The Pools of Silence Part 19

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 Felix 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 fas.h.i.+oned after G.o.d's own image.

A hatred for Felix, and a pity for Berselius.

CHAPTER XXII

THE LOST GUIDE

They improvised a shelter against the tree with the tent cloth over the sleeping man, and then Adams set Felix 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 Felix 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.

Felix, 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.

Felix had sat him down.

Adams rose up and took the elephant rifle, took from the bag a great solid drawn bra.s.s 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 gra.s.s as the wind bent it gently in its pa.s.sage.

A long time pa.s.sed, and then the black sketch appeared again outlined on the sky. It grew in size, and as it grew Adams 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.

Felix 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-b.u.t.t and stood watching the dot in the distance till it vanished from sight.

He had forgotten the fact that Felix 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 by _that_.

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 gra.s.s.

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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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 compa.s.ses, 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 and splendour, 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, pa.s.sed 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 had been 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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.s 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?"