It Is Never Too Late to Mend Part 144

"Captain! are you going to let them take us out of the wood before we have hunted it for that scoundrel?"

"Yes, I am. Look here, Jem, we are four, and he is one, but a double-barreled gun is an awkward enemy in a dark wood. No, Jem, we will outwit him to the last. We will clear the wood and get back to the camp.

He doesn't know we have got a clew to him. He will come back without fear, and we will nail him with the fifty-pound note upon him. And then--Jack Ketch."

The whole party was now on the move, led by Kalingalunga, bearing the sacred ashes.

"What on earth is he going to do with them?"

The chief heard this query, and looking back said gravely, "He take them to 'Milmeridien';" and the party followed Jacky, who twisted and zigzagged about the bush till, at last, he brought them to a fairy spot, whose existence in that rugged wood none of them had dreamed possible.

It was a long, open glade, meandering like a river between two deep, irregular fringes of the drooping acacia, and another lovely tree which I only know by its uncouth, unmelodious, scientiuncular name--the eucalyptus. This tree, as well as the drooping acacia, leaned over the ground with long leaves like disheveled hair.

Kalingalunga paused at the brink and said to his companions in a low, awestruck voice, "Milmeridien."

The glade was full of graves, some of them fresh, glittering with bright red earth under the cool, green acacias, others richly veiled with golden moss more or less according to their age; and in the recesses of the grove peeped smoother traces of mortality, mossy mounds a thousand years old, and others far more ancient still, now mere excrescences of green, known to be graves only by the light of that immense gradation of times and dates and epochs.

The floor of the open glade was laid out as a vast parterre--each grave a little flower-bed, round, square, oval, or rhomboid; and all round each bed flowed in fine and graceful curves little paths too narrow for a human foot. Primeval tradition had placed them there that spirits might have free pa.s.sage to visit all the mighty dead. For here reposed no vulgar corpses. Here, their heads near the surface, but their feet deep in earth, sat the great hunters and warriors of every age of the race of Kalingalunga, once a great nation, though now a failing tribe.

They sat there this many a day, their weapons in their hands, ready to start up whenever the great signal should come, and hunt once more, but without fatigue, in woods boundless as the sea, and with bodily frames no longer mortal, to knock and be knocked on the head, _ad infinitum._

Simple and benign creed!

A cry of delight burst from the white men, and they were going to spread themselves over the garden of the dead.

The savage checked them with horror.

"n.o.body walk there while him alive," said he. "Now you follow me and not speak any words at all, or Kalingalunga will leave you in the bush.--Hus.h.!.+"

The savage paused, that even the echo of his remonstrance might die well away before he traversed the garden. He then bowed his head down upon his breast in a set manner, and so remained quiet a few seconds. In that same att.i.tude he started and walked slowly by the verge of the glade, keeping carefully clear of the graves, and never raising his head. About half way he stopped and reverently scattered the ashes of the wambiloa upon three graves that lay near the edge, then forward--silent, downcast, reverential.

"Mors omnibus est communis!" The white men, even down to Jem, understood and sympathized with Kalingalunga. In this garden of the dead of all ages they felt their common humanity, and followed their black brother silent and awestruck. Melted, too, by the sweet and sacred sorrow of this calm scene; for here Death seemed to relax his frown, and the dead but to rest from trouble and toil, mourned by gentle, tender trees; and in truth it was a beautiful thought of these savage men to have given their dead for companions those rare and drooping acacias, that bowed themselves and loosed their hair so like fair women abandoned to sorrow over the beloved and dead, and night and morning swept with their dewy eyelashes the pillows of the brave. _Requiescant in pace!--resurgant in pacem!_ For I wish them better than they wished themselves.

After Milmeridien came a thick scrub, through which Kalingalunga tracked his way; and then a loud hurrah burst from all, for they were free--the net was broken. There were the mountains before them and the gaunt wood behind them at last. The native camp was visible two miles distant, and thither the party ran and found food and fires in abundance. Black sentinels were set at such distances as to render a surprise impossible, and the travelers were invited to sleep and forget all their troubles.

Robinson and Jem did sleep, and George would have been glad to, and tried, but was prevented by an unfortunate incident--_les enfans terribles_ found out his infirmity, viz., that nothing they could do would make him hit them. So half a dozen little rascals, potter bellied than you can conceive, climbed up and down George, sticking in their twenty claws like squirrels, and feeling like cold, slippery slugs. Thus was sleep averted, until a merciful gin, hearing the man's groans, came and cracked two or three of these little black pots with a waddie or club, so then George got leave to sleep, and just as he was dozing off, ting, tong, ti tong, tong, tong, came a fearful drumming of parchment.

A corroboree or native dance was beginning. No more sleep till that was over--so all hands turned out. A s.p.a.ce was cleared in the wood, women stood on both sides with flaming boughs and threw a bright red light upon a particular portion of that s.p.a.ce; the rest was dark as pitch.

Time, midnight. When the white men came up the dancing had not begun.

Kalingalunga was singing a preliminary war song.

George had picked up some of the native language, and he explained to the other that Jacky was singing about some great battle, near the Wurra-Gurra River.

"The Wurra-Gurra! why, that is where we first found gold."

"Why of course it is! and--yes! I thought so."

"Thought what?"

"It is our battle he is describing."

"Which of 'em?--we live in hot water."

"The one before Jem was our friend. What is he singing? Oh, come! that is overdoing it, Jacky! Why, Jem! he is telling them he killed you on the spot."

"I'll punch his head!"

"No! take it easy," said Robinson; "he is a poet; this is what they call poetical license."

"Lie without sense, I call it--when here is the man."

"Ting tong! ting tong tong!-- I slew him--he fell--by the Wurra-Gurra River.

I slew him!--ting tong! he fell--ting tong!

By the Wurra-Gurra River--ting ting tong!"

This line Jacky repeated at least forty times; but he evaded monotony by the following simple contrivance:

"I _slew_ him; he _fell_ by the Wurra-Gurra River--ting tong!

_I_ slew him; _he_ fell, by the Wurra-Gurra River, I slew him; he fell, by the _Wurra-Gurra River,"_

with similar changes, and then back again.

One of our own savages saved a great poet from monotony by similar means;* very good of him.

* The elder Sheridan, who used to teach his pupils to tresh dead Dryden out thus: _None_ but the brave,/None but the _brave,_/None _but_ the brave, deserve the fair.

And now the gins took up the tune without the words and the dance began to it. First, two figures ghastly with white paint came bounding like Jacks-in-the-box out of the gloom into the red light, and danced gracefully--then one more popped out--then another, at set intervals of time--then another, all painted differently--and swelled the dance by degrees; and still, as the dance grew in numbers, the musicians sang and drummed louder and faster by well-planned gradations, and the motion rose in intensity, till they all warmed into the terrible savage corroboree jump, legs striding wide, head turned over one shoulder, the eyes glaring with fiendish intensity in one direction, the arms both raised and grasping waddies and boomerangs--till at last they worked up to such a gallop of fierce, buck-like leaps that there was a jump for each beat of the music. Now they were in four lines, and as the figures in the front line jumped to the right, each keeping his distance to a hair, the second line jumped to the left, the third to the right, and the fourth to the left.

The twinkle and beauty and symmetry of this was admirable, and, strange as it may appear, not only were the savages now wrought up to frenzy at this climax of the dance, but the wonderful magnetic influence these children of Nature have learned to create and launch in the corroboree so stirred the white men's blood, that they went half mad too, and laughed and shouted and danced, and could hardly help flinging themselves among the mad fiends and jumping and yelling with them; and when the jump was at its fiercest and quickest, and the great frenzy boiling over, these cunning artists brought it to a dead stop sharp upon the climax--and all was still.

In another minute they were all snoring; but George and Robinson often started in their slumbers, dreaming they saw the horrid figures--the skeletons, lizards, snakes, tartan shawls, and whitened fiends, the whole lot blazing at the eyes and mouth like white budelights, come bounding one after another out of the black night into the red torchlight, and then go striding and jumping and glaring and raging and bucking and prancing, and scattering battle and song and joy and rage and inspiration and stark-staring frenzy all around.

They awoke at daylight rather cold, and found piles of snow upon their blankets, and the lizards and skeletons and imps and tartan shawls deteriorated. The snow had melted on their bodies, and the colors had all run--some of them away. _Quid multa?_ we all know how beauties look when the sun breaks on them after a ball.

They asked for Jacky. To their great chagrin he was not to be found.

They waited, getting crosser and crosser, till nine o'clock, and then out comes my lord from the wood, walking toward them with his head down on his bosom, the picture of woe--the milmeridien movement over again.

"There! don't let us scold him," said George, "I am sure he has lost a relation, or maybe a dear friend; anyway I hope it is not his sweetheart--poor Jacky. Well, Jacky! I am glad you have washed your face, now I know you again. You can't think how much better you look in your own face than painted up in that unreasonable way, like-like-like-I dono-what-all."

"Like something between a devil and a rainbow," suggested Robinson.

"But what is wrong?" asked George, kindly. "I am almost afraid to ask, though!"

Encouraged by the tone of sympathy, the afflicted chief pointed to his face, sighed, and said:

"Kalingalunga paint war, and now Kalingalunga wash um face and not kill anybody first. Kalingalunga Jacky again, and show your white place in um hill a good deal soon."

And the amiable heathen cleared up a little at the prospect of serving George, whom he loved--aboriginally.

Jem remained with the natives upon some frivolous pretense. His real hope was to catch the ruffian whom he secretly believed to be still in the wood. "He is like enough to creep out this way," thought Jem, "and then--won't I nail him!"

In half an hour they were standing under the spot whose existence Robinson had so often doubted.

"Well, George, you painted it true. It really is a river of quartz running between those two black rocks. And that you think is the home of the gold, eh?"