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

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 FÉlix, 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 FÉlix, 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 FÉlix 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 FÉlix and the two porters to follow him, he started off, searching amidst the dÉbris 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 FÉlix, 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 FÉlix.

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 FÉlix, 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 FÉlix 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 FÉlix, and a pity for Berselius.