CHAPTER XXITHE FEAST OF THE VULTURES
Adams, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a whoop from Félix.
It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Félix, were all that remained of Berselius’s savage train of followers. The rest were over there——
Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts and kites were holding a clamorous meeting; over there, where the ground was black with birds.
The two wretches approaching the camping place rolled their eyes in terror, glancing over there. They had run for miles and hidden themselves in a donga. They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, torn to pieces, trampled to pulp; they had heard the thunder of the vanishing herd, and they had listened to the awful silence that followed, lying on their faces, clinging to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the camp.
“Hi yi!” yelled Félix, and a response came like the cry of a seagull. They were shivering as dogs shiver when ill or frightened; their teeth were chattering, and they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on their necks and ankles showed white and leprous-looking in the bright morning sunshine.
But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent over him, and started back in surprise.
Berselius’s eyes were open; he was breathing regularly and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened from sleep, was yet too lazy to move.
Adams touched him upon the shoulder, and Berselius, raising his right hand, drew it over his face as if to chase away sleep. Then his head dropped, and he lay looking up at the sky. Then he yawned twice, deeply, and turning his head on his left shoulder looked about him lazily, his eyes resting here and there: on the two porters who were sitting, with knees drawn up, eating some food which Félix had given them; on the broken camp furniture and the heaps of raffle left by the catastrophe of the night before; on the skyline where the grass waved against the morning blue.
Adams heaved a sigh of relief. The man had only been stunned. None of the vital centres of the brain had been injured. Some injury there must be, but the main springs of life were intact. There was no paralysis, for now the sick man was raising his left hand, and, moving about as a person moves in bed to get a morecomfortable position, he raised both knees and then, turning over on his right side, straightened them out again. Now, by the movements of a sick person you can tell pretty nearly the condition of his brain.
All the movements of this sick man were normal; they indicated great tiredness, nothing more. The shock and the loss of blood might account for that. Adams the night before had made a pillow from his own coat for the stricken one’s head; he was bending now to rearrange it, but he desisted. Berselius was asleep.
Adams remained on his knees for a moment contemplating his patient with deep satisfaction. Then he rose to his feet. Some shelter must be improvised to protect the sleeping man from the sun, but in the raffle around there did not seem enough tent cloth to make even an umbrella.
Calling Félix and the two porters to follow him, he started off, searching amidst thedébrishere and there, setting the porters to work to collect the remains of the stores and to bring them back to the tree, hunting in vain for what he wanted, till Félix, just as they reached the northern limit of destruction, pointed to where the birds were still busy, clamorous and gorging.
“What is it?” asked Adams.
“Tent,” replied Félix.
To the left of where the birds were, and close to them, lay a mound of something showing dark amidst the grass. It was a tent, or a large part of one of the tents; tangled, perhaps, in a tusk, it had been brought here and cast, just as a storm might have brought and cast it. Even atthis distance the air was tainted with the odour of the birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before a savage.
“Come,” said he, and they started.
The birds saw them coming, and some flew away; others, trying to fly away, rose in the air heavily and fluttering a hundred yards sank and scattered about in the grass, looking like great vermin; a few remained waddling here and there, either too impudent for flight or too greatly gorged.
Truly it had been a great killing, and the ground was ripped as if by ploughs. Over a hundred square yards lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, though not a movement was there, save the movement of the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of a rag of skin to the breeze.
They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and with teeth glinting in the sun. It was the smallest tent, ripped here and there, but otherwise sound; the mosquito net inside was intact and rolled up like a ball, but the pole was broken in two.
As they carried it between them, they had to pass near a man. He was very dead, that man; a great foot had trodden on his face, and it was flattened out, looking like a great black flat-fish in which a child, for fun, had punched holes for eyes and mouth and nose; it was curling up at the edges under the sun’s rays, becoming converted into a cup.
“B’selius,” said Félix, with a laugh, indicating this thing as they passed it.
Adams had his hands full, or he would have struck the brute to the ground. He contented himself with driving the tent pole into the small of his back to urge him forward. From that moment he conceived a hatred for Félix such as few men have felt, for it was not a hatred against a man, or even a brute, but a black automatic figure with filed teeth, a thing with the brain and heart of an alligator, yet fashioned after God’s own image.
A hatred for Félix, and a pity for Berselius.
CHAPTER XXIITHE LOST GUIDE
They improvised a shelter against the tree with the tent cloth over the sleeping man, and then Adams set Félix to work splicing and mending the tent pole. The two porters, who had stuffed themselves with food, were looking better and a shade more human; the glossy look was coming back to their skins and the fright was leaving their faces. He set them to work, piling the recovered stores in the bit of shade cast by the tree and the improvised tent, and as they did so he took toll of the stuff.
He judged that there was enough provisions to take them back along the road they had come by. The hunt was ended. Even should Berselius recover fully in a couple of days, Adams determined to insist on a return. But he did not expect any resistance.
It was a long, long, wearisome day. The great far-stretching land, voiceless except just over there where birds were still busy and would be busy till all was gone; the cloudless sky, and the shifting shadow of the tree; these were the best company he had. The blacks were not companions. The two porters seemed less human than dogs, and Félix poisoned his sight.
His dislike for this man had been steadily growing. The thought that Berselius had risked his life for this creature, and the remembrance of how he had pointed to the dead man with a grin and said “B’selius,” had brought matters to a head in the mind of Adams, and turned his dislike into a furious antipathy. He sat now in what little shadow there was, watching the figure of the Zappo Zap.
Félix, the tent-pole finished, had slunk off westward, hunting about, or pretending to hunt for salvage. Little by little the black figure dwindled till it reached where the birds were discoursing and clamouring, and Adams felt his blood grow cold as he watched the birds rise like a puff of black smoke and scatter, some this way, some that; some flying right away, some settling down near by.
The black figure, a tiny sketch against the sky, wandered hither and thither, and then vanished.
Félix had sat him down.
Adams rose up and took the elephant rifle, took from the bag a great solid drawn brass cartridge, loaded the rifle, and sat down again in the shade.
Berselius was sleeping peacefully. He could hear the even respirations through the tent cloth. The porters were sleeping in the sun as only niggers can sleep when they are tired; but Adams was feeling as if he could never sleep again, as he sat waiting and watching and listening to the faint whisper, whisper of the grass as the wind bent it gently in its passage.
A long time passed, and then the black sketch appeared again outlined on the sky. It grew in size, and as it grewAdams fingered the triggers of the gun, and his lips became as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them and keep on licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his palate dry as his tongue.
Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had come to speaking distance. Adams advanced to meet him. There was a dry, dull glaze about the creature’s lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to where the birds were again congregating, cried “Gr-r-r,” as a man cries to a dog that has misbehaved, and flung the rifle to his shoulder.
Félix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, and bounding as a buck antelope bounds with a leopard at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering report of the great rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust broke from the ground near the black bounding figure. Adams, cursing himself for having missed, grounded the gun-butt and stood watching the dot in the distance till it vanished from sight.
He had forgotten the fact that Félix was the guide and that without him the return would be a hazardous one; but had he remembered this, it would have made no difference. Better to die in the desert twenty times over than to return escorted bythat.
It was now getting toward sundown. The great elephant country in which the camp lay lost had, during the daytime, three phases. Three spirits presided over this place; the spirit of morning, of noon, and of evening.In towns and cities, even in the open country of civilized lands, these three are clad in language and bound in chains of convention, reduced to slaves whose task is to call men to rise, to eat, or sleep. But here, in this vast place, one saw them naked—naked and free as when they caught the world’s first day, like a new-minted coin struck from darkness, and spun it behind them into night.
Under the presidency of these three spirits the land was ever changing; the country of the morning was not the country of the noon, nor was the country of the noon the country of the evening.
The morning was loud. I can express it in no other terms. Dawn came like a blast of trumpets, driving the flocks of the red flamingoes before it, tremendous, and shattering the night of stars at the first fanfare. A moment later, and, changing the image, imagination could hear the sea of light bursting against the far edge of the horizon, even as you watched the spindrift of it surging up to heaven and the waves of it breaking over ridge and tree and plain of waving grass.
Noon was the hour of silence. Under the pyramid of light the land lay speechless, without a shadow except the shadow of the flying bird, or a sound except the sigh of the grass, touched and bent by the wind, if it blew.
Evening brought with it a new country. There was no dusk here, no beauties of twilight, but the level light of sunset brought a beauty of its own. Distance stood over the land, casting trees farther away, and spreading the prairies of grass with her magic.
The country, now, had a new population. The shadows. Nowhere else, perhaps, do shadows grow and live as here, where the atmosphere and the level light of evening combine to form the quaintest shadows on earth. The giraffe has for his counterpart a set of shadow legs ten yards long, and the elephant in his shadow state goes on stilts. A man is followed by a pair of black compasses, and a squat tent flings to the east the shadow of a sword.
Adams was sitting looking at the two porters whom he had set to hunt for firewood; he was watching their grotesque figures, and more than grotesque shadows, when a movement of the sick man under the tent-cloth caused him to turn.
Berselius had awakened. More than that, he was sitting up, and before Adams could put up a hand, the tent-cloth was flung back, and the head and shoulders of the sick man appeared.
His face was pale, his hair in disorder; but his consciousness had fully returned. He recognized Adams with a glance, and then, without speaking, struggled to free himself of the tent-cloth and get on his feet.
Adams helped him.
Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, looked around him, and then stood looking at the setting sun.
The glorious day was very near its end. The sun huge and half-shorn of his beams, was sinking slowly, inevitably; scarce two diameters divided his lower edge from the horizon that was thirsting for him as the grave thirsts for man. Thus fades, shorn of its dazzle andsplendour, the intellect so triumphant at noon, the personality, the compelling will; the man himself when night has touched him.
“Are you better?” asked Adams.
Berselius made no reply.
Like a child, held by some glittering bauble, he seemed fascinated by the sun. The western sky was marked by a thin reef of cloud; dull gold, it momentarily brightened to burnished gold, and then to fire.
The sun touched the horizon. Ere one could say “Look!” he was half gone. The blazing arc of his upper limb hung for a moment palpitating, then it dwindled to a point, vanished, and a wave of twilight, like the shadow of a wing, passed over the land.
As Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, turned, it was already night.
The camp fire which the porters had lit was crackling, and Berselius, helped by his friend, sat down with his back to the tree and his face toward the fire.
“Are you better?” asked Adams, as he took a seat beside him and proceeded to light a pipe.
“My head,” said Berselius. As he spoke he put his hand to his head as a person puts his hand to his forehead when he is dazed.
“Have you any pain?”
“No, no pain, but there is a mist.”
“You can see all right?”
“Yes, yes, I can see. It is not my sight, but there is a mist—in my head.”
Adams guessed what he meant. The man’s mind hadbeen literally shaken up. He knew, too, that thought and mental excitement were the worst things for him.
“Don’t think about it,” said he. “It will pass. You have had a knock on the head. Just lean back against the tree, for I want to dress the wound.”
He undid the bandage, fetched some water from the pool, which was now clear, and set to work. The wound was healthy and seemed much less severe than it had seemed the night before. The dent in the bone seemed quite inconsiderable. The inner table of the skull might, after all, be not injured. One thing was certain: whatever mischief the cortex of the brain had suffered, the prime centres had escaped. Speech and movement were perfect and thought was rational.
“There,” said Adams, when he had finished his dressings and taken his seat, “you are all right now. But don’t talk or do any thinking. The mist, as you call it, in your head will pass away.”
“I can see,” said Berselius; then he stopped, hesitated, and went on—“I can see last night—I can see us all here by the camp fire, but beyond that I cannot see, for a great white mist hides everything. And still”—he burst out—“I seem to know everything hidden by that mist, but I can’t see, I can’t see. What is this thing that has happened to me?”
“You know your name?”
“Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. My mind is clear, my memory is clear, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp fire of last night, everything is a thick mist—I am afraid!”
He took Adams’s big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and the action.
The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a little child, and saying, “I am afraid!”
And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so different from the voices of common men.
“It will pass,” said Adams. “It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out. He had to learn his alphabet again.”
Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.
Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful. It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment, until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.
Berselius’s case was a phase of this condition. Heknew his name—everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that, he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.
If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.
Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other words, he had lost his past.
CHAPTER XXIIIBEYOND THE SKYLINE
Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred yards from the camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling and flickering beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark that made the camping place determinable many miles away.
Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct brought him to a stand, saying, “You are safe.”
He knew the country well, and the thirty miles that separated him from the eastern forest, where he could obtain food and shelter, were nothing to him. He could have run nearly the whole distance and reached there in a few hours’ time.
But time was also nothing to him. He had fed well,and could last two days without food. It was not his intention to desert the camp yet; for at the camp, under that tree away to the west, lay a thing that he lusted after as men lust for drink or love: the desire of his dark soul—the elephant gun.
Before Adams drove him away from the camp he had made up his mind to steal it. Sneak off with it in the night and vanish with it into his own country away to the northeast, leaving B’selius and his broken camp to fend for themselves. This determination was still unshaken; the thing held him like a charm, and he sat down, squatting in the grass with his knees drawn up to his chin and his eyes fixed westward, waiting for evening.
An hour before sunset he made for the camp, reaching within a mile of it as the light left the sky. He watched the camp fire burning, and made for it. Toward midnight, crawling on his belly, soundless as a snake, he crept right up beside Adams, seized the gun and the cartridge bag, and with them in his hands stood erect.
He had no fear now. He knew he could outrun anyone there. He held the gun by the barrels. Adams’s white face, as he lay with mouth open, snoring and deep in slumber, presented an irresistible mark for the heavy gun-butt, and all would have been over with that sleeper in this world, had not the attention of the savage been drawn to an object that suddenly appeared from beneath the folds of the improvised tent.
It was the hand of Berselius.
Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power,struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog.
B’selius was alive and able to clench his fist. That fact was enough for Félix, and next moment he was gone, and the moonlight cast his black shadow as he ran, making northeast, a darkness let loose on life and on the land.
Adams awoke at sun-up to find the gun and the cartridge bag gone. The porters knew nothing. He had picked up enough of their language to interrogate them, but they could only shake their heads, and he was debating in his own mind whether he ought to kick them on principle, when Berselius made his appearance from the tent.
His strength had come back to him. The dazed look of the day before had left his face, but the expression of the face was altered. The half smile which had been such a peculiar feature of his countenance was no longer there. The level eye that raised to no man and lowered before no man, the aspect of command and the ease of perfect control and power—where were they?
Adams, as he looked at his companion, felt a pang such as we feel when we see a human being suddenly and terribly mutilated.
Who has not known a friend who, from an accident in the hunting field, the shock of a railway collision, or some great grief, has suddenly changed; of whom people say, “Ah, yes, since the accident he has never been the same man”?
A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty, full of will power and brain, and who to-day is a different personwith drooping under-lip, lack-lustre eye, and bearing in every movement the indecision which marks the inferior mind.
Berselius’s under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner lack the ordinary decision of a healthy man; the change in him was slight, but it was startlingly evident. So high had Nature placed him above other men, that a crack in the pedestal was noticeable; as to the injury to the statue itself, the ladder of time would be required before that could be fully discovered.
So far from being downcast this morning, Berselius was mildly cheerful. He washed and had his wound dressed, and then sat down to a miserable breakfast of cold tinned meat and cassava cakes, with water fetched from the pool in a cracked calabash.
He said nothing about the mist in his head, and Adams carefully avoided touching on the question.
“Sleep has put him all right,” said Adams to himself. “All the same, he’s not the man he was. He’s a dozen times more human and like other men. Wonder how long it will last. Just as long as he’s feeling sick, I expect.”
He rose to fetch his pipe when Berselius, who had finished eating and had also risen to his feet, beckoned him to come close.
“That is the road we came by?” said Berselius, pointing over the country toward the west.
“Yes,” said Adams, “that is the road.”
“Do you see the skyline?” said Berselius.
“Yes, I see the skyline.”
“Well, my memory carries me to the skyline, but not beyond.”
“Oh, Lord!” said Adams to himself, “here he is beginning it all over again!”
“I can remember,” said Berselius, “everything that happened as far as my eye carries me. For instance, by that tree a mile away a porter fell down. He was very exhausted. And when we had passed that ridge near the skyline we saw two birds fighting; two bald-headed vultures——”
“That is so,” said Adams.
“But beyond the skyline,” said Berselius, suddenly becoming excited and clutching his companion’s arm, “I see nothing. I know nothing. All is mist—all is mist.”
“Yes, yes,” said the surgeon. “It’s only memory blindness. It will come back.”
“Ah, but will it? If I can get to the skyline and see the country beyond, and if I remember that, and if I go on and on, the way we came, and if I remember as I go, then, then, I will be saved. But if I get to that skyline and if I find that the mist stops me from seeing beyond, then I pray you kill me, for the agony of this thing is not to be borne.” Suddenly he ceased, and then, as if to some unseen person, he cried out—
“I have left my memory on that road.”
Adams, frightened at the man’s agitation, tried to soothe him, but Berselius, in the grip of this awful desire to pierce back beyond that mist and find himself, would not be soothed. Nothing would satisfy him but to strikecamp and return along the road they had come by. Some instinct told him that the sight of the things he had seen would wake up memory, and that bit by bit, as he went, the mist would retreat before him, and perhaps vanish at last. Some instinct told him this, but reason, who is ever a doubter, tortured him with doubts.
The only course was to go back and see. Adams, who doubted if his patient was physically fit for a march, at last gave in; the man’s agony of mind was more dangerous to him than the exhaustion of physical exercise could prove. He gave orders to the porters to strike camp, and then turned to himself, and helped them. They only carried what was barely needful, and was even less than needful, to take them to Fort M’Bassa, ten days, journey in Berselius’s condition. Four water bottles that had been left intact they filled with water; they took the tent, and the pole that Félix had spliced. Cassava cakes and tinned meat and a few pounds of chocolate made up the provisions. There were no guns to carry, no trophies of the chase. Of all the army of porters only two were left. Berselius was broken down, Félix had fled, they had no guide, and the crowning horror of the thing was that they had struck off in pursuit of the herd at right angles to the straight path they had taken from the forest, and Adams did not know in the least the point where they had struck off. The porters were absolutely no use as guides, and unless God sent a guide from heaven or chance interposed to lead them in the right way, they were lost; for they had no guns or ammunition with which to get food.
Truly the omen of the elephant lying down had not spoken in vain.
When all was loaded up, and Adams was loaded even like the porters, they turned their backs on the tree and the pools, and leaving them there to burn in the sun forever struck straight west in the direction from which they had come.
Berselius had come in pursuit of a terrible thing and a merciless thing; he was returning in search of a more terrible and a more merciless thing—Memory.
It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; and two hours’ march brought them to that ridge which Berselius had indicated from the camp as being near the skyline.
When they reached the ridge, and not before, Berselius halted and stared over the country in front of him, his face filled with triumph and hope.
He seized Adams’s hand and pointed away to the west. The ridge gave a big view of the country.
“I can remember all that,” said he, “keenly, right up to the skyline.”
“And at the skyline?”
“Stands the mist,” replied Berselius. “But it will lift before me as I go on. Now I know it is only the sight of the things I have seen that is needful to recall the memory of them and of myself in connection with them.”
Adams said nothing. It struck him with an eerie feeling that this man beside him was actually walking back into his past. As veil after veil of distance was raised, so would the past come back, bit by bit.
But he was yet to learn what a terrible journey that would be.
One thing struck him as strange. Berselius had never tried to pierce the mist by questions. The man seemed entirely obsessed by the curtain of mist, and by the necessity of piercing it by physical movement, of putting tree to tree and mile to mile.
Berselius had not asked questions because, no doubt, he was under the dominion of a profound instinct, telling him that the past he had lost could only be recalled by the actual picture of the things he had seen.
CHAPTER XXIVTHE SENTENCE OF THE DESERT
Berselius had not asked a single question as to the catastrophe. His own misfortune had banished for him, doubtless, all interest in everything else.
Adams had said to him nothing of Félix, his horrible deeds or his theft of the rifle. Félix, though he had vanished from Adams’s life completely and forever, had not vanished from the face of the earth. He was very much alive and doing, and his deeds and his fate are worth a word, for they formed a tragedy well fitting the stage of this merciless land.
The Zappo Zap, having secured the gun and its ammunition, revelling in the joy of possession and power, went skipping on his road, which lay to the northeast. Six miles from the camp he flung himself down by a bush, and, with the gun covered by his arm, slept, and hunted in his sleep, like a hound, till dawn.
Then he rose and pursued his way, still travelling northeast, his bird-like eyes skimming the land and horizon. He sang as he pursued his way, and his song fitted his filed teeth to a charm. If a poisoned arrow could sing or a stabbing spear, it would sing what Félixsang as he went, his long morning shadow stalking behind him; he as soulless and as heartless as it.
What motive of attachment had driven him to follow Verhaeren to Yandjali from the Bena Pianga country heaven knows, for the man was quite beyond the human pale. The elephants were far, far above him in power of love and kindness; one had to descend straight to the alligators to match him, and even then one found oneself at fault.
He was not. Those three words alone describe this figure of india-rubber that could still walk and talk and live and lust, and to whom slaying and torture were amongst the æsthetics of life.
An hour before noon, beyond and above a clump of trees, he sighted a moving object. It was the head of a giraffe.
It was the very same bull giraffe that had fled with the elephant herd and then wheeled away south from it. It was wandering devious now, feeding by itself, and the instant Félix saw the tell-tale head, he dropped flat to the ground as if he had been shot. The giraffe had not seen him, for the head, having vanished for a moment, reappeared; it was feeding, plucking down small branches of leaves, and Félix, lying on his side, opened the breech of the rifle, drew the empty cartridge case, inserted a cartridge in each barrel, and closed the breech. Now, unknown to Adams, when he had fired the gun the day before, there was a plug of clay in the left-hand barrel about two inches from the muzzle; just an inconsiderable wad of clay about as thick as a gun wad; the elephantfolk had done this when they had mishandled the gun, and, though the thing could have been removed with a twig, Puck himself could not have conceived a more mischievous obstruction. He certainly never would have conceived so devilish a one.
Adams had, fortunately for himself, fired the right-hand barrel; the concussion had not broken up the plug, for it was still moist, being clay from the trodden-up edge of the pool. It was moist still, for the night dew had found it.
The Zappo Zap knew nothing of the plug. He knew nothing, either, of the tricks of these big, old-fashioned elephant guns, for he kept both barrels full cock, and it is almost three to two that if you fire one of these rifles with both barrels full cock, both barrels will go off simultaneously, or nearly so, from the concussion.
With the gun trailing after him—another foolish trick—the savage crawled on his belly through the long grass to within firing distance of the tree clump.
Then he lay and waited.
He had not long to wait.
The giraffe, hungry and feeding, was straying along the edge of the clump of trees, picking down the youngest and freshest leaves, just as agourmetpicks the best bits out of a salad.
In a few minutes his body was in view, the endless neck flung up, the absurd head and little, stumpy, useless horns prying amidst the leaves, and every now and then slewing round and sweeping the country in search of danger.
Félix lay motionless as a log; then, during a moment when the giraffe’s head was hidden in the leaves, he flung himself into position and took aim.
A tremendous report rang out, the giraffe fell, squealing, and roaring and kicking, and Félix, flung on his back, lay stretched out, a cloud of gauzy blue smoke in the air above him.
The breech of the rifle had blown out. He had fired the right-hand barrel, but the concussion had sprung the left-hand cock as well.
It seemed to the savage that a great black hand struck him in the face and flung him backward. He lay for a moment, half-stunned; then he sat up, and, behold! the sun had gone out and he was in perfect blackness.
He was blind, for his eyes were gone, and where his nose had been was now a cavity. He looked as though he had put on a red velvet domino, and he sat there in the sun with the last vestige of the blue smoke dissolving above him in the air, not knowing in the least what had happened to him.
He knew nothing of blindness; he knew little of pain. An Englishman in his wounded state would have been screaming in agony; to Félix the pain was sharp, but it was nothing to the fact that the sun had “gone down.”
He put his hand to the pain and felt his ruined face, but that did not tell him anything.
This sudden black dark was not the darkness which came from shutting one’s eyes; it was something else, and he scrambled on his feet to find out.
He could feel the darkness now, and he advanced afew steps to see if he could walk through it; then he sprang into the air to see if it was lighter above, and dived on his hands and knees to see if he could slip under it, and shouted and whooped to see if he could drive it away.
But it was a great darkness, not to be out-jumped, jumped he as high as the sun, or slipped under, were he as thin as a knife, or whooped away, though he whooped to everlasting.
He walked rapidly, and then he began to run. He ran rapidly, and he seemed to possess some instinct in his feet which told him of broken ground. The burst gun lay where he had left it in the grass, and the dead giraffe lay where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the grass waved, the sun spread his pyramid of light from horizon to horizon, and in the sparkle above a black dot hung trembling above the stricken beast at the edge of the wood.
The black figure of the man continued its headlong course. It was running in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by the dark soul raging in it.
Hours passed, andthenit fell, and lay face to the sky and arms outspread. You might have thought it dead. But it was a thing almost indestructible. It lay motionless, but it was alive with hunger.
During all its gyrations it had been followed and watched closely. It had not lain for a minute when a vulture dropped like a stone from the sky and lit on it with wings outspread.
Next moment the vulture was seized, screeching, torn limb from limb, and in the act of being devoured!
But the sentence of the desert on the blind is death, trap vultures as cunningly as you will, and devour them as ferociously. The eye is everything in the battle of the strong against the weak. And so it came about that two days later a pair of leopards from the woods to the northeast fought with the figure, which fought with teeth and hands and feet, whilst the yellow-eyed kites looked on at a battle that would have turned with horror the heart of Flamininus.
CHAPTER XXVTOWARD THE SUNSET
When Berselius, standing on the ridge, had looked long enough at the country before him, taking in its every detail with delight, they started again on their march, Berselius leading.
They had no guide. The only plan in Adams’s head was to march straight west toward the sunset for a distance roughly equivalent to the forced march they had made in pursuit of the herd, and then to strike at right angles due north and try to strike the wood isthmus of the two great forests making up the forest of M’Bonga.
But the sunset is a wide mark and only appears at sunset. They had no compass; the elephant folk had made away with all the instruments of the expedition. They must inevitably stray from the true direction, striking into that infernal circle which imprisons all things blind and all things compassless. Even should they, by a miracle, strike the isthmus of woods, the forest would take them, confuse them, hand them from tree to tree and glade to glade, and lose them at last and for ever in one of the million pockets which a forest holds open for the lost.
The stout heart of the big man had not quailed beforethis prospect. He had a fighting chance; that was enough for him. But now at the re-start, as Berselius stepped forward and took the lead, a hope sprang up in his breast. A tremendous and joyful idea occurred to him. Was it possible that Berselius would guide them back?
The memory that the man possessed was so keen, his anxiety to pierce the veil before him was so overpowering, was it possible that like a hound hunting by sight instead of smell, he would lead them straight?
Only by following the exact track they had come by, could Berselius pierce back into that past he craved to see. Only by putting tree to tree and ridge to ridge, memory to memory, could he collect what he had lost.
Could he do this?
The life of the whole party depended upon the answer to that question.
The track they ought to follow was the track by which the herd had led them. Adams could not tell whether they were following that track—even Félix could scarcely have told—for the dew and the wind had made the faint traces of the elephants quite indiscernible now to civilized eyes; and Berselius never once looked at the ground under his feet, he was led entirely by the configuration of the land. That to the eyes of Adams was hopeless. For the great elephant country is all alike, and one ridge is the counterpart of another ridge, and one grassy plain of another grassy plain, and the scattered trees tell you nothing when you are lost, except that you are lost.
The heat of the day was now strong on the land; theporters sweated under their loads, and Adams, loaded like them, knew for once in his life what it was to be a slave and a beast of burden.
Berselius, who carried nothing, did not seem to feel the heat; weak though he must have been from his injury and the blood-letting. He marched on, ever on, apparently satisfied and well pleased as horizon lifted, giving place to new horizon, and plain of waving grass succeeded ridge of broken ground.
But Adams, as hour followed hour, felt the hope dying out in his breast, and the remorseless certainty stole upon him that they were out of their track. This land seemed somehow different from any he had seen before; he could have sworn that this country around them was not the country through which they had pursued the herd. His hope had been built on a false foundation. How could a man whose memory was almost entirely obscured lead them right? This was not the case of the blind leading the blind, but the case of the blind leading men with sight.
Berselius was deceiving himself. Hope was leading him, not memory.
And still Berselius led on, assured and triumphant, calling out, “See! do you remember that tree? We passed it at just this distance when we were coming.” Or, now, “Look at that patch of blue grass. We halted for a minute here.”
Adams, after a while, made no reply. The assurance and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible andsardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that insulted the soul.
The dead leading the living, the blind leading the man with sight, lunacy leading sanity to death.
Yet there was nothing to be done but follow. As well take Berselius’s road as any other. Sunset would tell them whether they were facing the sunset; but he wished that Berselius would cease.
The situation was bad enough to bear without those triumphant calls.
It was past noon now; the light wind that had been blowing in their faces had died away; there was the faintest stirring of the air, and on this, suddenly, to Adams’s nostrils came stealing a smell of corruption, such as he had never experienced before.
It grew stronger as they went.
There was a slight rise in the ground before them just here, and as they took it the stench became almost insupportable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought him forward to his side.
The rise in the ground had hidden from them a dried-up river-bed, and there before them in the sandy trough, huge amidst the boulders, lay the body of an elephant.
A crowd of birds busy about the carcass rose clamouring in the air and flew away.
“Do you remember?” cried Berselius.
“Good God!” said Adams. “Do I remember!”
It was the body of the great beast they had passed when in pursuit of the herd.
Yes, there was no doubt now that Berselius was guiding them aright. He had followed the track they had come by without deviating a hundred yards.
The great animal was lying just as they had left it, but the work of the birds was evident; horribly so, and it was not a sight to linger over.
They descended into the river bed, passed up the other bank, and went on, Berselius leading and Adams walking by his side.
“Do you know,” said Adams, “I was beginning to think you were out of the track.”
Berselius smiled.
Adams, who was glancing at his face, thought that he had never seen an expression like that on the man’s face before. The smile of the lips that had marked and marred his countenance through life, the smile that was half a sneer, was not there; this came about the eyes.
“He was in exactly the same position, too,” said Adams. “But the birds will have him down before long. Well, he has served one purpose in his life; he has shown us we are on the right road, and he has given you back another bit of memory.”
“Poor brute,” said Berselius.
These words, coming from the once iron-hearted Berselius, struck Adams strangely; there was a trace of pity in their tone.