Norah woke before it was light. She made no attempt to recapture a sleep that dreams had disturbed—dreams in which the ox was drowned again, in which a crocodile pursued her leaden steps while the Indian's crooked knife held Dick from her rescue. As soon as her watch showed half-past four, she summoned Changalilo from the fire which he had tended through the night, waking at intervals as a native will. Yesterday it had been decided to strike camp before dawn, giving him time to cook breakfast and carry their loads down to the shore ready to start at the first gleam of light.
Breakfast finished, Dick led the way to the beach. When they were twenty yards away, they heard a quick scrunch on the shingle and a quiet plop in the water.
'Ngwene,' said Changalilo casually, and kept back from the lake's edge, where the crocodile they had disturbed still might lurk.
They waited, Norah's hand in Dick's. The water was warmer than the air, and a mist hung on its surface. Above the mist the mountains across the lake were already outlined against a faint sky.
Voices on the Mimi, carried by the water, were audible.
'Damn Alibaba!' said Dick. 'Why can't he send the boat?'
Norah felt her last night's uneasiness return. 'But it's early yet,' she said.
The talking on board continued. Alibaba's voice was recognisable, raised in command or protest.
'He's having a job getting the boat's crew out,' said Dick, in answer to an unspoken anxiety.
Dawn came suddenly, and the water showed a delicate misty blue, as if it were seen through silvered crystal. Dick raised his voice in a hail. The sounds on the steamer ceased. She was visible now, squat and black on the water, but the distance was too great to distinguish figures in the group that darkened the deck.
Dick hailed again.
A silence seemed to brood on the face of the waters till the banal reassurance 'All right' floated to them on the motionless air.
'That wasn't Alibaba?' asked Norah.
Dick shrugged his shoulders in nervous irritation. He was angry with Alibaba, angry with himself.
Soon, however, the sight of black figures climbing over the stern dispelled his apprehension. 'That's better,' he sighed, 'but why five of them? We don't want more than four oars.'
As the boat approached, Norah noticed that for the long row its crew had discarded the unfamiliar European oar, reverting to the pointed paddle of their fathers. This looked like business. She took a last glance at the shore, where she had sensed such sinister influence, and smiled at her unfulfilled forebodings.
What the devil's that blasted Hindoo doing in the boat?' cried Dick suddenly.
Norah looked and saw the Indian's sardonic features momentarily revealed over the rising and falling shoulder of the bow-paddler, an ape-like negro, whose hunting knife, stuck in his belt, lent a piratical air to a personality no doubt genial enough.
'I'll jolly soon have him out of that,' muttered Dick.
As if his intentions had been divined, the uplifted paddles were checked and the silver water dripped from their narrow blades. The boat swung broadside on, a stone's-throw from land, rocking gently. Norah was near enough to see the perturbed, uneasy features of the crew that contrasted with the ironic composure of the Indian. He rose slowly to his feet from his seat in the stern. His thin lips twisted into a smile. His beaklike nose and the naked, withered skin of his neck reminded Norah of a vulture that had settled on a buck she had shot on the farm.
He stood for a moment in silence, smiling at the Europeans.
'Yesterday,' he began nasally, 'the Sahib struck this slave for remaining seated in the Sahib's presence. The slave now stands.'
'Cut that out,' shouted Dick, 'and paddle the boat inland at once.'
The habit of obeying white men stimulated the gorilla-like stoker to dip his paddle in the water, but the Indian stopped him with a gesture.
'Surely, Sahib, when my words are ended, we will paddle to land.'
His hand, waved gently towards the Belgian coast, explained his meaning.
'Yesterday the Sahib forbade his slave to interfere in his affairs. He will now lay the lake between himself and those affairs.'
He threw back his head and laughed noiselessly. Dick went red with rage.
'The damned nigger...' he cried.
Under her breath Norah whispered to him to take his gun.
'It's him or us,' she said.
'Do you mean?...' began Dick, then broke off. 'Hell!' he shouted. Why did I waste those cartridges yesterday?'
'Why——' began Norah.
'I emptied my magazine on a croc last night,' he confessed. 'I thought I had another handful in my shooting jacket.'
'Then bluff him with the empty gun. If you can frighten the Indian, the natives will turn.'
But if Dick was a bluffer, his was not the brand that pulls off forlorn hopes. His belief in the avarice of the Indians who colonise Africa suggested an easier plan. Holding out his purse, he shouted promises of lavish reward, if the Indian would take them off.
The offer made to the crew might have had effect. Their simple minds were free from hostility or mistrust. But in the dominant heart of the Hindoo, vengeance, and doubt that promises would be honoured, displaced cupidity.
He gave the order to paddle.
Too late Dick ran to the loads and snatched his gun. The dinghy had drawn out into the lake. 'Stop,' shouted Dick, 'or I'll fire.' His words recalled to Norah's brain the games of her childhood, and in spite of her anxiety she had to smother a smile.
The Indian stopped laughing and crouched in the bottom of the boat, urging speed on the paddlers. He put his faith in the increasing range and the mist which still covered the water. For some seconds after every one had recognised the pretence Dick stood, gun at shoulder, theatrical, ridiculous. Then with an oath he dropped the Mauser.
Already remote, the Indian's laugh rang out above the là! ... là! ... là! ... of the paddlers, half chant, half grunt of exertion.
Then distance enveloped the sounds.
The position was desperate. Without ammunition or stores of food, life was impossible on shore. Between shore and steamer the water teemed with crocodiles. They had no boat or the materials to build one. No help could be expected from the land, no rescue for many days from the lake. When at last the relief party came, it was doubtful if there would even be bones for them to find....
But Norah's courage, which had shrunk before the intangible menace of the bay, rose to meet the concrete disaster that appeared to have overwhelmed Dick. With Changalilo's help she unpacked the food boxes and measured the margin between them and starvation.
Even the scant array of tins that Changalilo produced proved to be misleading. It included such innutritious aids as baking and curry powder, anchovies and Worcester sauce—the armoury of Colonials against the monotony of ulendo meals. The solid residue was meagre, for they had brought on board only enough food for the normal trip of three days, counting for emergency on the ship's supplies and on purchases from fishing villages. What was now left would last them two bare days. And Alibaba had said that rescue could not come for twelve.
Norah looked towards Dick, who had subsided on the pile of baggage, his head in his hands. She decided to tell Changalilo first. He accepted the position with the indifference of one accustomed to famine, and with the native's inherited communism added his rations—a cloth full of millet meal—to the common store.
'What are you doing?' asked Dick in a dull voice.
She turned to him a little brusquely. After all, if Dick hadn't quarreled with the Indian, if he hadn't insisted on sleeping ashore, if he hadn't wasted his ammunition, they wouldn't be in this mess. He ought to pull himself together and help; there must be some way that a man could find to retrieve the disaster.
She was conscious that she was unfair and feminine, but with all their independence the present generation of young women admire a muddler as little as did their grandmothers.
'Come on, Dick,' she said briskly, let's think this out.'
'I've done nothing else, since that swine rowed off,' said Dick.
She made him listen to the result of her commissariat calculations.
'That's worse than I thought,' he said; 'our number's up.'
'Of course it isn't. Don't be such a pessimist.'
Dick drummed on the boxes. 'Unless you can do a fortnight without food,' he said.
She restrained her impatience.
'Are you sure you haven't any cartridges anywhere?'
'Quite—I looked through my kit last night. I could have sworn...'
And while he explained and excused his folly, Norah wondered what would have happened half an hour before, had Dick's rifle been loaded. A sudden doubt of his resolution assailed her. With a loaded gun in his hand, would he have dominated the mutiny? In his rage he might have fired, but in cold blood she doubted if, even to secure their escape, he could have screwed himself to the killing point.
Surprisingly she was sorry. Not, I think, from any hate of the Indian, pre-eminently unlovable as he was, but from a feeling that if logic barred all other paths a man should kill. And as a woman and an aristocrat, if a life lay between her and safety, she instinctively demanded a man's love to ... eliminate the obstacle.
In the comparative comfort and security of a deck chair on an ocean liner, such sentiments seem blameworthy even in a woman. In her father's stately home in the Shires or her father-in-law's respectable legal circle in Scotland, I have no doubt that Norah, whom I have presented to you as no paragon, would have shrunk from so drastic a solution. But I suppose standards suffer when you are in danger of life in Central Africa.
In justice I record that she did not pursue the thought; she turned to wondering what Archie would have done. Probably nothing, she decided. By the time he had weighed the advantages and disadvantages of drastic action, opportunity would have flown. But when at last he moved, she admitted that Archie generally went to the heart of the matter.
Of one thing she was certain. His Scottish stubbornness would not allow him to beg from a man who had insulted him and whom he had struck. Nor would he offer money. She tried to put out of her mind that picture of her lover, pale in the dawn, unconscious of the water lapping over his feet, holding out his purse to his enemy.
In this, you may remark, she was unjust. At one moment she blamed Dick for not securing her safety by a cold-blooded murder, at the next she tried not to despise him for attempting to save her by the much less reprehensible methods of bribery and a trifling surrender of pride.
She was recalled from her reflections. Dick had ended his explanation and had asked her a question.
'There must be a way out,' she said at random.
'Yes,' he laughed nervously. 'We could swim to the Mimi ... at least we could swim the first ten yards.... Norah,' he said suddenly, 'I believe that would be the best thing to do.'
The part of Norah's brain that was not under Dick's spell wondered cynically what he would say if she agreed. Then she felt ashamed of her sneer. Was not the greater part of his distress on her behalf?
'We can't make a boat without tools,' he began again, and rekindled her irritation. All this talk of what they couldn't do was utterly vain. Her woman's brain had jumped to the only course that lay open, moving along no path of reason, accepting the only practicable picture that offered.
'Dick,' she said, 'we must strike inland.'
'And hardly any of these African woods float,' went on Dick, monotonously pursuing his line of thought. There's no second boat on board.' ... Then the hope that he had been repressing burst to the surface. 'Norah,' he said, 'do you think there's a chance of those paddlers bringing back the dinghy from the other side?'
'No, dear, I don't,' she said gently. Then, as if she were dealing with an invalid, 'You see, they know they've behaved badly, and natives in the wrong get frightened like naughty children. They'd be afraid of being punished, if they came back.... No, as soon as the Indian lets them go, they'll disappear to their villages.'
The last pitiful hope that had lingered, disappeared. In his heart, he could almost have cursed the elopement, which threatened to prove fatal to both of them. Yet, as he looked at Norah, the robuster part of him declared her worth it. In the sea of blood spilt for women, no fairer face can have been mirrored.
She stood bare-headed, her short hair stirring, her chin up and her eyes bright with courage. He noticed where the lake sun had caught the skin on her arms. It was borne on him that his attitude lacked worth. An aristocrat-on-the-scaffold gesture was indicated. Or perhaps something more tender. 'Darling,' he whispered, with his faint Irish intonation, 'I'd die happy in your arms.'
As he laid his cheek against hers, he sensed a slight rigidity. Had he struck the wrong note? Norah was sometimes disconcertingly practical.
'"There is a time for marrying, and a time for giving in marriage,"' she quoted under her breath. 'Now, be sensible, Dick,' she went on aloud, 'and listen to me. There's no need to talk about dying, but it's no good looking to the lake for help. Our best chance is to strike inland and hope to hit a village or a native path leading to one.'
Dick felt his flourish had miscarried; but in spite of himself, his sinews were braced by Norah's example.
She developed her plan. Not wasting any of the forty-eight hours that were assured to them, they must struggle up the mountain side, the three of them, with the food on their backs. When night overtook them, they would lie between two blazing fires to protect them against beasts. Then push on in the dawn, till they had left the sleeping sickness belt and reached inhabited country once again. If their luck held, they should strike a village or a village path before their food was gone.
'How are you going to get over that?' Dick waved his arm toward the crater wall.
There must be a pass somewhere.'
'We may take days to find it.'
'We must leave something to chance.'
But Dick was no gambler, and the idea of laying out all their food on the possibility that they would find a path frightened him. He thought of the stories of travellers lost in the bush, walking in despairing circles. Where they were, they at least had water.
'It would be better if I went to find the way alone, without a load on my back, and came back for you.'
'If you didn't find it, you'd have to come back just the same. We'd be no further on, with a day wasted.'
'A dhow might have come in or a canoe from a village along the coast.'
Norah said nothing. Though she did not put into words the criticism of her lover, she knew the futility of arguing with a man who prefers a sixty-six to one miracle to a short price chance.
After a brief silence Dick expounded his scheme. There was a hope that the valley of the yellow river led to a pass. He would follow the stream to its source, from every vantage point searching with field-glasses for sign of human life—boat on the lake, path, garden or village in the forest.
Norah gave in. Human eyes she knew could penetrate short distance into the forest, and she had small faith in the plan. But Dick had taken the initiative, and she was not sure enough of her own scheme to force its risk on him. In any case no time must be wasted in argument.
'All right, dear; I'll come the first bit of the climb with you.' Her new-born insight into his nature advised her to keep him under way. Followed by Changalilo, they ascended the course of the yellow stream.
Fantastically tangled roots, growing apparently in air, and a lattice work of creepers formed a wall that forbade progress along the bank, but, at that season of the year, it was possible to walk along a strip of shingle that bordered the bed of the stream. Up this they toiled until their advance was barred by a little waterfall, which boiled through a gap in rocks worn smooth and red, and fell in spray on the rounded boulders below.
Dick decided to deviate into the forest. From where they stood it was possible to divine the course of the river through the trees, until it disappeared circling round the base of a column or chimney of natural rock, whose throat torn raggedly open showed where a small volcano or blowhole had once belched its stream of lava. Dick intended to slant through the forest and rejoin the river by the chimney.
'I'll go back here,' said Norah. 'Changalilo, stay with Bwana Dick to show him the way back to-night.'
'The Bwana said I was never to leave the Ba-Mama[1] alone in the forest,' protested Changalilo.
'Bwana A-ri-shy,'[2] replied Changalilo firmly.
As Norah retraced her steps, she repeated Changalilo's words. He still regarded her as Archie's possession. In her scorn for the condemnation of others, it had never entered her head to consider the opinion of the natives on her flight with Dick. She knew that while the Chiwemba tongue contains no word for a virgin—an ideal that is unfamiliar to this direct people—they looked with an unsympathetic eye on adultery. The code of the good old days, before the white men came, allotted death, she believed, to the guilty pair. Fantastically enough, the existence of this point of view in a backward and little known people carried weight with her.
She dismissed it from her mind and faced the danger that confronted her. The practical side of her nature was uppermost. She saw that two factors—Time and Food—dominated the situation and threatened to sign the death warrant. She could not shorten the days that must precede a rescue, she could increase the food supply. Fish there must be in the lake, fruit there might be in the ruins. As she had no fishing tackle, she decided first to explore the mission.
As she approached the ruined tower, the superstitious dread which the place inspired in her was reinforced by a more concrete fear of snakes. She was a better zoologist than Omar, and knew that 'the keeping of courts where Jamshyd gloried' was more probably entrusted to puff adders and cobras than to lions and leopards.
But fruit trees would have been planted near monastery walls, and to the need for food terrors, supernatural and material, must yield.
As she picked her way through the long grass which surrounded the tower, her foot touched masonry. Treading cautiously, she identified the remnants of a flight of broad steps that once, she supposed, led to the lake. Now their easy gradient was distorted and reft. At one point they ceased completely, at others they slanted drunkenly. The grass that covered them, knee high, made the ascent dangerous.
She stood at the foot of the tower. To her right creeper-grown mounds showed where the chancel lay. She penetrated a clump of trees, dark like citrus, but she found them an outpost of the forest and no domesticated variety. Now she could see a gaping, jagged rift, following the bonding of the brickwork that explained the quick destruction of the station. An earthquake had associated itself with the more patient forces of the forest in the work of obliteration. She wondered that the tower still stood.
Beyond the grass-covered mounds, into which the monastery walls had decayed, she found a grove of mangoes ... the late sort whose fruit, it seemed odd to reflect, might not be ripe till she was dead. In what once had been the courtyard some oranges had reverted to stock. Even so they were fruitless, their season past. Her biggest haul was a handful of small, hard peaches from what had been an orchard. It was doubtful if the trees had ever flourished in the great heat of lake level.
There were no other European trees except the cypresses that edged the terrace on which the monastery had stood, their dark spires pointing men to heaven. But Norah was reminded of Archie's farm and the avenue of young cypresses that led to the new house. She remembered searching the forestry catalogue with Archie, and the Latin name of the Italian cypress—cypressus funebris—crossed her mind with significance now sinister.
Another clump of cypresses led her from the main ruins to an enclosure whose containing wall the destroying forces had spared. As she clambered through a gap she saw the reason of their tolerance. It was the mission cemetery, and here the pride of man was already humbled.
A crudely-hewn stone proclaimed that Alibaba's words had been literal, and that at least one of the White Fathers had died at his post. She wondered how long the news had taken to reach the French village he had left so long ago, and whether there had been any relatives to remember an old man who had endured exile, danger, and death for his faith.
Round him, in their almost obliterated graves, lay his adopted people.
The Christian practices are only able to reduce, by a few years and by the faint memory which mound and stone briefly preserve, the eternity of oblivion that waits. Norah wondered if the old native form of burial—an unmarked hole in the uncharted bush—was not at once less pretentious and, when you bargain with infinity, as effective.
With her miserable handful of peaches, she left the desolation of the mission for the solitude of the shore.
She must face the problem of catching fish without tackle or net. Changalilo's spear, she thought, might have served, had it not formed the sole defence of the party in the hills. Her mind flew to Dick where he felt his way through the forest. Why had she let him go without her? Suppose, without a gun, he ran into lion or buffalo!
She pulled off the cording of the loads and set to work. After more than two hours' labour, a net of sorts was finished. Clasping it, she scrambled on to the breakwater of rocks that the Mimi had turned as she entered the bay.
From talk on the farm, she knew that tiger fish lie under white cliffs. These rocks were white—great round boulders worn smooth like marble in the years that had elapsed since they crumbled from the cliffs above and piled haphazard one on another. She had noticed divers and egrets sitting motionless on the edge. Where were fishing birds there must be fish. As she clambered along the slippery surface she surprised an otter, sitting in the sun with head alert and paws spread like a Landseer lion. Her precarious approach disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets, who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost hurt the eye.
Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.
But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour she had caught nothing. Neither tiger fish with rat-trap teeth that cut through wire casts, nor iron-grey ngombe, whose narrow head and jaws fight the fisherman like a true salmon of the lake, nor yellow, blue-blotched coupi, nor pande, the gigantic perch of Tanganyika, rewarded the efforts of her aching arms.
The sun scorched pitilessly off the rocks, and, as pitilessly, thought seared her brain. When Dick came back that night without accomplishment, they would have one day left to eat. It seemed incredible that in time of peace and in the twentieth century, enjoying full health and strength, with money in her pocket, without an enemy in the world, death should lurk so near. But her appetite—for she had given Dick the lion's share of the day's rations—confirmed her reasoning.
The sun was low above the mountains when she desisted from her unavailing task and returned to camp. She noticed with relief that the store of wood was not spent and she set to work to kindle a blaze.
How much longer would Dick be? Surely he would be back before dark! What news would he bring? Her eyes searched the hillside in vain. She took her field-glasses to the shore and looking back she tried to penetrate the maze of trees. As she raked the hillside, hope leapt within her. High up, near the torn throat of the little volcano, in the fading light, she saw a native.
Dick must have found a village and help was coming.
Then her heart turned to lead. It was Changalilo ... alone. Her worst fears had come true: something had happened to Dick. The criticism that had been forming in her mind since the fiasco of the dinghy fell to dust. Dick was dead or disabled. Her gallant, lovely Dick.
She would have stumbled into the hills, but fear that she would miss Changalilo in the dark restrained her. She waited.
* * * * * * *
An hour she waited, till Changalilo appeared noiselessly in the firelight. He saluted in silence.
'What has happened?' she forced herself to ask.
He did not speak. Her eyes, which had been trying to read his expressionless features, fell till they rested on his hand decorously holding a letter. She snatched it.
'Darling,' it read, 'we're saved. Just seen a camp fire in the bush. Chang says it's a white man. Will spend night with him and join you to-morrow. All my love.—DICK.'"
* * * * * * *
Ross broke off. He remarked that the air was a little cooler and that he thought he could snatch a little sleep in the interval between stifling night and sweltering day.
We went below. As we reached the companionway:—
"To-morrow," he said. "I'll tell you how optimistic was that letter. No will-o'-the-wisp ever led wayfarer farther from safety than that camp fire led Dick.”
[1] Ba-Mama—lit. "Grandmothers" (plur.). The respectful term for all influential ladies—white women or native princesses.
[2] The Awemba cannot pronounce consecutive consonants without inserting a vowel. Changalilo meant Archie.