"Do we still go on?" breathed Hamoud.

Without opening her eyes she returned, in a loud voice:

"He shall not die till I get there."

Hamoud's look of sadness gave place to a look of peace.



CHAPTER LXI

At daybreak the safari entered the forest.

Two askaris went first, guarding the albino. Next, since the forest trail was too narrow for hammock travel, Lilla came afoot with Hamoud, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling no physical weariness or pain. Behind her the rest of the askaris herded along the porters.

The huge tree trunks sprang up toward a firmament of somber green, from which descended dense festoons of vines. Through this twilight flitted birds of brilliant plumage and long-haired monkeys. The place had a morose, nefarious beauty, like the forest in the prophecy of Anna Zanidov.

Now and then a glade appeared, hung with flowers of mustard yellow or diaphanous purple. Then again the tunnel-like trail, the green twilight, the flapping of carmine wings, and a shaft of sunshine piercing the canopy to rest upon the gnawed bones of a forest deer. Here and there stood clumps of brown reeds, without twigs or buds, as though a band of warriors had buried their spear blade down in the earth before vanishing into the thickets. But one saw no faces except those of the monkeys.

They camped in a glade beside a spring. The drums filled the night with their throbbing, which seemed part of the throbbing in Lilla's feverish head. The askaris kept double guard; but at dawn eleven of the porters were missing.

Ahead of the marching safari, in a clearing spotted with large, dirty-white blossoms, six black men sat motionless round the ashes of a camp fire. They were watchers posted here to see that no strangers entered their land at the season of the dances.

Although they could not take part in those mysteries they wore the full dance regalia. They were crowned with towering shakoes of black-and-white monkey hair, fastened under their chins with beaded straps, and bristling with egrets. Their bodies were smeared with indigo and blotched with large discs of white paint; their faces were painted white, but their noses were covered with soot. They wore not a scrap of clothing; but around their necks and on their arms and legs they had a wealth of talismans—tiny figures fashioned from clay, from iron, from copper and from stones, in which one might discern the characteristics of Phoenician images debased by thousands of years of savage inspiration. In their painted, plumed, bedizened immobility they appeared inhuman, or perhaps less than human—the personifications of Africa's blind and vivid soul, the full efflorescence of this gloomy, white-splotched clearing.

They raised their heads as a seventh, crowned and painted as they were, stood forth from a curtain of vines. On his left arm he wore a shield covered with black-and-white patterns; above the shield rim glittered the blades of three spears.

He described what he had seen.

He told of a train of dark-skinned men, guided by one with unexceptional features, but with yellowish wool and a skin that resembled the belly of a dead fish. These intruders served a personage such as had never been seen. For she—if indeed a woman—was tall, with a face the color of the highest mountain peaks, and eyes gleaming like strange stones. She walked as if in a trance; but in her trancelike face was a cold grief, or maybe a cold fury, like that of some goddess whose taboos had been broken, and who was marching to vengeance.

They sat awe-stricken, filled with that dread of the supernatural which possesses the savage who is confronted with anything unheard of. Besides, the spell of the dances was upon them, remote though they were from that scene—the far-off frenzies that were preparing had begun to trouble their nerves. But at last their leader rose. Moved by the mysticism of the season, when every act must take on a liturgical quality, he chanted the question:

"Who is the woman with the cold face who enters our country at the time of the Dances of the Moon?"

All his companions repeated his question in a low, singing tone, touching their amulets, and raising their whitened visages toward the interlaced branches and vines.

The leader's high, tremulous voice was heard again:

"Is it a woman of flesh and blood; or is it the Lady of the Moon?"

It was the genius of the ancient Phoenicians, the spirit of Astoreth, surviving distorted through all these ages in the depths of the jungle, exerting its spell.

But a look of cunning entered his blood-shot eyes; and his flexible mask of white was creased by a smile. He cried out in a new voice:

"If she is the Lady of the Moon our spears will not hurt her!"

He bounded into the air, stamped his feet, shook his headdress, and crouched in an attitude of war.

"But if she is flesh and blood our spears will tell us so!"

All leaped to their feet. Their brandished spears made nimbuses over their heads; and this time their response was like the baying of hounds. Then, one by one, stepping lightly, they slipped through the curtain of vines.



CHAPTER LXII

Trees, trees, trees. They were colossal, draped in moss and lichen, ferns growing from the crooks of their limbs, above the impenetrable thickets of broad-leaved plants from which came the tinkle of rills. Here and there had fallen across the narrow corridor a tree trunk riddled by ants; as Lilla stepped over it blue scorpions scuttled away.

Hour after hour there floated before her the fezzes and khaki-covered backs of the two leading askaris, trim, narrow, jaunty backs flanking the leprous shoulders of the albino. Now and again Hamoud, a robed figment always beside her, addressed her in an unintelligible language.

"Dying. Dying. Dying."

Too late, perhaps, even for that last embrace of glances, that moment of pardon and love which was all that she had asked. Closed eyes, sealed lips, a similacrum to mock her will, left behind by the spirit that had gone where she and the safari could not follow.

"All the same, I shall not be far behind you! My spirit, when it has shaken off this flesh, will travel faster than yours, on the wings of a supreme necessity. I shall find you!"

She stopped short, bewildered by a new hallucination—a flash of silvery light across her face. She saw one of the leading askaris kneel down and stretch himself upon his face, as if trying to press against the ground a thin shaft that seemed to be lying crosswise under his chest. Then she heard an explosion, and perceived a film of smoke full of horizontal gleams—the blades of flying spears.

She had a fleeting impression of Hamoud, his arm outstretched, his hand spitting fire. Beyond him the albino vanished in mid-air. The second askari, his rifle lowered, was staring in vague surmise at his breast, from which protruded a piece of polished wood. At that moment she found herself surrounded by khaki-clad forms all moving with catlike grace. The dark faces under the fezzes were changed by the fervor of battle; the bared teeth shone out beside the locks of the rifles. These thin, hard bodies, buffeting her about, formed round her a rampart from which the blades of steel were answered by blades of flame.

Hamoud rose from the ground at her feet, drawing his dagger. An askari grunted and sat down with a thud. Then she saw that they were in the midst of a glade. Among the bushes flitted the pattern of a shield, a clump of egrets, a whitened visage that seemed to lack a nose. The askaris' rifles rose, spouted fire, sank down with a click, rose, crashed again. Silence fell.

The blue veil of smoke rose slowly, all in one piece.

Then, without warning, came the charge.

She became aware of an incredible apparition—a sort of naked harlequin, magnified by a towering headdress, sailing high, twisting over his shield like a pole vaulter over a pole, coming down asprawl in a bed of crimson flowers. Another followed, crouching—or else this was only a swiftly advancing shield, topped by a tuft of egrets. But from one side of the shield darted out along, indigo arm, releasing a spear: an askari leaned against Lilla, coughed, and slipped to the ground. The advancing shield doubled up, to reveal a warrior who, with a somersault, a rattle of amulets, a blur of broad polka dots, lay flat, his face blown away.

More shields were rushing upon the guns, however.

The Mambava, shot through and through, feeling death upon them, maintained their momentum long enough to drive their weapons through the khaki jackets, or, at the least, to go down with their teeth buried in the riflemen's necks, as if that draught of blood might reanimate them. The wrestlers sank to earth inextricably mingled, a fist perhaps sticking up above the tangle and slowly relinquishing a broad-bladed Somali knife.

One remained apart, some dozen yards away, shot through the hips, but still dragging himself forward. From his open month, yawning black in the whitened face, issued roars like those of a crippled lion, as with a lion's courage he still came on, his legs trailing, his body scraping the soil, a spear in one clenched paw.

Lilla stood paralyzed, alone before that inexorable advance.

For the rampart of askaris had become a circle of dead men, expressing with their last gestures a deep desire to be remerged with this rich, dark, ancient earth.

But all at once, as though a bit of blue sky had fallen into the glade, there appeared between Lilla and the crawling warrior, a figure of trailing blue robes, bent double, running. It was Hamoud, his turban gone, his cheek smeared with loam, one shoulder of his robe stained a deep violet.

Clapping his sandaled foot upon the spear blade, he seized the Mambava by his plume of egrets. The painted head was dragged back. The Zanzibar dagger shone through the ribbons of smoke.

Her mouth twisted in abnormal shapes as she struggled to cry out. "Hamoud!" she screamed at last, raising her arms as high as she could, and trying to tear her gaze away from that spectacle. The Arab's pose, as he bent over his enemy, was a frightful burlesque of solicitude. How many times had she not seen him bending thus over David, maybe to smooth his pillow? And now, against the colonnade of gloomy trees, there was something sacrificial in that tableau—the blue robe, the wet dagger, the plumed head pulled back, with glazed eyes fixed on the woman who stood rigid, her arms upstretched, transformed from the giver of life into the giver of death.

She fled, stumbled, stood still in the entrance to the back-trail. In that leafy tunnel, as far as the eye could see, was no one living or dead. The porters, the tent boys, all were gone in a stampede for safety. The baggage lay scattered among the fern beds. She saw bundles of green canvas, chop boxes, rags, bursting sacks of grain. Beside a mossy rock lay her dressing case smashed open, its mirror, brushes, and vials trampled into the mud.

"Ah, my mirror is broken."

She wandered through the wreckage, uttering peals of laughter.



CHAPTER LXIII

The light of the full moon, penetrating the high canopy of leaves, illuminated the contorted vines that hung motionless in mid-air like pythons of silver. Here, miles beyond the place of battle, apart from the trail, in a covert that seemed made for them, the woman and the man sat resting, she on a mound of moss as soft as a pile of velvet cushions, he at her feet. A moonbeam rested on her loosened hair and her dress that was torn to tatters. She raised her head as the sound of the drums came to her from far away.

To-night there was a new accent in that throbbing, a wilder cadence, a suggestion of tumult, a hint of the infernal. In her fancy she perceived a multitude of naked, painted figures dancing in the glamor of great fires.

A shudder passed through her from head to foot, as she said:

"Now you will confess that we have come into a place where God does not exist."

He cast round her his blood-stained robe. Through a rent in his white kanzu, which was glued to his body, his shoulder appeared, covered with a black encrustation.

"Wherever we turn," he answered, "there is the face of God."

"So you still believe? You could even pray, perhaps?"

By way of response, casting up his dark eyes, he pronounced the Fatihah, his low voice mingling with the mutter of the drums:

"In the name of God, the Compassionate! Praise belongeth to God, the Lord of the Worlds, the King of the Day of Doom. Thee do we serve, and of Thee do we ask aid. Guide us in the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious, not of those with whom Thou art angered, or of those who stray. Amen."

"Delusion!" she moaned.

His gaze embraced her in pity. His precisely modeled face, still so youthful despite his delicate beard, and almost spiritually handsome in the moonlight, yearned toward her as he returned, with a caressing gentleness:

"Yes, surely this present life is only a play, a pastime. This world, and all in it, are shadows cast upon the screen of eternity. But God is real. Everything may go to destruction, but not the face of God. Ah," he sighed, "if only the Lord had opened your heart to Islam, had willed that you might feel the Inner Light! No matter what may happen, there is peace." He dreamed sadly for a time, then said, "Fair-seeming to men are women; but God—goodly the home with him!" And he averted his head from her, as though from a temptation to apostasy.

Something moved in the bushes. Hamoud raised a rifle from the moss into his lap. Amid the leaves two balls of green fire appeared and disappeared. It was a leopard that had peeped out at them.

The drum music swelled through the forest.

"To-morrow they will find us," she reflected.

"Meanwhile we live in this flesh, subject to its beliefs, still able to trust in its seeming powers of delight."

So, after a long hush, he took from his bosom a little glass bottle of square surfaces enameled with gold, uncorked it, and held it out to her. There came to her nostrils the odor of her own perfume, which she had worn in a lost world.

"Clothe yourself in this sweetness," he whispered. "Touch it once more to your temples, your hair, your lips. Let it float about you like a veil that covers a beauty remembered from old dreams. These rags will become cloth of gold on the body of the Sultana of Sultanas. I shall sit while still alive in those gardens beneath whose shades the rivers flow—those charming abodes that are in the Garden of Eden. This, and not Paradise, shall be the great bliss."

She poured the few drops of perfume into her palms, and held out her hands.

"Ah, Hamoud——"

"Do not speak," he protested, catching her hands in his. "It is this moment for which I became a servant, did things that you will never know of, and followed you here."

She sat in the blood-stained robe, in the dark forest vibrating from the drums and rustling with stealthy beasts, lost, bereft of beauty and faith, yet aware of one more miracle—realizing that even now, out of her poverty, she could still bestow happiness.



CHAPTER LXIV

At daybreak they went on.

With his shoulders bowed under a distended sack and a canvas water bottle, and with his rifle at trail, he guided her feeble steps along the path. Now and then he besought her to rest. She shook her head.

Bees hummed above them in the festoons of flowers. Purple parrots with scarlet crests went fluttering away. At noon they paused, ate some biscuits, then pressed ahead, she driven by her obsession and he, as he believed, by the purposes of Allah.

Just as a rosy warmth was invading the upper foliage, Hamoud pushed her from him, and struck at the ground with his gun butt. He had stepped upon a puff adder.

He sat down to examine his ankle, on which four tiny pinpricks were visible. He looked up with a fixed smile.

There it lay, a little, crushed reptile, a trivial fragment of matter, its triangular head flattened out, its scales of pinkish gray, black, slate, and lemon yellow already turning dull. Yet the man, a rational being, with power for good as well as evil, for love as well as hatred, was even now dying from it. But his face expressed the fortitude that was at the same time the blessing and the curse of his religion, as he said to her:

"Go. I do not wish you to see me die this death."

She knelt down to peer at those almost imperceptible punctures.

"From that?"

As she spoke he seized his leg above the knee, to choke back the first excruciating pang. Rocking backward and forward, he began to repeat scattered texts from the Koran:

"The recompense of the life to come is better, for those who have believed and feared God——" With a groan he let go of his leg and clutched at his abdomen. He gasped, "Adorned shall they be with golden bracelets and with pearls, and their raiment shall be of silk—— Go! go! Oh, my star, I do not want you to see me die this death!" He arched his back, then lay flat, his skin colorless, bedewed with a sudden moisture. "Praise be to God, who hath allowed release from all this, my Master, the Knowing, the Wise! Into gardens beneath whose shades—— Ah, but you will not be there! You will not be there!"

He was silent, twisting like the serpent whose head he had crushed.



CHAPTER LXV

Night was falling: it was the time when the beasts of prey begin to stir from their lairs. Sitting beside the semblance of Hamoud, she examined in the last of the twilight the well-worn Koran. She hurled the book from her. It was swallowed by the gloom. "You have won," she thought, regarding the murky thickets that were hung with morbific blossoms, the trees that remained a labyrinth even while they dissolved in the night.

In her progress hither she had cast off, one by one, all her repugnances and terrors, all her proud and luxurious impulses, all her charms. Nothing had remained except a love that expected and desired no physical rewards, and a power of will that she had conjured up apparently out of nothing.

Now both will and love lay vanquished.

The drums were not yet beating. Silence filled the forest that should have been alive with little furtive noises. Nature, of which this place was the core and utmost manifestation, seemed to brood with bated breath.

She began to speak, urgently, seductively:

"When they come you will wake up and protect me, Hamoud? You love me, and I once read somewhere that love can be stronger than death. But now sleep; get back your strength. I'll keep watch. I'm not afraid; for I have only to reach out my hand to touch you."

She touched the cold forehead and muttered, "How chilly you are!" and threw over the body of the martyr the torn joho, which she had been wearing round her shoulders. There was long silence. The whole forest sighed softly, as if weary of waiting.

"What did you say, Hamoud? A play of shadows? And above it a permanence that you call the face of God? What queer things your God must see in this shadow play of ours!"

She laughed indulgently, then caught her breath. The darkness was filled with an amazing sight.

Before her a great pyramid of bodies rose toward an apex surrounded by flashes of pink lightning—the seething bodies of all humanity, and of all the animals and reptiles of the earth. Each struggled to extricate itself from the rest, to surmount its neighbors, to wriggle toward the apex. The bare breasts of women, whose handsome ball gowns were torn and covered with mud, strained to be free from the enwrapping trunks of elephants, and the coils of pythons. The torsoes of dusky savages and the limbs of white men writhed under the fangs of lions and hyenas, which were transfixed by spears, or lacerated by wounds that they had inflicted on one another. The countless faces exposed on that quaking mountain of flesh, male and female, light and dark, fair and hideous, brutish and sensitive, expressed one look of stupid and yet agonized desire—all eyes were turned upward toward the summit wreathed with lightning. There those who had just gained their goal, lightly touched by the tips of the rose-colored bolts, sank back inanimate, went tumbling down the slope with astonishment frozen on their faces, scattering broadcast from their hands a cascade of treasures—jewels, scraps of paper, purses, images of gold and ivory, wreaths of laurel or of lilies, scepters, and objects in which no one could have discovered any meaning or any worth.

But what was the goal toward which this mass of flesh was striving so frantically? Above the apex of the pyramid, amid the sheen of the lightning, was revealed a vast figure, naked and indeterminate, dim and yet seeming of a denser texture than the most abysmal beasts, a figure at the same time human and serpentine, that twisted in attitudes of human anguish, yet appeared, like a maddened serpent, to be stinging itself to death.

The whole vision vanished.

"Hamoud! Hamoud! Now I'm afraid!"

But she could not wake the protector. She was alone.

"God, then!"

And in one last flash of distracted irony:

"If I called God in Arabic?"

She had an idea that the silently brooding forest was smiling in the darkness.

Yes, she felt, alone; since even the God of Hamoud could not be aware of this world, in which everything desired by the senses, or apprehensible by them, was going to destruction—so futile a tragedy, so contemptible a fleeting dream, a nothingness of which the miserable woman seemed to see herself, at last, as the most insignificant part.

"But I have cast it off, left it all behind me! You must hear me! You shall hear me!"

When her voice, a thin blade of sound, pierced the silence of the black forest, without a premonitory thud the rumble of the drums began, as though the roused spirit of the jungle were trying to drown out this cry. The drum music swelled louder and louder in the breathless night, its mingled rhythms combining into a thunder. But once more the cry, "Hear me!" rose to contest with that demoniacal uproar.

When she had remained motionless for a while with upturned face, weariness rolled down upon her like an avalanche.

The moonlight, creeping through the tangles, covered her prostrate body. She was dreaming that Anna Zanidov stood before her in the barbarically painted evening gown. She sat up with a bound. Hands had embraced her feet. A grayish form crouched before her.

The albino had heard her.



CHAPTER LXVI

Sitting back upon his heels, hugging against his breast a small bow and a handful of arrows, the albino scrutinized the fallen divinity. Yes, by some pass of magic she had been changed into a helpless human being, full of human despair. The poor pariah contemplated her in her abasement from an eminence of pity.

He rose with an uncouth gesture of invitation. He guided her through the mottled labyrinth. Stumbling over the roots, bursting her way through the vines, she pressed after the bent figure whose very loathsomeness now seemed precious to her.

He had found the lost path. He crept forward more quickly, halted at last, and pointed. Ahead there expanded a wide sheen of moonlight, in the midst of which she discerned a man standing like a statue, a fez on his head and a rifle over his arm.

The albino was gone.

A challenge rang out as she stood forth on the edge of the clearing. Beyond the sentinel she saw red embers and tents, rising black skulls, and agitated fezzes. But in the midst of a broad pool of moonlight was spread a tent cloth through which appeared the outline of a body.

She sank down upon her knees, turned back the tent cloth from the inscrutable face.

It was the face of Cornelius Rysbroek, who, in the dead of night, beside his sleeping rival, while drawing the pistol from the holster, had been shot in the back.

She perceived, on the curtain of a tent before her, a hand that thrust back the folds, a hand that moved, that lived. Under the tent fly emerged a man cadaverous from fever, to gaze at another chimera, of tatters and gaunt pallor, in which he found at last a resemblance to the woman he had loved. Though Lawrence was sure that this could not be reality, life bubbled up in him as she drew nearer. He found somehow the power to stand firm, to hold her fast when she sagged down in his arms.

THE END