Shot after shot rang out, but not an elephant was touched, and in two great clouds, which coalesced, the broken herd with the sound of a storm passed away along the road they had come by, the night closing on them as the sun vanished from the sky.

Berselius had not reckoned on this. No man can reckon on what the wilderness will do. The oldest hunter is the man who knows most surely the dramatic surprises of the hunt, but the oldest hunter would never have taken this into his calculations.

Here, back along the road they had travelled all day, was coming, not a peacefully moving herd, but a storm of elephants. Elephants who had been disturbed in feeding, shot at, and shot after, filled with the dull fury that dwells in an elephant's brain for days, and with the instinct for safety that would carry them perhaps a hundred miles before dawn.

And right in the track of this terrible army of destruction lay the sleeping camp, the camp fire smouldering and fluttering its flames on the wind.

And the wind had shifted!

With the dark, as though the scene had been skilfully prepared by some infernal dramatist, just as the cover of night shut down tight and sealed, and suddenly, like a box-lid that had been upheld by the last rays of the setting sun, just as the great stars burst out above as if at the touch of an electric button, the wind shifted right round and blew due east.

This change of wind would dull the sound of the oncoming host to the people at the camp; at the same time it would bring the scent of the human beings to the elephants.

The effect of this might be to make them swerve away from the line they were taking, but it would be impossible to tell for certain. The only sure thing was, that if they continued in their course till within eyeshot of the camp fire, they would charge it and destroy everything round about it in their fury.

A camp fire to an angry elephant is the equivalent of a red rag to a bull.

Thus the dramatic element of uncertainty was introduced into the tragedy unfolding on the plains, and the great stars seemed to leap like expectant hearts of fire till the moon broke over the horizon, casting the flying shadows of the great beasts before them.

The first furious stampede had settled into a rapid trot, to a sound like the sound of a hundred muffled drums beating a rataplan.

Instinct told the herd that immediate danger was past, also that for safety they would have to cover an immense space of country; so they settled to the pace most suitable for the journey. And what a pace it was, and what a sight!

Drifting across the country before the great white moon, fantastic beasts and more fantastic shadows, in three divisions line ahead, with the lanes of moonlight ruled between each line; calves by the cows, bulls in the van, they went, keeping to the scent of the track they had come by as unswervingly as a train keeps to the metals.

The giraffe was still with them. He and his shadow, gliding with compass-like strides a hundred yards away from the southward column; and just as the scent of the camp came to his mammoth friends, the sight of the camp fire, like a red spark, struck his keen eyes.

With a rasping note of warning he swerved to the south.

Now was the critical moment. Everything lay with the decision of the bulls leading the van, who, with trunks flung up and crooked forward, were holding the scent as a man holds a line. They had only a moment of time, but he who knows the elephant folk knows well the rapidity with which their minds can reason, and from their action it would seem that the arbiters of Berselius's fate reasoned thus: "The enemy were behind; they are now in front. So be it. Let us charge."

And they charged, with a blast of trumpeting that shook the sky; with trunks flung up and forward-driving tusks, ears spread like great sails, and a sound like the thunder of artillery, they charged the scent, the body of the herd following the leaders, as the body of a battering-ram follows the head.

* * * * *

Adams, when he had flung himself down in his tent, fell asleep instantly. This sleep, which was profound and dreamless, lasted but half an hour, and was succeeded by a slumber in which, as in a darkened room where a magic-lantern is being operated, vivid and fantastic pictures arose before him. He was on the march with the column through a country infinite as is space; the road they were taking, like the road to the tombs of the Chinese kings, was lined on either side with animals done in stone. At first these were tigers, and then, as though some veil of illusion had been withdrawn, he discovered them to be creatures far larger and more cruel, remorseless, and fearful than tigers; they were elephants—great stone elephants that had been standing there under the sun from everlasting, and they dwindled in perspective from giants to pigmies and from pigmies to grains of sand, for they were the guardians of a road whose end was infinity.

Then these vanished, but the elephant country under the burning sun remained. There was nothing to be seen but the sun-washed spaces of wind-blown grass, and broken ground, and scattered trees, till across the sky in long procession, one following the other, passed shadow elephants. Shadows each thrice the height of the highest mountain, and these things called forth in the mind of the sleeper such a horror and depth of dread that he started awake with the sweat running down his face.

Sleep was shattered, and in the excitement and nerve-tension of over-tiredness he lay tossing on his back. The long march of the day before, in which men had matched themselves against moving mountains, the obsession of the things they had been pursuing, had combined to shatter sleep.

He came out in the open for a breath of air.

The camp was plunged in slumber. The two sentries ordered by Berselius to keep watch and to feed the fire lay like the others, with arms outspread; the fire was burning low, as though drowned out by the flood of moonlight, and Adams was on the point of going to the pile of fuel for some sticks to feed it, when he saw a sight which was one of the strangest, perhaps, that he would ever see.

The sentry lying on the right of the fire sat up, rose to his feet, went to the wood pile, took an armful of fuel and flung it on the embers.

The fire roared up and crackled, and the sleep-walker, who had performed this act with wide-staring eyes that saw nothing, returned to his place and lay down.

It was as if the order of Berselius still rang in his ears and the vision of Berselius still dominated his mind.

Adams, thinking of this strange thing, stood with the wind fanning his face, looking over the country to the west, the country they had traversed that day in tribulation under the burning sun. There was nothing to tell now of the weary march, the pursuit of phantoms, the long, long miles of labour; all was peaceful and coldly beautiful, moonlit and silent.

He was about to return to his tent when a faint sound struck his ear. A faint, booming sound, just like that which troubles us when the eardrum vibrates on its own account from exhaustion or the effect of drugs.

He stopped his ears and the sound ceased.

Then he knew that the sound was a real sound borne on the air.

He thought it was coming to him on the wind, which was now blowing steadily in his face, and he strained his eyes to see the cause; but he saw nothing. There was no cloud in the sky or storm on the horizon, yet the sound was increasing. Boom, boom, becoming deeper and more sonorous, now like the long roll of muffled drums, now like the sea bursting in the sea-caves of a distant coast, or the drums of the cyclone when they beat the charge for the rushing winds. But the heart-searching feature of this strange booming in the night was a rhythm, a pulsation that spoke of life. This was no dull shifting of matter, as in an earthquake, or of air as in a storm; this sound was alive.

Adams sprang to the tent where Berselius was sleeping, and dragged him out by the arm, crying, "Listen!"

He would have cried, "See!" but the words withered on his lips at the sight which was now before him as he faced east.

An acre of rollicking and tossing blackness storming straight for the camp across the plain under the thunder that was filling the night. A thing inconceivable and paralyzing, till the iron grip of Berselius seized his arm, driving him against the tree, and the voice of Berselius cried, "Elephants."

In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two figures remaining, the figures of Berselius and Felix.

The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven.

Berselius had spied him.

What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man. The soul-shattering terror of the advancing storm, the thunder and the trumpeting that never ceased, had no effect on the iron heart of Berselius.

He made the instantaneous calculation that it was just possible to kick the man awake (for sound has no effect on the hemp-drugged one) and get him to the tree and a chance of safety. And he made the attempt.

And he would have succeeded but that he fell.

The root of a dead tree, whose trunk had long vanished, caught his foot when he had made half the distance, and brought him down flat on his face.

It was as though God had said, "Not so."

Adams, in an agony, sweat pouring from him, watched Berselius rise to his feet. He rose slowly as if with deliberation, and then he stood fronting the oncoming storm. Whether he was dazed, or whether he knew that he had miscalculated his chances, who knows? But there he stood, as if disdaining to fly, face fronting the enemy. And it seemed to the watcher that the figure of that man was the figure of a god, till the storm closed on him, and seized and swung aloft by a trunk, he was flung away like a stone from a catapult somewhere into the night.

Just as a man clings to a mast in a hurricane, deaf, blind, all his life and energy in his arms, Adams clung to the tree bole above the branch upon which he was.

The storm below, the smashing of great bodies against the tree, the trumpeting whose prolonged scream never ceased—all were nothing. His mind was cast out—he had flung it away just as the elephant had flung Berselius away. To him the universe was the tree to which he was clinging, just that part which his arms encircled.

The herd had attacked in three columns, keeping the very same formation as they had kept from the start. The northern column, consisting of cows with their calves, drove on as if to safety, the others, cows and bulls—the cows even more ferocious than the bulls—attacked the camps, the tents, and the fire. They stamped and trod the fire out, smashing tent poles and chop boxes, stores and cooking utensils, tusking one another in the tight-packed melee, and the scream of the trumpeting never ceased.

Then they drove on.

The porters, all except two, had, unhappily for themselves, fled in a body to the west, and now mixed with the trumpeting and thunder could be heard the screams of men trodden under foot or tusked to pieces. These sounds ceased, and the trumpeting died away, and nothing could be distinguished but the dull boom, boom of the herd sweeping away west, growing fainter and fainter, and dying away in the night.



CHAPTER XX

THE BROKEN CAMP

The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself, "What will come after?" The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no fear.

Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other, and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not knowing that they had left a living man behind them.

As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from his will power, they held him there despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety on their own account, and he had to think himself free. There was no use in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little by little, they (fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped down and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him and he fell.

He was a very brave man and a very strong man, but now, just released from Death, now that all danger was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen and heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in maelstrom action, Life in its loudest and most appalling phase, and he felt as a man might feel to whom the gods had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we call the sun.

He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving-glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; yet this thing, useless and fragile, had been carefully preserved, watched over by some god of its own.

He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head.

A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight.

It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by. The column of cows with their calves had passed him on the other side. Old hunters say that elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Felix, though awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain like a dead man as the storm swept by.

He was very much alive, now, and seemingly unconcerned as he came toward Adams, stood beside him, and looked around.

"All gone dam," said Felix. And volumes would not have expressed the situation more graphically. Then the savage, having contemplated the scene for a moment, rushed forward to a heap of stuff—broken boxes and what not—dragged something from it and gave a shout.

It was the big elephant rifle, with its cartridge-bag attached. The stock was split, but the thing was practically intact. Felix waved it over his head and laughed and whooped.

"Gun!" yelled Felix.

Adams beckoned to him, and he came like a black devil in the moonlight—a black devil with filed teeth and flashing eyeballs—and Adams pointed to the tree and motioned him to leave the gun there and follow him. Felix obeyed, and Adams started in the direction in which he had seen Berselius flung.

It was not far to walk, and they had not far to search. A hundred yards took them to a break in the ground, and there in the moonlight, with arms extended, lay the body of the once powerful Berselius, the man who had driven them like sheep, the man whose will was law. The man of wealth and genius, great as Lucifer in evil, yet in courage and heroism tremendous. God-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably great and compelling.

Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on.

Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain. Adams tore open the collar of the hunting shirt; then he examined the limbs.

Berselius, flung like a stone from a catapult, had, unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very slightly for a space nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner table of the skull no doubt was splintered, hence the brain mischief.

There was only one thing to be done—trephine. And that as swiftly as possible.

Everything needful was in the instrument-case, but had it escaped destruction?

He raised Berselius by the shoulders. Felix took the feet, and between them they carried the body to the tree, where they laid it down.

Before starting to hunt for the instruments, Adams bled Berselius with his penknife. The effect was almost instantaneous. The breathing became less stertorous and laboured. Then he started to search hither and thither for the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre of ground. The case had almost to a certainty been smashed to pieces; still, there was a chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He remembered the shaving-glass, and how it had been miraculously preserved, and started to work. He came across a flat oblong disc of tin; it had been a box of sardines, it was now flattened out as though by a rolling mill. He came across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole in the ground, as if saying, "Have a drink." It was intact. He knocked the head off and, accepting the dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it, and went on.

He came across long strips of the green rot-proof stuff the tents had been made of. They looked as though they had been torn up like this for rib-roller bandages, for they were just of that width. He came across half a mosquito-net; the other half was sailing away north, streaming from the tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, and giving him, no doubt, a sufficiently bizarre appearance under the quiet light of the moon and stars.

There were several chop boxes of stores intact; and a cigar box without a crack in it, and also without a cigar. It looked as though it had been carefully opened, emptied, and laid down. There was no end to the surprises of this search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and mortar, things easily smashable untouched.

He had been searching for two hours when he found the trephine. It lay near the brass lock of the amputating case, attached to which there were some pieces of mahogany from the case itself.

A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of the screw you have a cup of steel. This steel cup has a serrated edge: it is, in fact, a small circular saw. Applying the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from the outer table of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes out of a sheet of dough with a "cutter."

Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as paper and brittle as glass, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all events, it was not there.

He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back to the tree beneath which the body of Berselius was lying. Berselius, still senseless, was breathing deeply and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the pool for water to bathe the wound; but the pool was trodden up into slush, and hours must elapse before the mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy, fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with his handkerchief torn into three pieces bound it up.

There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down with his back to the tree to wait for dawn.

The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bitterness of being there with hands willing and able to help, yet helpless. A surgeon is as useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied, but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the situation.

Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Felix, lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.



CHAPTER XXI

THE FEAST OF THE VULTURES

Adams, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a whoop from Felix.

It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Felix, were all that remained of Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there——

Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts and kites were holding a clamorous meeting; over there, where the ground was black with birds.

The two wretches approaching the camping place rolled their eyes in terror, glancing over there. They had run for miles and hidden themselves in a donga. They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, torn to pieces, trampled to pulp; they had heard the thunder of the vanishing herd, and they had listened to the awful silence that followed, lying on their faces, clinging to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the camp.

"Hi yi!" yelled Felix, and a response came like the cry of a seagull. They were shivering as dogs shiver when ill or frightened; their teeth were chattering, and they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on their necks and ankles showed white and leprous-looking in the bright morning sunshine.

But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent over him, and started back in surprise.

Berselius's eyes were open; he was breathing regularly and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened from sleep, was yet too lazy to move.

Adams touched him upon the shoulder, and Berselius, raising his right hand, drew it over his face as if to chase away sleep. Then his head dropped, and he lay looking up at the sky. Then he yawned twice, deeply, and turning his head on his left shoulder looked about him lazily, his eyes resting here and there: on the two porters who were sitting, with knees drawn up, eating some food which Felix had given them; on the broken camp furniture and the heaps of raffle left by the catastrophe of the night before; on the skyline where the grass waved against the morning blue.

Adams heaved a sigh of relief. The man had only been stunned. None of the vital centres of the brain had been injured. Some injury there must be, but the main springs of life were intact. There was no paralysis, for now the sick man was raising his left hand, and, moving about as a person moves in bed to get a more comfortable position, he raised both knees and then, turning over on his right side, straightened them out again. Now, by the movements of a sick person you can tell pretty nearly the condition of his brain.

All the movements of this sick man were normal; they indicated great tiredness, nothing more. The shock and the loss of blood might account for that. Adams the night before had made a pillow from his own coat for the stricken one's head; he was bending now to rearrange it, but he desisted. Berselius was asleep.

Adams remained on his knees for a moment contemplating his patient with deep satisfaction. Then he rose to his feet. Some shelter must be improvised to protect the sleeping man from the sun, but in the raffle around there did not seem enough tent cloth to make even an umbrella.

Calling Felix and the two porters to follow him, he started off, searching amidst the debris here and there, setting the porters to work to collect the remains of the stores and to bring them back to the tree, hunting in vain for what he wanted, till Felix, just as they reached the northern limit of destruction, pointed to where the birds were still busy, clamorous and gorging.

"What is it?" asked Adams.

"Tent," replied Felix.

To the left of where the birds were, and close to them, lay a mound of something showing dark amidst the grass. It was a tent, or a large part of one of the tents; tangled, perhaps, in a tusk, it had been brought here and cast, just as a storm might have brought and cast it. Even at this distance the air was tainted with the odour of the birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before a savage.

"Come," said he, and they started.

The birds saw them coming, and some flew away; others, trying to fly away, rose in the air heavily and fluttering a hundred yards sank and scattered about in the grass, looking like great vermin; a few remained waddling here and there, either too impudent for flight or too greatly gorged.

Truly it had been a great killing, and the ground was ripped as if by ploughs. Over a hundred square yards lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, though not a movement was there, save the movement of the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of a rag of skin to the breeze.

They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and with teeth glinting in the sun. It was the smallest tent, ripped here and there, but otherwise sound; the mosquito net inside was intact and rolled up like a ball, but the pole was broken in two.

As they carried it between them, they had to pass near a man. He was very dead, that man; a great foot had trodden on his face, and it was flattened out, looking like a great black flat-fish in which a child, for fun, had punched holes for eyes and mouth and nose; it was curling up at the edges under the sun's rays, becoming converted into a cup.

"B'selius," said Felix, with a laugh, indicating this thing as they passed it.

Adams had his hands full, or he would have struck the brute to the ground. 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 fashioned after God'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 shifting 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 brass 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 niggers 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 grass as the wind bent it gently in its passage.

A long time passed, 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-butt 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 grass.

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 grass, 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 grass 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 compasses, 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, passed 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 pass. 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 pass 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?"

"You know your name?"

"Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. My mind is clear, my memory is clear, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp fire of last night, everything is a thick mist—I am afraid!"

He took Adams's big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and the action.

The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a little child, and saying, "I am afraid!"

And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so different from the voices of common men.

"It will pass," said Adams. "It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out. He had to learn his alphabet again."

Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.

Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful. It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment, until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.

Berselius's case was a phase of this condition. He knew his name—everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that, he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.

If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.

Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other words, he had lost his past.



CHAPTER XXIII

BEYOND THE SKYLINE

Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred yards from the camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling and flickering beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark that made the camping place determinable many miles away.

Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct brought him to a stand, saying, "You are safe."

He knew the country well, and the thirty miles that separated him from the eastern forest, where he could obtain food and shelter, were nothing to him. He could have run nearly the whole distance and reached there in a few hours' time.

But time was also nothing to him. He had fed well, and could last two days without food. It was not his intention to desert the camp yet; for at the camp, under that tree away to the west, lay a thing that he lusted after as men lust for drink or love: the desire of his dark soul—the elephant gun.

Before Adams drove him away from the camp he had made up his mind to steal it. Sneak off with it in the night and vanish with it into his own country away to the northeast, leaving B'selius and his broken camp to fend for themselves. This determination was still unshaken; the thing held him like a charm, and he sat down, squatting in the grass with his knees drawn up to his chin and his eyes fixed westward, waiting for evening.

An hour before sunset he made for the camp, reaching within a mile of it as the light left the sky. He watched the camp fire burning, and made for it. Toward midnight, crawling on his belly, soundless as a snake, he crept right up beside Adams, seized the gun and the cartridge bag, and with them in his hands stood erect.

He had no fear now. He knew he could outrun anyone there. He held the gun by the barrels. Adams's white face, as he lay with mouth open, snoring and deep in slumber, presented an irresistible mark for the heavy gun-butt, and all would have been over with that sleeper in this world, had not the attention of the savage been drawn to an object that suddenly appeared from beneath the folds of the improvised tent.

It was the hand of Berselius.

Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the clenched fist, like the emblem of power, struck the eye of the Zappo Zap, and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog.

B'selius was alive and able to clench his fist. That fact was enough for Felix, and next moment he was gone, and the moonlight cast his black shadow as he ran, making northeast, a darkness let loose on life and on the land.

Adams awoke at sun-up to find the gun and the cartridge bag gone. The porters knew nothing. He had picked up enough of their language to interrogate them, but they could only shake their heads, and he was debating in his own mind whether he ought to kick them on principle, when Berselius made his appearance from the tent.

His strength had come back to him. The dazed look of the day before had left his face, but the expression of the face was altered. The half smile which had been such a peculiar feature of his countenance was no longer there. The level eye that raised to no man and lowered before no man, the aspect of command and the ease of perfect control and power—where were they?

Adams, as he looked at his companion, felt a pang such as we feel when we see a human being suddenly and terribly mutilated.

Who has not known a friend who, from an accident in the hunting field, the shock of a railway collision, or some great grief, has suddenly changed; of whom people say, "Ah, yes, since the accident he has never been the same man"?

A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty, full of will power and brain, and who to-day is a different person with drooping under-lip, lack-lustre eye, and bearing in every movement the indecision which marks the inferior mind.

Berselius's under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner lack the ordinary decision of a healthy man; the change in him was slight, but it was startlingly evident. So high had Nature placed him above other men, that a crack in the pedestal was noticeable; as to the injury to the statue itself, the ladder of time would be required before that could be fully discovered.

So far from being downcast this morning, Berselius was mildly cheerful. He washed and had his wound dressed, and then sat down to a miserable breakfast of cold tinned meat and cassava cakes, with water fetched from the pool in a cracked calabash.

He said nothing about the mist in his head, and Adams carefully avoided touching on the question.

"Sleep has put him all right," said Adams to himself. "All the same, he's not the man he was. He's a dozen times more human and like other men. Wonder how long it will last. Just as long as he's feeling sick, I expect."

He rose to fetch his pipe when Berselius, who had finished eating and had also risen to his feet, beckoned him to come close.

"That is the road we came by?" said Berselius, pointing over the country toward the west.

"Yes," said Adams, "that is the road."

"Do you see the skyline?" said Berselius.

"Yes, I see the skyline."

"Well, my memory carries me to the skyline, but not beyond."

"Oh, Lord!" said Adams to himself, "here he is beginning it all over again!"

"I can remember," said Berselius, "everything that happened as far as my eye carries me. For instance, by that tree a mile away a porter fell down. He was very exhausted. And when we had passed that ridge near the skyline we saw two birds fighting; two bald-headed vultures——"

"That is so," said Adams.

"But beyond the skyline," said Berselius, suddenly becoming excited and clutching his companion's arm, "I see nothing. I know nothing. All is mist—all is mist."

"Yes, yes," said the surgeon. "It's only memory blindness. It will come back."

"Ah, but will it? If I can get to the skyline and see the country beyond, and if I remember that, and if I go on and on, the way we came, and if I remember as I go, then, then, I will be saved. But if I get to that skyline and if I find that the mist stops me from seeing beyond, then I pray you kill me, for the agony of this thing is not to be borne." Suddenly he ceased, and then, as if to some unseen person, he cried out—

"I have left my memory on that road."

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'Bassa, 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. Cassava 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 God 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 lust, 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-fashioned elephant guns, for he kept both barrels full cock, and it is almost three to two that if you fire one of these rifles with both barrels full cock, 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 grass 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 cock 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 grass, and the dead giraffe lay where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the grass 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 passed, 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!

* * * * *

But the sentence of the desert on the blind is death, trap vultures as cunningly as you will, and devour them as ferociously. The eye is everything in the battle of the strong against the weak. And so it came about that two days later a pair of leopards from the woods to the northeast fought with the figure, which fought with teeth and hands and feet, whilst the yellow-eyed kites looked on at a battle that would have turned with horror the heart of Flamininus.



CHAPTER XXV

TOWARD THE SUNSET

When Berselius, standing on the ridge, had looked long enough at the country before him, taking in its every detail with delight, they started again on their march, Berselius leading.

They had no guide. The only plan in Adams's head was to march straight west toward the sunset for a distance roughly equivalent to the forced march they had made in pursuit of the herd, and then to strike at right angles due north and try to strike the wood isthmus of the two great forests making up the forest of M'Bonga.

But the sunset is a wide mark and only appears at sunset. They had no compass; the elephant folk had made away with all the instruments of the expedition. They must inevitably stray from the true direction, striking into that infernal circle which imprisons all things blind and all things compassless. Even should they, by a miracle, strike the isthmus of woods, the forest would take them, confuse them, hand them from tree to tree and glade to glade, and lose them at last and for ever in one of the million pockets which a forest holds open for the lost.

The stout heart of the big man had not quailed before this prospect. He had a fighting chance; that was enough for him. But now at the re-start, as Berselius stepped forward and took the lead, a hope sprang up in his breast. A tremendous and joyful idea occurred to him. Was it possible that Berselius would guide them back?

The memory that the man possessed was so keen, his anxiety to pierce the veil before him was so overpowering, was it possible that like a hound hunting by sight instead of smell, he would lead them straight?

Only by following the exact track they had come by, could Berselius pierce back into that past he craved to see. Only by putting tree to tree and ridge to ridge, memory to memory, could he collect what he had lost.

Could he do this?

The life of the whole party depended upon the answer to that question.

The track they ought to follow was the track by which the herd had led them. Adams could not tell whether they were following that track—even Felix could scarcely have told—for the dew and the wind had made the faint traces of the elephants quite indiscernible now to civilized eyes; and Berselius never once looked at the ground under his feet, he was led entirely by the configuration of the land. That to the eyes of Adams was hopeless. For the great elephant country is all alike, and one ridge is the counterpart of another ridge, and one grassy plain of another grassy plain, and the scattered trees tell you nothing when you are lost, except that you are lost.

The heat of the day was now strong on the land; the porters sweated under their loads, and Adams, loaded like them, knew for once in his life what it was to be a slave and a beast of burden.

Berselius, who carried nothing, did not seem to feel the heat; weak though he must have been from his injury and the blood-letting. He marched on, ever on, apparently satisfied and well pleased as horizon lifted, giving place to new horizon, and plain of waving grass succeeded ridge of broken ground.

But Adams, as hour followed hour, felt the hope dying out in his breast, and the remorseless certainty stole upon him that they were out of their track. This land seemed somehow different from any he had seen before; he could have sworn that this country around them was not the country through which they had pursued the herd. His hope had been built on a false foundation. How could a man whose memory was almost entirely obscured lead them right? This was not the case of the blind leading the blind, but the case of the blind leading men with sight.

Berselius was deceiving himself. Hope was leading him, not memory.

And still Berselius led on, assured and triumphant, calling out, "See! do you remember that tree? We passed it at just this distance when we were coming." Or, now, "Look at that patch of blue grass. We halted for a minute here."

Adams, after a while, made no reply. The assurance and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible and sardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that insulted the soul.

The dead leading the living, the blind leading the man with sight, lunacy leading sanity to death.

Yet there was nothing to be done but follow. As well take Berselius's road as any other. Sunset would tell them whether they were facing the sunset; but he wished that Berselius would cease.

The situation was bad enough to bear without those triumphant calls.

It was past noon now; the light wind that had been blowing in their faces had died away; there was the faintest stirring of the air, and on this, suddenly, to Adams's nostrils came stealing a smell of corruption, such as he had never experienced before.

It grew stronger as they went.

There was a slight rise in the ground before them just here, and as they took it the stench became almost insupportable, and Adams was turning aside to spit when a cry from Berselius, who was a few yards in advance, brought him forward to his side.

The rise in the ground had hidden from them a dried-up river-bed, and there before them in the sandy trough, huge amidst the boulders, lay the body of an elephant.

A crowd of birds busy about the carcass rose clamouring in the air and flew away.

"Do you remember?" cried Berselius.

"Good God!" said Adams. "Do I remember!"

It was the body of the great beast they had passed when in pursuit of the herd.

Yes, there was no doubt now that Berselius was guiding them aright. He had followed the track they had come by without deviating a hundred yards.

The great animal was lying just as they had left it, but the work of the birds was evident; horribly so, and it was not a sight to linger over.

They descended into the river bed, passed up the other bank, and went on, Berselius leading and Adams walking by his side.

"Do you know," said Adams, "I was beginning to think you were out of the track."

Berselius smiled.

Adams, who was glancing at his face, thought that he had never seen an expression like that on the man's face before. The smile of the lips that had marked and marred his countenance through life, the smile that was half a sneer, was not there; this came about the eyes.

"He was in exactly the same position, too," said Adams. "But the birds will have him down before long. Well, he has served one purpose in his life; he has shown us we are on the right road, and he has given you back another bit of memory."

"Poor brute," said Berselius.

These words, coming from the once iron-hearted Berselius, struck Adams strangely; there was a trace of pity in their tone.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE FADING MIST

They camped two hours before sundown. One of the few mercies of this country is the number of dead trees and the bushes from which one can always scrape the materials for a fire.

Adams, with his hunting knife and a small hatchet which was all steel and so had been uninjured in the catastrophe, cut wood enough for the fire. They had nothing to cook with, but fortunately the food they had with them did not require cooking.

The tent was practicable, for the pole, so well had it been spliced, was as good as new. They set it up, and having eaten their supper, crept under it, leaving the porters to keep watch or not as they chose.

Berselius, who had marched so well all day, had broken down at the finish. He seemed half dead with weariness, and scarcely spoke a word, eating mechanically and falling to sleep immediately on lying down.

But he was happy. Happy as the man who suddenly finds that he can outwalk the paralysis threatening him, or the man who finds the fog of blindness lifting before him, showing him again bit by bit the world he had deemed forever lost. Whilst this man sleeps in the tent beside his companion and the waning moon breaks up over the horizon and mixes her light with the red flicker of the fire, a word about that past of which he was in search may not be out of place.

Berselius was of mixed nationality. His father of Swedish descent, his mother of French.

Armand Berselius the elder was what is termed a lucky man. In other words, he had that keenness of intellect which enables the possessor to seize opportunities and to foresee events.

This art of looking into the future is the key to Aladdin's Palace and to the Temple of Power. To know what will appreciate in value and what will depreciate, that is the art of success in life, and that was the art which made Armand Berselius a millionaire.

Berselius the younger grew up in an atmosphere of money. His mother died when he was quite young. He had neither brothers nor sisters; his father, a chilly-hearted sensualist, had a dislike to the boy; for some obscure reason, without any foundation in fact, he fancied that he was some other man's son.

The basis of an evil mind is distrust. Beware of the man who is always fearful of being swindled. Who cannot trust, cannot be trusted.

Berselius treated his son like a brute, and the boy, with great power for love in his heart, conceived a hatred for the man who misused him that was hellish in intensity.

But not a sign of it did he show. That power of will and restraint so remarkable in the grown-up man was not less remarkable in the boy. He bound his hate with iron bands and prisoned it, and he did this from pride. When his father thrashed him for the slightest offence, he showed not a sign of pain or passion; when the old man committed that last outrage one can commit against the mind of a child, and sneered at him before grown-up people, young Berselius neither flushed nor moved an eyelid. He handed the insult to the beast feeding at his heart, and it devoured it and grew.

The spring was poisoned at its source.

That education of the heart which only love can give was utterly cut off from the boy and supplanted by the education of hate.

And the mind tainted thus from the beginning was an extraordinary mind, a spacious intellect, great for evil or great for good, never little, and fed by an unfailing flood of energy.

The elder Berselius, as if bent on the utter damnation of his son, kept him well supplied with money. He did this from pride.

The young man took his graduate degree in vice, with higher marks from the devil than any other young man of his time. He passed through the college of St. Cyr and into the cavalry, leaving it at the death of his father and when he had obtained his captaincy.

He now found himself free, without a profession and with forty million francs to squander, or save, or do what he liked with.

He at once took his place as a man of affairs with one hand in politics and the other in finance. There are a dozen men like Berselius on the Continent of Europe. Politicians and financiers under the guise of Boulevardiers. Men of leisure apparently, but, in reality, men of intellect, who work their political and financial works quite unobtrusively and yet have a considerable hand in the making of events.

Berselius was one of these, varying the monotony of social life with periodic returns to the wilderness.

With the foundation of the Congo State by King Leopold, Berselius saw huge chances of profit. He knew the country, for he had hunted there. He knew the ivory, the copal, and the palm oil resources of the place, and in the rubber vines he guessed an untapped source of boundless wealth. He saw the great difficulty in the way of making this territory a paying concern; that is to say, he saw the labour question. Europeans would not do the work; the blacks would not, unless paid, and even then inefficiently.

To keep up a large force of European police to make the blacks work on European terms, was out of the question. The expense would run away with half the profits; the troops would die, and, worst of all, other nations would say, "What are you doing with that huge army of men?" The word "slavery" had to be eliminated from the proceedings, else the conscience of Europe would be touched. He foresaw this, and he was lost in admiration at the native police idea. The stroke of genius that collected all the Felixes of the Congo basin into an army of darkness, and collected all the weak and defenceless into a herd of slaves, was a stroke after his own heart.

Of the greatest murder syndicate the world has ever seen, Berselius became a member. He was not invited to the bloody banquet—he invited himself.

He had struck the Congo in a hunting expedition; he had seen and observed; later on, during a second expedition, he had seen the germination of Leopold's idea. He dropped his gun and came back to Europe.

He was quite big enough to have smashed the whole infernal machinery then and there. America had not yet, hoodwinked, signed the licence to kill, which she handed to Leopold on the 22d of April, 1884. Germany had not been roped in. England and France were still aloof, and Berselius, arriving at the psychological moment, did not mince matters.

The result was two million pounds to his credit during the next ten years.

So much for Berselius and his past.

An hour after dawn next day they started. The morning was windless, warm, and silent, and the sun shining broad on the land cast their shadows before them as they went, the porters with their loads piled on their heads, Adams carrying the tent-pole and tent, Berselius leading.

He had recovered from his weakness of the night before. He had almost recovered his strength, and he felt that newness of being which the convalescent feels—that feeling of new birth into the old world which pays one, almost, for the pains of the past sickness.

Never since his boyhood had Berselius felt that keen pleasure in the sun and the blue sky and the grass under his feet; but it called up no memories of boyhood, for the mist was still there, hiding boyhood and manhood and everything up to the skyline.

But the mist did not frighten him now. He had found a means of dispelling it; the photographic plates were all there unbroken, waiting only to be collected and put together, and he felt instinctively that after a time, when he had collected a certain number, the brain would gain strength, and all at once the mist would vanish for ever, and he would be himself again.

Three hours after the start they passed a broken-down tree.

Adams recognized it at once as the tree they had passed on the hunt, shortly after turning from their path to follow the herd of elephants.

Berselius was still leading them straight, and soon they would come to the crucial point—the spot where they had turned at right angles to follow the elephants.

Would Berselius remember and turn, or would he get confused and go on in a straight line?

The question was answered in another twenty minutes by Berselius himself.

He stopped dead and waved his arm with a sweeping motion to include all the country to the north.

"We came from there," he said, indicating the north. "We struck the elephant spoor just here, and turned due west."

"How on earth do you know?" asked Adams. "I can't see any indication, and for the life of me I couldn't tell where we turned or whether we came from there," indicating the north, "or there," pointing to the south. "How do you know?"

"How do I know?" replied Berselius. "Why, this place and everything we reach and pass is as vivid to me as if I had passed it only two minutes ago. It hits me with such vividness that it blinds me. It is that which I believe makes the mist. The things I can see are so extraordinarily vivid that they hide everything else. My brain seems new born—every memory that comes back to it comes back glorious in strength. If there were gods, they would see as I see."

A wind had arisen and it blew from the northwest. Berselius inhaled it triumphantly.

Adams stood watching him. This piece-by-piece return of memory, this rebuilding of the past foot by foot, mile by mile, and horizon by horizon, was certainly the strangest phenomenon of the brain that he had ever come across.

This thing occurs in civilized life, but then it is far less striking, for the past comes to a man from a hundred close points—a thousand familiar things in his house or surroundings call to him when he is brought back to them; but here in the great, lone elephant land, the only familiar thing was the track they had followed and the country around it. If Berselius had been taken off that track and placed a few miles away, he would have been as lost as Adams.

They wheeled to the north, following in their leader's footsteps.

That afternoon, late, they camped by the same pool near which Berselius had shot the rhinos.

Adams, to make sure, walked away to where the great bull had fought the cow before being laid low by the rifle of the hunter.

The bones were there, picked clean and bleached, exemplifying the eternal hunger of the desert, which is one of the most horrible facts in life. These two great brutes had been left nearly whole a few days ago; tons of flesh had vanished like snow in sunshine, mist in morning.

But Adams, as he gazed at the colossal bones, was not thinking of that; the marvel of their return filled his mind as he looked from the skeletons to where, against the evening blue, a thin wreath of smoke rose up from the camp fire which the porters had lighted.

Far away south, so far away as to be scarcely discernible, a bird was sailing along, sliding on the wind without a motion of the wings. It passed from sight and left the sky stainless, and the land lay around silent with the tremendous silence of evening, and lifeless as the bones bleaching at his feet.



CHAPTER XXVII

I AM THE FOREST

The day after the next, two hours before noon, they passed an object which Adams remembered well.

It was the big tree which Berselius had pointed out to him as having been tusked by an elephant; and an hour after they had started from the mid-day rest, the horizon to the north changed and grew dark.

It was the forest.

The sky immediately above the dark line, from contrast, was extraordinarily bright and pale, and, as they marched, the line lifted and the trees grew.

"Look!" said Berselius.

"I see," replied Adams.

A question was troubling his mind. Would Berselius be able to guide them amidst the trees? Here in the open he had a hundred tiny indications on either side of him, but amidst the trees how could he find his way? Was it possible that memory could lead him through that labyrinth once it grew dense?

It will be remembered that it was a two days' march from Fort M'Bassa through the isthmus of woods to the elephant country. At the edge of the forest the trees were very thinly set, but for the rest, and a day's march from the fort, it was jungle.

Would Berselius be able to penetrate that jungle? Time would tell. Berselius knew nothing about it; he only knew what lay before his sight.

Toward evening the trees came out to meet them, baobab and monkey-bread, set widely apart; and they camped by a pool and lit their fire, and slept as men sleep in the pure air of the woods and the desert.

Next morning they pursued their journey, Berselius still confident. At noon, however, he began to exhibit slight signs of agitation and anxiety. The trees were thickening around them; he still knew the way, but the view before him was getting shorter and shorter as the trees thickened; that is to say, the mist was coming closer and closer. He knew nothing of the dense jungle before them; he only knew that the clear road in front of him was shortening up rapidly and horribly, and that if it continued to do so it would inevitably vanish.

The joy that had filled his heart became transformed to the grief which the man condemned to blindness feels when he sees the bright world fading from his sight, slowly but surely as the expiring flame of a lamp.

He walked more rapidly, and the more rapidly he went the shorter did the road before him grow.

All at once the forest—which had been playing, up to this, with Berselius as a cat plays with a mouse—all at once the forest, like a great green Sphinx, put down its great green paw and spoke from its cavernous heart—

"I am the Forest."

They had passed almost at a step into the labyrinths. Plantain leaves hit them insolently in the face, lianas hung across their path like green ropes placed to bar them out, weeds tangled the foot.

Berselius, like an animal that finds itself trapped, plunged madly forward. Adams following closely behind heard him catching back his breath with a sob. They plunged on for a few yards, and then Berselius stood still.

The forest was very silent, and seemed listening. The evening light and the shade of the leaves cast gloom around them. Adams could hear his own heart thumping and the breathing of the porters behind him. If Berselius had lost his way, then they were lost indeed.

After a moment Berselius spoke, as a man speaks whose every hope in life is shattered.

"The path is gone."

Adams's only reply was a deep intake of the breath.

"There is nothing before me. I am lost."

"Shall we try back?" said Adams, speaking in that hard tone which comes when a man is commanding his voice.

"Back? Of what use? I cannot go back; I must go forward. But here there is nothing."

The unhappy man's voice was terrible to hear. He had marched so triumphantly all day, drawing nearer at each step to himself, to that self which memory had hidden from him and which memory was disclosing bit by bit. And now the march was interrupted as if by a wall set across his path.

But Adams was of a type of man to whom despondency may be known, but never despair.

They had marched all day; they were lost, it is true, but they were not far, now, from Fort M'Bassa. The immediate necessity was rest and food.

There was a little clearing amidst the trees just here, and with his own hands he raised the tent. They had no fire, but the moon when she rose, though in her last quarter, lit up the forest around them with a green glow-worm glimmer. One could see the lianas and the trees, the broad leaves shining with dew, some bright, some sketched in dimly, and all bathed in gauze green light; and they could hear the drip and patter of dew on leaf and branch.

This is a mournful sound—the most mournful of all the sounds that fill the great forests of the Congo. It is so casual, so tearful. One might fancy it the sound of the forest weeping to itself in the silence of the night.



CHAPTER XXVIII

GOD SENDS A GUIDE

To be lost in the desert or in a land like the elephant country is bad, but to be lost in the dense parts of the tropical forest is far worse.

You are in a horrible labyrinth, a maze, not of intricate paths but of blinding curtains. I am speaking now of that arrogant jungle, moist and hot, where life is in full ferment, and where the rubber vine grows and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside of a trunk, and day is so feeble that your hand, held before your face at arm's length, is just a shadow. The westward part of the forest of M'Bonga projects a spur of the pestiferous rubber-bearing land into the isthmus of healthy woods. It was just at the tip of this spur that Berselius and his party were entangled and lost.

The two porters were Yandjali men, they knew nothing of these woods, and were utterly useless as guides; they sat now amidst the leaves near the tent eating their food; dark shadows in the glow-worm light, the glistening black skin of a knee or shoulder showing up touched by the glimmer in which leaf and liana, tree trunk and branch, seemed like marine foliage bathed in the watery light of a sea-cave.

Adams had lit a pipe, and he sat beside Berselius at the opening of the tent, smoking. The glare of the match had shown him the face of Berselius for a moment. Berselius, since his first outcry on finding the path gone, had said little, and there was a patient and lost look on his face, sad but most curious to see. Most curious, for it said fully what a hundred little things had been hinting since their start from the scene of the catastrophe—that the old Berselius had vanished and a new Berselius had taken his place. Adams had at first put down the change in his companion to weakness, but the weakness had passed, the man's great vitality had reasserted itself, and the change was still there.

This was not the man who had engaged him in Paris; this person might have been a mild twin-brother of the redoubtable Captain of the Avenue Malakoff, of Matadi and Yandjali. When memory came fully back, would it bring with it the old Berselius, or would the new Berselius, mild, inoffensive, and kindly, suddenly find himself burdened with the tremendous past of the man he once had been?

Nothing is more true than that the human mind from accident, from grief, or from that mysterious excitement, during which in half an hour a blaspheming costermonger "gets religion" and becomes a saint of God—nothing is more certain than that the human mind can like this, at a flash, turn topsy-turvy; the good coming to the top, the bad going to the bottom. Mechanical pressure on the cortex of the brain can bring this state of things about, even as it can convert a saint of God into a devil incarnate.

Was Berselius under the influence of forced amendment of this sort?

Adams was not even considering the matter, he was lost in gloomy thoughts.

He was smoking slowly, holding his index and middle fingers over the pipe-bowl to prevent the tobacco burning too quickly, for he had only a couple of pipefuls left. He was thinking that to-morrow evening the pouch would be empty, when, from somewhere in the forest near by, there came a sound which brought him to his feet and the two porters up on hands and knees like listening dogs.

It was the sound of a human voice raised in a sort of chant, ghostly and mournful as the sound of the falling dew. As it came, rising and falling, monotonous and rhythmical, the very plain song of desolation, Adams felt his hair lift and his flesh crawl, till one of the porters, springing erect from his crouching position, sent his voice through the trees—

"Ahi ahee!"

The song ceased; and then, a moment later, faint and wavering, and like the voice of a seagull, came the reply—

"Ahi aheee!"

"Man," said the porter, turning white eyeballs and glinting teeth over his shoulder at Adams.

He called again, and again came the reply.

"Quick," said Adams, seizing the arm of Berselius, who had risen, "there's a native here somewhere about; he may guide us out of this infernal place; follow me, and for God's sake keep close."

Holding Berselius by the arm, and motioning the other native to follow, he seized the porter by the shoulder and pushed him forward. The man knew what was required and obeyed, advancing, calling, and listening by turns, till, at last, catching the true direction of the sound he went rapidly, Berselius and Adams following close behind. Sometimes they were half up to the knees in boggy patches, fighting their way through leaves that struck them like great wet hands; sometimes the call in the distance seemed farther away, and they held their pace, they held their breath, they clung to each other, listening, till, now, by some trick of the trees, though they had not moved and though there was no wind, the cry came nearer.

"Ahi, ahee!"

Then, at last, a dim red glow shone through the foliage before them and bursting their way through the leaves they broke into an open space where, alone, by a small fire of dry branches and brushwood, sat a native, stark naked, except for a scrap of dingy loincloth, and looking like a black gnome, a faun of this horrible place, and the very concretion of its desolation and death.

He was sitting when they caught their first glimpse of him, with his chin supported on his hand, but the instant he saw the faces of the white men he rose as if to escape, then the porter called out something that reassured him, and he sat down again and shivered.

He was one of the rubber collectors. He had reached this spot the day before, and had built himself a shelter of leaves and branches. He would be here for ten days or a fortnight, and his food, chiefly cassava, lay in a little pile in the shelter, covered over with leaves.

The porter continued speaking to the collector, who, now regaining the use of his limbs, stood up before the white men, hands folded in front of him, and his eyes rolling from Berselius to Adams.

"M'Bassa," said Adams, touching the porter, pointing to the collector, and then away into the forest in the direction he fancied Fort M'Bassa to be.

The porter understood. He said a few words to the collector, who nodded his head furiously and struck himself on the breast with his open hand.

Then the porter turned again to Adams.

"M'Bassa," said he, nodding his head, pointing to the collector, and then away into the forest.

That was all, but it meant that they were saved.

Adams gave a great whoop that echoed away through the trees, startling bats and birds in the branches and losing itself without an echo in the depths of the gloom. Then he struck himself a blow on the chest with his fist.

"My God!" said he, "the tent!"

They had only travelled an eighth of a mile or so from the camping place, but they had wandered this way and that before the porter had found the true direction of the call, and the tent, provisions, and everything else were lost as utterly and irrevocably as though they had been dropped in mid-ocean.

To step aside from a thing—even for a hundred yards—in this terrible place was to lose it; even the rubber collectors, from whom the forest holds few secrets have, in these thick places, to blaze a trail by breaking branches, tying lianas and marking tree trunks.

"True," said Berselius in a weary voice, "we have lost even that."

"No matter," said Adams, "we have got a guide. Cheer up, this man will take us to Fort M'Bassa and there you will find the road again."

"Are you sure?" said Berselius, a touch of hope in his voice.

"Sure? Certain. You've forgotten Fort M'Bassa. Well, when you see it, you will remember it, and it will lead you right away home. Cheer up, cheer up; we've got a fire and a bit of shelter for you to sleep under, and we'll start bright and early in the morning, and this black imp of Satan will lead you straight back to your road and your memory—hey! Uncle Joe!"

He patted the collector on the naked shoulder and a faint grin appeared on that individual's forlorn countenance; never had he come across a white man like this before. Then, bustling about, Adams piled up the fire with more sticks, got Berselius under the shelter of the collector's wretched hut, sat himself down close to the fire, produced his pipe, and proceeded, in one glorious debauch, to finish the last of his tobacco.

This rubber collector, the last and the humblest creature on earth, had given them fire and shelter; they were also to be beholden to him for food. His wretched cassava cakes and his calabash of water gave them their breakfast next morning, and then they started, the collector leading, walking before them through the dense growth of the trees as assuredly as a man following a well-known road. It was a terrible thing for him to leave his post, but the white men were from M'Bassa and wished to return to M'Bassa, and M'Bassa was the head centre of his work and the terrible Mecca of his fears. White men from there and going to there must be obeyed.

This was the last phase of the great hunt. Berselius had been slowly stripped by the wilderness of everything now but the clothes he stood up in, his companion and two porters. Guns, equipment, tents, stores, the Zappo Zap, and the army of men under that ferocious lieutenant, had all "gone dam." He was mud to the knees, his clothing was torn, he was mud to the elbows from having tripped last night and fallen in a quagmire, his face was white and drawn and grimy as the face of a London cabrunner, his hair was grayer and dull, but his eyes were bright and he was happy. At M'Bassa he would be put upon the road again—the only road to the thing he craved for as burning Dives craved for water—himself.

But it was ordained that he should find that questionably desirous person before reaching M'Bassa.

They had been on the march for an hour when Adams, fussing like a person who is making his first journey by rail, stopped the guide to make sure he was leading them right.

"M'Bassa?" said Adams.

"M'Bassa," replied the other, nodding his head. Then with outspread hand he pointed before them and made a semicircular sweep to indicate that he was leading them for some reason by a circuitous route.

He was making, in fact, for open ground that would bring them in the direction of the fort by a longer but much easier road than a direct line through the jungle. He was making also for water, for his scant supply had been exhausted by his guests, and he knew the road he was taking would lead him to broad pools of water. Adams nodded his head to imply that he understood, and the man led on.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE VISION OF THE POOLS

Somewhere about noon they halted for a rest and some food. It was less boggy here, and the sunlight showed stronger through the dense roof of foliage. The cassava cakes were tainted with must, and they had no water, but the increasing light made them forget everything but the freedom that was opening before them.

Adams pointed to the empty calabash which their guide carried, and the collector nodded and pointed before them, as if to imply that soon they would come to water and that all would be well.

Now, as they resumed their way, the trees altered and drew farther apart, the ground was solid under foot, and through the foliage of the euphorbia and raphia palm came stray glimmers of sunshine, bits of blue sky, birds, voices, and the whisper of a breeze.

"This is better," said Berselius.

Adams flung up his head and expanded his nostrils.

"Better, my God!" said he; "this is heaven!"

It was heaven, indeed, after that hell of gloom; that bog roofed in with leaves, the very smell of which clings to one for ever like the memory of a fever dream.

All at once patches of sunlight appeared in front as well as above. They quickened their pace, the trees drew apart, and, suddenly, with theatrical effect, a park-like sward of land lay before them leading to a sheet of blue water reflecting tall feather-palms and waving speargrass, all domed over with blue, and burning in the bright, bright sunshine.

"The Silent Pools!" cried Adams. "The very place where I saw the leopard chasing the antelope! Great Scott!—Hi! hi! hi! you there!—where are you going?"

The collector had raced down to the water's edge; he knew the dangers of the place, for he divided the grass, filled his calabash with water, and dashed back before anything could seize him. Then, without drinking, he came running with the calabash to the white men.

Adams handed the calabash first to his companion.

Berselius drank and then wiped his forehead; he seemed disturbed in his mind and had a dazed look.

He had never come so far along the edge of the pools as this, but there was something in the configuration of the place that stirred his sleeping memory.

"What is it?" asked Adams.

"I don't know," replied Berselius. "I have dreamt—I have seen—I remember something—somewhere—"

Adams laughed.

"I know," said he; "you come along, and in a few minutes you will see something that will help your memory. Why, man, we camped near here, you and I and Meeus; when you see the spot you'll find yourself on your road again. Come, let's make a start."

The collector was standing with the half-full calabash in his hands.

He had not dared to drink. Adams nodded to him, motioning him to do so, but he handed it first to the porter. Then, when the porter had drunk, the collector finished the remains of the water and the last few drops he flung on the ground, an offering, perhaps, to some god or devil of his own. Then he led on, skirting the water's edge. The loveliness of the place had not lessened since Adams had seen it last; even the breeze that was blowing to-day did not disturb the spirit of sweet and profound peace which held in a charm this lost garden of the wilderness; the palms bent as if in sleep, the water dimpled to the breeze and seemed to smile, a flamingo, with rose-coloured wings, passed and flew before them and vanished beyond the rocking tops of the trees that still sheltered the camping place where once Berselius had raised his tent.

Again, with theatrical effect, as the pools had burst upon them on leaving the forest, the camping place unveiled itself.

"Now," said Adams in triumph, "do you remember that?"

Berselius did not reply. He was walking along with his eyes fixed straight before him. He did not stop, or hesitate, or make any exclamation to indicate whether he remembered or not.

"Do you remember?" cried Adams.

But Berselius did not speak. He was making noises as if strangling, and suddenly his hands flew up to the neck of his hunting shirt, and tore at it till he tore it open.

"Steady, man, steady," cried Adams catching the other's arm. "Hi, you'll be in a fit if you don't mind—steady, I say."

But Berselius heard nothing, knew nothing but the scene before him, and Adams, who was running now after the afflicted man, who had broken away and was making straight for the trees beneath which the village had once been, heard and knew nothing of what lay before and around Berselius.

Berselius had stepped out of the forest an innocent man, and behold! memory had suddenly fronted him with a hell in which he was the chief demon.

He had no time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a blow in the face.

Under that m'bina tree two soldiers, one with the haft of a blood-stained knife between his teeth, had mutilated horribly a living girl. Little Papeete had been decapitated just where his skull lay now; the shrieks and wails of the tortured tore the sky above Berselius; but Adams heard nothing and saw nothing but Berselius raving amidst the remains.

Bones lay here and bones lay there, clean picked by the vultures and white bleached by the sun; skulls, jawbones, femurs, broken or whole. The remains of the miserable huts faced the strewn and miserable bones, and the trees blew their golden trumpets over all.

As Adams looked from the man who with shrill cries was running about as a frantic woman runs about, to the bones on the ground, he guessed the tragedy of Berselius. But he was to hear it in words spoken with the torrid eloquence of madness.



PART FOUR

CHAPTER XXX

THE AVENGER

It was a hot night up at the fort, a night eloquent of the coming rains. The door of the guest house stood open and the light of the paraffin lamp lay upon the veranda and the ground of the yard, forming a parallelogram of topaz across which were flitting continually great moth shadows big as birds.

Andreas Meeus was seated at the white-wood table of the sitting room before a big blue sheet of paper. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing just at present; he was reading what he had written.

He was, in fact, making up his three-monthly report for headquarters, and he found it difficult, because the last three months had brought in little rubber and less ivory. A lot of things had conspired to make trade bad. Sickness had swept two villages entirely away; one village, as we know, had revolted; then, vines had died from some mysterious disease in two of the very best patches of the forest. All these explanations Meeus was now putting on paper for the edification of the Congo Government. He was devoting a special paragraph to the revolt of the village by the Silent Pools, and the punishment he had dealt out to the natives. Not a word was said of torture and slaughtering. "Drastic Measures" was the term he used, a term perfectly well understood by the people to whom he was writing.