The Pools of Silence Part 21

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 strike camp 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'Ba.s.sa, 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 Felix had spliced. Ca.s.sava 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, Felix 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 G.o.d 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 XXIV

THE 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 Felix, his horrible deeds or his theft of the rifle. Felix, 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 Felix sang 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 l.u.s.t, and to whom slaying and torture were amongst the aesthetics 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 Felix 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 Felix, 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 elephant folk 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-fas.h.i.+oned elephant guns, for he kept both barrels full c.o.c.k, and it is almost three to two that if you fire one of these rifles with both barrels full c.o.c.k, 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 gra.s.s 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 a _gourmet_ picks 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.

Felix 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 Felix, 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 c.o.c.k 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 Felix 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 a few 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 gra.s.s, and the dead giraffe lay where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, and _then_ it 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!