left with a clicking of their rifle locks; they drove the porters together, close to the fire. A soft moan arose from the huddled crowd. They had seen the whips of hippopotamus hide, long and flexible, translucent in the firelight like streams of amber.
As the lash described a flourish above the first outstretched back she turned away to her tent. Hamoud was before her, raising the curtain. He said:
"They will speak no more about the coast when we are through with them."
At dawn he came to tell her that Parr had the black-water fever.
The sick man was unconscious when they sent him off, in the machilla, toward Fort Pero d'Anhaya, with three of the askaris and fifteen of the porters. They soon disappeared into a jungle of spear grass, above which the sunrise was spreading its bands of smoky gold and rose. The chosen porters forgot their lacerated bodies; a song floated back from them to those who must still press onward.
"I have killed him, Hamoud."
"Who knows? It is true that he is old and has had this fever before. But we do not need him. Maybe he has fulfilled his destiny. And we have not." In the glory of the sunrise he turned to meditate over her thin, tortured face. He observed, with a lyrical sadness, "What is life? A running this way and that after mirages. A thirsting for sweet wells of which one has heard in a dream. Does one ever taste those waters? Are they sweet or bitter? Perhaps this is the secret—that to taste them is death."
The safari marched on. She rode the Muscat donkey, which was dying from the bites of tsetse flies.
Next morning she marched afoot in the blaze of the sun. Trailing thorns pierced her ankles; the stipa shrubs showered her with little barbs, and from another bush was detached an invisible pollen that penetrated her clothing and burned her skin. At the noon halt they made a hammock of tent cloth, in which she was carried all the afternoon by four porters. At nightfall they saw, across a valley, the edge of the Mambava forests, the towering tree trunks banked with huge thickets and bound together by nets of vines.
They camped in the valley, where a stream flowed through a tangle of indigo plants. The warm bath steamed in her tent; the fresh evening garments were laid out; everything was the same in this canvas ark that proceeded farther and farther into the wilds with its atmosphere of rude luxury intact. When she emerged from the tent, in her polo coat and suede mosquito boots, the table glistened with its china and glassware.
She sat looking at the black forest.
"He is there!"
But she was very tired.
Ah, to lie down, grope no longer for her will, drift away into a region where there was no love or remorse, sleep forever! Why should she feel like this with the goal so near at last, unless from a premonition that all her efforts were useless?
Never before had this land and its phenomena appeared so cruel, so perfectly the manifestation of a superhuman force that clothed its malignancy in a primordial splendor. Here, she reflected, was the quintessence of earthly beauty inextricable from the quintessence of horror; here was the source of all that she had trusted elsewhere in countless perfidious disguises and refinements.
Poisonous in some subtle element behind its visible vapors, it corrupted not only the flesh, but also the souls that had emerged elsewhere into forms of affection and compassion. Two nights ago even she had greeted the crack of the whips with the furious thought, "Strike again!"—and now there stole into her brain, together with the light hallucinations of fever, a hatred of these cringing black men who for a moment had dared to stand before her as antagonists. The evening breeze brought to her, from the porters' fires, the odor of savage bodies that had labored and been beaten for the cause of love; and her disgust was tinctured with the fierce intolerance of all those impressionable beings from what is called civilization, whom Africa had debased—or else, made "natural" again.
Through the buzz of insects there came from the forest, gradually blending over wide distances, a gentle throbbing. The porters lifted their round heads beyond the fires. The sharp profiles of the askaris were motionless. A wail floated over the camp:
"The drums of the Mambava!"
The throbbing died away. But soon it began again in the north, then in the south, and swelled to a continuous rumbling.
On the edge of the sky the moon appeared, blood red, nearly full.
There was a rush of feet, a scuffle in the bushes, and two askaris advanced into the firelight, dragging between them a creature that they seemed to have plucked out of some grotesque dream.
He was an albino. His gray skin, because of its lack of pigmentation, was splotched with eczema; his wool was a dirty, yellowish white; his features were permanently distorted because of his lifelong efforts to keep the light from paining his pink eyes. The askaris threw this monstrosity upon his face before Lilla's chair. He lay moaning and feebly moving his hands, as if he were caressing the earth.
Suddenly he sat up on his haunches. His body jumped from the beating of his heart. He fixed on Lilla a look that was the utmost caricature of terror and entreaty.
An askari let out a neighing laugh:
"So this is one of the dangerous Mambava!"
But the albino was not one of the Mambava.
He was a man of the Manyazombe, who dwelt in the north—an exile, a solitary wanderer, a lost soul. Who knew what aversion, what indefinable dread, his dissimilarity had produced in his own people, what village calamities he had been blamed for, what persecutions he had suffered? For some reason he had fled from his own tribe, to be greeted at the outskirts of alien villages with showers of spears. He had learned to reciprocate the horror of mankind. Then he had dwelt in the jungle, joining the furtive beasts. But still, moved by an obscure, invincible need, he crept in thickets from which he might watch the life of human beings, feasting his eyes on the fire-splashed bodies of men and women, listening to the songs and the laughter, filling his nostrils with the savor of his kind, as a damned spirit might creep back to the warmth of life from a desolate hereafter.
But what did he see now? Was she who sat before him human or divine—one of those who must be placated by strict deeds, by charms or the blood of animals and captives; some spirit of the jungle that had made herself visible, in her marvelous pallor and uncanny costume, amid a retinue of mortals inured to her magic?
"Tell him that he is safe," she said, with a movement of loathing.
Falling forward, he embraced her boots with his hands.
A porter who understood his language was summoned to question him. The albino had just now crept through the country of the Mambava. He had not dared to linger there; for on all the forest trails bands of warriors were moving in toward the rendezvous where, as soon as the moon was full, they would hold the dances. Yet in the midst of those forests he had seen the camp of white men.
"He has seen it!" she cried, leaning forward to devour with her eyes that hideous and precious instrument of fate. "Hamoud, he has seen him! He can guide us there!" And with a look of tenderness she murmured, "You will show us the way? Ah, I will give you—I will give you——"
She saw herself pouring gold over the pariah.
He bowed his head till his dirty, yellowish poll nearly touched his gray knees that were covered with callouses. Amid the close-packed, silent audience a smothered phrase rose to the ears of the interpreter. Hamoud, turning away his face, cast forth the words:
"Too late."
For the albino, while creeping round that camp in the Mambava forests, had heard of a strange thing, of the shooting of one of the white men in the night. Those discussing the matter had not known how it had happened, since they had all been asleep. The white man was then dying. By this time, no doubt, he was dead.
She sank back as if she, too, had received a bullet. But after a time, during which that dark throng had not stirred, she rose and entered her tent. There Hamoud found her standing, swaying slightly, with closed eyes. An invisible hand had brushed across her countenance, effacing the last traces of her beauty.
"Do we still go on?" breathed Hamoud.
Without opening her eyes she returned, in a loud voice:
"He shall not die till I get there."
Hamoud's look of sadness gave place to a look of peace.
At daybreak the safari entered the forest.
Two askaris went first, guarding the albino. Next, since the forest trail was too narrow for hammock travel, Lilla came afoot with Hamoud, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling no physical weariness or pain. Behind her the rest of the askaris herded along the porters.
The huge tree trunks sprang up toward a firmament of somber green, from which descended dense festoons of vines. Through this twilight flitted birds of brilliant plumage and long-haired monkeys. The place had a morose, nefarious beauty, like the forest in the prophecy of Anna Zanidov.
Now and then a glade appeared, hung with flowers of mustard yellow or diaphanous purple. Then again the tunnel-like trail, the green twilight, the flapping of carmine wings, and a shaft of sunshine piercing the canopy to rest upon the gnawed bones of a forest deer. Here and there stood clumps of brown reeds, without twigs or buds, as though a band of warriors had buried their spear blade down in the earth before vanishing into the thickets. But one saw no faces except those of the monkeys.
They camped in a glade beside a spring. The drums filled the night with their throbbing, which seemed part of the throbbing in Lilla's feverish head. The askaris kept double guard; but at dawn eleven of the porters were missing.
Ahead of the marching safari, in a clearing spotted with large, dirty-white blossoms, six black men sat motionless round the ashes of a camp fire. They were watchers posted here to see that no strangers entered their land at the season of the dances.
Although they could not take part in those mysteries they wore the full dance regalia. They were crowned with towering shakoes of black-and-white monkey hair, fastened under their chins with beaded straps, and bristling with egrets. Their bodies were smeared with indigo and blotched with large discs of white paint; their faces were painted white, but their noses were covered with soot. They wore not a scrap of clothing; but around their necks and on their arms and legs they had a wealth of talismans—tiny figures fashioned from clay, from iron, from copper and from stones, in which one might discern the characteristics of Phoenician images debased by thousands of years of savage inspiration. In their painted, plumed, bedizened immobility they appeared inhuman, or perhaps less than human—the personifications of Africa's blind and vivid soul, the full efflorescence of this gloomy, white-splotched clearing.
They raised their heads as a seventh, crowned and painted as they were, stood forth from a curtain of vines. On his left arm he wore a shield covered with black-and-white patterns; above the shield rim glittered the blades of three spears.
He described what he had seen.
He told of a train of dark-skinned men, guided by one with unexceptional features, but with yellowish wool and a skin that resembled the belly of a dead fish. These intruders served a personage such as had never been seen. For she—if indeed a woman—was tall, with a face the color of the highest mountain peaks, and eyes gleaming like strange stones. She walked as if in a trance; but in her trancelike face was a cold grief, or maybe a cold fury, like that of some goddess whose taboos had been broken, and who was marching to vengeance.
They sat awe-stricken, filled with that dread of the supernatural which possesses the savage who is confronted with anything unheard of. Besides, the spell of the dances was upon them, remote though they were from that scene—the far-off frenzies that were preparing had begun to trouble their nerves. But at last their leader rose. Moved by the mysticism of the season, when every act must take on a liturgical quality, he chanted the question:
"Who is the woman with the cold face who enters our country at the time of the Dances of the Moon?"
All his companions repeated his question in a low, singing tone, touching their amulets, and raising their whitened visages toward the interlaced branches and vines.
The leader's high, tremulous voice was heard again:
"Is it a woman of flesh and blood; or is it the Lady of the Moon?"
It was the genius of the ancient Phoenicians, the spirit of Astoreth, surviving distorted through all these ages in the depths of the jungle, exerting its spell.
But a look of cunning entered his blood-shot eyes; and his flexible mask of white was creased by a smile. He cried out in a new voice:
"If she is the Lady of the Moon our spears will not hurt her!"
He bounded into the air, stamped his feet, shook his headdress, and crouched in an attitude of war.
"But if she is flesh and blood our spears will tell us so!"
All leaped to their feet. Their brandished spears made nimbuses over their heads; and this time their response was like the baying of hounds. Then, one by one, stepping lightly, they slipped through the curtain of vines.
Trees, trees, trees. They were colossal, draped in moss and lichen, ferns growing from the crooks of their limbs, above the impenetrable thickets of broad-leaved plants from which came the tinkle of rills. Here and there had fallen across the narrow corridor a tree trunk riddled by ants; as Lilla stepped over it blue scorpions scuttled away.
Hour after hour there floated before her the fezzes and khaki-covered backs of the two leading askaris, trim, narrow, jaunty backs flanking the leprous shoulders of the albino. Now and again Hamoud, a robed figment always beside her, addressed her in an unintelligible language.
"Dying. Dying. Dying."
Too late, perhaps, even for that last embrace of glances, that moment of pardon and love which was all that she had asked. Closed eyes, sealed lips, a similacrum to mock her will, left behind by the spirit that had gone where she and the safari could not follow.
"All the same, I shall not be far behind you! My spirit, when it has shaken off this flesh, will travel faster than yours, on the wings of a supreme necessity. I shall find you!"
She stopped short, bewildered by a new hallucination—a flash of silvery light across her face. She saw one of the leading askaris kneel down and stretch himself upon his face, as if trying to press against the ground a thin shaft that seemed to be lying crosswise under his chest. Then she heard an explosion, and perceived a film of smoke full of horizontal gleams—the blades of flying spears.
She had a fleeting impression of Hamoud, his arm outstretched, his hand spitting fire. Beyond him the albino vanished in mid-air. The second askari, his rifle lowered, was staring in vague surmise at his breast, from which protruded a piece of polished wood. At that moment she found herself surrounded by khaki-clad forms all moving with catlike grace. The dark faces under the fezzes were changed by the fervor of battle; the bared teeth shone out beside the locks of the rifles. These thin, hard bodies, buffeting her about, formed round her a rampart from which the blades of steel were answered by blades of flame.
Hamoud rose from the ground at her feet, drawing his dagger. An askari grunted and sat down with a thud. Then she saw that they were in the midst of a glade. Among the bushes flitted the pattern of a shield, a clump of egrets, a whitened visage that seemed to lack a nose. The askaris' rifles rose, spouted fire, sank down with a click, rose, crashed again. Silence fell.
The blue veil of smoke rose slowly, all in one piece.
Then, without warning, came the charge.
She became aware of an incredible apparition—a sort of naked harlequin, magnified by a towering headdress, sailing high, twisting over his shield like a pole vaulter over a pole, coming down asprawl in a bed of crimson flowers. Another followed, crouching—or else this was only a swiftly advancing shield, topped by a tuft of egrets. But from one side of the shield darted out along, indigo arm, releasing a spear: an askari leaned against Lilla, coughed, and slipped to the ground. The advancing shield doubled up, to reveal a warrior who, with a somersault, a rattle of amulets, a blur of broad polka dots, lay flat, his face blown away.
More shields were rushing upon the guns, however.
The Mambava, shot through and through, feeling death upon them, maintained their momentum long enough to drive their weapons through the khaki jackets, or, at the least, to go down with their teeth buried in the riflemen's necks, as if that draught of blood might reanimate them. The wrestlers sank to earth inextricably mingled, a fist perhaps sticking up above the tangle and slowly relinquishing a broad-bladed Somali knife.
One remained apart, some dozen yards away, shot through the hips, but still dragging himself forward. From his open month, yawning black in the whitened face, issued roars like those of a crippled lion, as with a lion's courage he still came on, his legs trailing, his body scraping the soil, a spear in one clenched paw.
Lilla stood paralyzed, alone before that inexorable advance.
For the rampart of askaris had become a circle of dead men, expressing with their last gestures a deep desire to be remerged with this rich, dark, ancient earth.
But all at once, as though a bit of blue sky had fallen into the glade, there appeared between Lilla and the crawling warrior, a figure of trailing blue robes, bent double, running. It was Hamoud, his turban gone, his cheek smeared with loam, one shoulder of his robe stained a deep violet.
Clapping his sandaled foot upon the spear blade, he seized the Mambava by his plume of egrets. The painted head was dragged back. The Zanzibar dagger shone through the ribbons of smoke.
Her mouth twisted in abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the blue robe, the wet dagger, the plumed head pulled back, with glazed eyes fixed on the woman who stood rigid, her arms upstretched, transformed from the giver of life into the giver of death.
She fled, stumbled, stood still in the entrance to the back-trail. In that leafy tunnel, as far as the eye could see, was no one living or dead. The porters, the tent boys, all were gone in a stampede for safety. The baggage lay scattered among the fern beds. She saw bundles of green canvas, chop boxes, rags, bursting sacks of grain. Beside a mossy rock lay her dressing case smashed open, its mirror, brushes, and vials trampled into the mud.
"Ah, my mirror is broken."
She wandered through the wreckage, uttering peals of laughter.
The light of the full moon, penetrating the high canopy of leaves, illuminated the contorted vines that hung motionless in mid-air like pythons of silver. Here, miles beyond the place of battle, apart from the trail, in a covert that seemed made for them, the woman and the man sat resting, she on a mound of moss as soft as a pile of velvet cushions, he at her feet. A moonbeam rested on her loosened hair and her dress that was torn to tatters. She raised her head as the sound of the drums came to her from far away.
To-night there was a new accent in that throbbing, a wilder cadence, a suggestion of tumult, a hint of the infernal. In her fancy she perceived a multitude of naked, painted figures dancing in the glamor of great fires.
A shudder passed through her from head to foot, as she said:
"Now you will confess that we have come into a place where God does not exist."
He cast round her his blood-stained robe. Through a rent in his white kanzu, which was glued to his body, his shoulder appeared, covered with a black encrustation.
"Wherever we turn," he answered, "there is the face of God."
"So you still believe? You could even pray, perhaps?"
By way of response, casting up his dark eyes, he pronounced the Fatihah, his low voice mingling with the mutter of the drums:
"In the name of God, the Compassionate! Praise belongeth to God, the Lord of the Worlds, the King of the Day of Doom. Thee do we serve, and of Thee do we ask aid. Guide us in the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious, not of those with whom Thou art angered, or of those who stray. Amen."
"Delusion!" she moaned.
His gaze embraced her in pity. His precisely modeled face, still so youthful despite his delicate beard, and almost spiritually handsome in the moonlight, yearned toward her as he returned, with a caressing gentleness:
"Yes, surely this present life is only a play, a pastime. This world, and all in it, are shadows cast upon the screen of eternity. But God is real. Everything may go to destruction, but not the face of God. Ah," he sighed, "if only the Lord had opened your heart to Islam, had willed that you might feel the Inner Light! No matter what may happen, there is peace." He dreamed sadly for a time, then said, "Fair-seeming to men are women; but God—goodly the home with him!" And he averted his head from her, as though from a temptation to apostasy.
Something moved in the bushes. Hamoud raised a rifle from the moss into his lap. Amid the leaves two balls of green fire appeared and disappeared. It was a leopard that had peeped out at them.
The drum music swelled through the forest.
"To-morrow they will find us," she reflected.
"Meanwhile we live in this flesh, subject to its beliefs, still able to trust in its seeming powers of delight."
So, after a long hush, he took from his bosom a little glass bottle of square surfaces enameled with gold, uncorked it, and held it out to her. There came to her nostrils the odor of her own perfume, which she had worn in a lost world.
"Clothe yourself in this sweetness," he whispered. "Touch it once more to your temples, your hair, your lips. Let it float about you like a veil that covers a beauty remembered from old dreams. These rags will become cloth of gold on the body of the Sultana of Sultanas. I shall sit while still alive in those gardens beneath whose shades the rivers flow—those charming abodes that are in the Garden of Eden. This, and not Paradise, shall be the great bliss."
She poured the few drops of perfume into her palms, and held out her hands.
"Ah, Hamoud——"
"Do not speak," he protested, catching her hands in his. "It is this moment for which I became a servant, did things that you will never know of, and followed you here."
She sat in the blood-stained robe, in the dark forest vibrating from the drums and rustling with stealthy beasts, lost, bereft of beauty and faith, yet aware of one more miracle—realizing that even now, out of her poverty, she could still bestow happiness.