CHAPTER XLVIII

In the early morning, while the trees round the house were still full of mist, Lilla, in her sitting room, at the tall Venetian desk of green and gold lacquer, redrafted for the twentieth time the message that she wanted to send after Lawrence Teck by wireless. The rich scintillations from the polished surfaces before her enveloped her distracted countenance in a new, greenish pallor, as she traced, now heavily, now very faintly, the words:

"If you knew what you've done——"

She paused; for the confusion of her brain made her think of a squirrel frantically racing in a revolving cage. Then, seeing nothing except the pen point, she wrote slowly, "What have you done? What have you done?" And suddenly, in a convulsive hand that sprawled over half the page, "Betrayed!" She stared at these words in amazement.

Hamoud-bin-Said entered the sitting room. He had on the dark blue joho edged with a red pattern. His snowy under robe was bound with a blue and red sash from which protruded the silver hilt of his dagger. His tan-colored, clear-cut, delicately bearded face was expressionless, as he said softly:

"The morning paper."

And she realized that the whole story had been discovered, scattered broadcast.

For a time Hamoud regarded the prostration of her spirit from the heights of fatalism. But presently, as he contemplated that limp pose, which added one more novelty to her innumerable beautiful appearances, the stoicism that had made him look mature gave way to the fervor of youth—his limpid eyes turned to fire; his full, precisely chiseled lips were distorted by a pang. He appeared as before, however, when she raised her head and uttered:

"Burn it."

His reverie had a flavor of commiseration now, as though he were saying to himself, "Who can catch all the leaves before they fall to the ground? Who can sweep back the waves of the sea?" He responded:

"The men who make these things have been telephoning half the night. And now they are here themselves."

"Here!"

"They are sitting on the steps," he affirmed, lost in a gloomy, relishing consideration of the wonders of life. "They wish to talk to you and to Mr. Verne."

He pronounced these words as if he had no idea of their enormity.

Her spirit stirred at this threat. All seemed lost except the phenomenon of David living, by which, in her distraction, she hoped somehow to justify herself. To the amazement of the world one might oppose the fact of genius miraculously unfolding through her sacrifice. But she thought, "The world! What is that?" And thereupon, "All the same it shall not strike down this helpless creature." And the world became a monster, unfeeling, indeed immeasurably malign, lying far off with the teeming cells of its brain all plotting to rob her of her wretched victory, and with the claws of one outstretched paw already touching the threshold of this house.

"You are to drive them away."

She went on groping for phrases as one gropes for objects in the dark, telling Hamoud that henceforth nobody from outside the house was to see David till she had been informed, that all newspapers and letters must come first to her, that the servants must not show by so much as a look—— She became aware that among these phrases she was uttering, with an air of calm consideration, others that had no intelligible meaning, no relation to her objective thoughts. She heard herself say, "Perhaps I had better see the servants myself. It would be a queer thing if there were a draft from the pantry. There is a red pillow in the fernery; it must be hidden—the spears, too——" She gazed in perplexity at Hamoud, who appeared to be floating before her at the end of a dark tunnel.

"For how long?" he sighed.

"For how long?" she repeated plaintively.

He seemed to grow taller. His face, which had taken on a blank aspect, resembled the faces of those who, in Oriental tales, stand waiting to fulfil a wish too sinister to have become an audible command. In that instant she saw all problems rushing to their solution, except one; all treasures recaptured, except the peace of conscience. She struggled as one might to awake from some hypnotic spell in which one has been assailed with frightful suggestions. She sprang up and transfixed him with a look.

"Go! Do as I say!"

He bowed and departed.

At once she became so weary that she could hardly reach her couch.

"What am I to do?" she asked herself in a lost voice.

Somewhere, no doubt, there was another Lilla, sane, able to act as well as to think, capable of solving even this dilemma. But that other Lilla remained far away, perhaps in the realm of those who, with an Alexandrian gesture, ruthlessly cut the knot of interwoven scruples, and for a brief season triumphed over the accidents of life! Raising her eyes in despair, she saw trembling on the ceiling a ray of light that resembled the blade of a spear.

There descended upon her the full weight of her forebodings—the superstitious dread that was typical of her emotional defectiveness, and that had its origin, perhaps, in those two unhappy persons who had been her parents. Yet when she moaned, "Ah, Anna Zanidov!" it was with an accent of reproach as keen as though the prophetess of a tragedy must be the cause of it.

The sunshine was dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain."

She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague smile:

"I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom downstairs."

CHAPTER XLIX

Lilla descended the staircase in the transplendency of the many colored windowpanes. The red of rubies, the blue of sapphires, the green of emeralds, enwrapped her slim body that was still phenomenally moving in its habitual harmoniousness. The serene progress of her person through prismatic light, the smile that passed unchanged through rays of varying resplendence, added another stanza to the poetry of flesh, a stanza differing from all the rest, however, in its ominous quality of strangeness. For now, bathed in the fortuitous magnificence of the stained glass, she shone in herself with an unearthly bloom, as if an abnormality that had always permeated her seductiveness were now at its apogee—as if, with no one to witness, she had reached the utter expression of her loveliness, which blazed forth for an instant completely, before dissolving in this strange element that mingled with it.

The multicolored lights released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the wheel chair—the phantom because of which that other phantom was traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her footsteps. He remained with his head bowed forward, a prey, no doubt, to such anxiety as ghosts experience. He expressed perfectly that helplessness with which, when she had believed him to be real, he had laid hold of her pity.

The outlines of all objects round her were clear and hard: everything had assumed a look of preternatural density. She stood paralyzed by the thought, "It is not illusion. It is reality."

He was looking at her.

What did he read in her face? Had he, too, heard the command that seemed to have been shouted in her ears, "Tell him! Strike and be free!"

"What is it?" he whispered.

Her lips parted, writhed, and uttered no sound. She was struck dumb, no doubt by the feeling that if she spoke she would blurt out everything, in obedience to that atrocious command.

All at once she seemed to have flames in her eyes. Everything had turned the color of gold. She stood with her head thrown back, her face changed by anguish; then she fled through that golden dazzle. On the staircase the many-colored rays reached out to hold her, to restore her to that exquisite transfiguration; she passed through them in a flash; and indeed they could now have enhanced, instead of beauty, only the triumph of that element which had made her beauty strange. She stretched herself upon her couch, on her back, in the attitude of the dead. She pronounced with an extreme rapidity, in muffled tones:

"I am on the ship——Faster! Faster!"

She uttered a cry that was heard all over the house.

When Hamoud and the servants came running, they found her rigid; but while they were telephoning for the nearest physician the convulsions began. Tossing about, she showed intense fear of all who tried to approach her. The women ran from the room. Hamoud remained, rigid at the foot of the bed, his face a dingy white, staring before him as one who meditates on some immense, intolerable injury. When her cries burst forth, he laid his hand upon his dagger, as if against these invisible forces, these jinn from the Pit, that had taken possession of her.

The physician arrived to find the convulsions ended. Hamoud, now gripping his dagger as if he would presently escape this scene by plunging the blade into his breast, uttered:

"Dying?"

"It will pass," the physician answered, with a movement of reproof.

Hamoud, afflicted by disbelief, by a despair that swept away his fatalism, by a fury that called for revenge, bared his teeth and demanded:

"I shall bring him? We show her to him?"

"Who?"

Hamoud glanced malignantly toward the floor.

"Hardly!"

The physician resumed his contemplation of the patient, who had descended into a stupor that was to last for days.

CHAPTER L

There was a hush over the house amid the old trees. The servants moved softly through the corridors, paused to whisper to one another, then hurried out of sight as David Verne appeared in his wheel chair, slowly propelled toward the sick room by Hamoud.

She seemed hardly to breathe as she lay in the gloom through which drifted the white uniforms of the nurses, amid a dim glamour from all the charming objects that had been meant to please her senses. Her hair was spread out on the pillow to frame her colorless face, which had now attained indeed the look of the "angelic messenger." But the angelic messenger, the bearer of life to him, seemed to David on the point of returning to the source of life.

He sat at the bedside, sometimes unable to extend his hand to touch her hand, as though his strength were wholly a reflection of her strength, so that with the latter's waning the former must flicker out.

"What is it?" he thought, lost in misery and wonder.

The physicians and the nurse looked at him askance, their secret pent in behind their lips.

He felt round him the pressure of this secret. The air was full of thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these shadows which he felt might be less agonizing than that flash of light.

There was no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria, emotional collapse.

Ah, yes; but from what cause?

Even Hamoud, he was sure, knew something that he did not know. The Arab, while apparently as solicitous as ever, was changed. He had taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of vengeance—with something sensual in its look of cruelty.

Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the deepest mass of shadows. One could make out only the pale blotch that was his white skullcap, and the long pale streak that was the uncovered portion of his white under robe. The eyes, the expression of the face, were lost in blackness.

"I thought you called."

And he was gone.

In his own room, having noiselessly closed and locked the door, he drew from his bosom the Koran. Holding the book reverently in his small, right hand, he raised his head, and stood waiting with closed eyes for inspiration. Presently, opening the Koran, he read:

"The doom of God cometh to pass."

This text was the answer to his prayer for guidance?

He seated himself by the window, and gazed out into the darkness. He considered piously the wonders of terrestrial life, a succession of accidents all foreordained by God, an apparent drifting that was in fact one steady propulsion by the hand of fate. From the rich, ancestral house of coraline limestone across the sea to strange lands. From dignity to abasement. From loneliness to this faint, delicious fragrance in which the heart dissolved. From a dream of freedom to the service of love through the agency of death.

CHAPTER LI

It was twilight. David Verne sat in the study, his chin on his breast. Hamoud, appearing in the doorway, gazed round the room. He had a folded newspaper in his hand.

He looked carefully at the fireplace, where logs were piled ready for lighting over a heap of brushwood and crumpled wrapping paper. Then he regarded the center table, on which stood the Venetian goblet, the caraffe, and the bottle filled with the medicine prescribed by Dr. Fallows. In the expiring daylight Hamoud, motionless in his robes, loomed paler than usual, his handsome face very grave.

The piano attracted his attention. In the shadows it had the aspect of a squatting monster that bared at him the teeth of its wide mouth. As if he had been awaiting this grotesque effect of challenge, he moved toward the hazy windows, and began to curtain them.

David murmured listlessly:

"Has the doctor gone?"

Hamoud gave a slight start. With his hand on the last window curtain, he inclined his head, listening in awe to the tremor of that voice. When he had passed his tongue over his lips he responded:

"Yes."

He drew the last curtain slowly. As he did so, his visage, sharpened by the dying light, was turned toward David; his gemlike lips, without parting, seemed to say, "Look! it is the world of sky and trees, of sunrise and noon, sunset and night, that I am shutting out."

The study lay in darkness.

Through this darkness Hamoud moved silently toward the center table. He tweaked the lamp cord: a gush of mellow rays leaped out to cover the scattered piles of manuscript, the Venetian goblet, the bottle of medicine. Hamoud moved the wheel chair closer to these objects, so that David by reaching forth his hand might touch them if he wished. Then, after stepping back to consider this arrangement with a strained look, he went to the fireplace, lighted a match, blew it out, and laid it on the hearth. David stared at him.

"You have not lighted the fire. It is cold tonight."

Again Hamoud listened in awe to the sound of that voice.

"It is cold," he assented softly, with a shiver.

Still kneeling on the hearth, he contemplated the other as though he were seeing him now for the first time. The feeble, romantic face before him was not so pallid as his face; those enlarged, questioning eyes were not so strange as his eyes. At that stare of undefined alarm he felt, despite all his jealousy, contempt, and hatred, a twinge of weakness; he remembered all the other's helpless attitudes that he had sustained and eased. Of a sudden the habit of protection grappled with his resolve, and might have conquered, for a time at any rate, had he not recalled the sufferings of the beloved.

He rose and approached the wheel chair. The newspaper was in his left hand, half concealed, like a weapon, in the folds of his robe.

He heard a feeble cry:

"What has happened? What has happened?"

"And I who have eaten his bread," thought Hamoud, in sudden shame and horror.

If only some one would come! But the shadowy perspective of the living room remained empty; and there was nowhere any sound except the beating of his heart.

He lifted the bottle containing the solution of arsenic.

"Have not taken any of this?" He pronounced in a tone of suffocation. "Remember must never take it until Hamoud has dropped it."

He set down the bottle. It fell upon its side. But alas! it did not break.

"Hamoud! what has happened?"

In mercy, with a violent gesture, with a sensation of sickness, he thrust the newspaper into David's hands. "Done! No chance to turn back now!" He rolled the folding doors together behind him and leaned against them, his face beaded with sweat, panting as if in escaping that room he had run a mile. He listened. How his heart thumped! He heard nothing. "Has he the courage, though? Alone with those thoughts!" Leaning against the door, through which came never a sound, Hamoud began to weep, for the man whom he had served, for her, and for himself.

Yes, the OmÂn stock, cruel and remorseless in its pristine state, had deteriorated in the lax paradise of Zanzibar; the old impulses were there, but in abortive form; and the deed that Hamoud's forefathers would have done less indirectly, and without a twinge, aroused in Hamoud that pity which an ironist has called "the mask of weakness."

Next morning, when they asked him to state his whole knowledge of the matter, he told them that as he had been about to light the fire Mr. Verne had seen, amid the brushwood, a bit of newspaper showing his name in large type. It was there, no doubt, in consequence of the servants' carelessness.

"But you gave it to him," the local chief of police remarked severely.

"Before I knew."

Their indignation was softened by his crushed mien, and by his inflamed eyes. Having arrived at their verdict, they discussed Arabs—or, as they called them, "Ayrabs"—and one honest old fellow even paid the race a compliment, in saying:

"It's said that when they like a person they will do anything for them."

It was Hamoud who told her.

The nurse, stealing a nap on the couch in the sitting room, did not stir as he passed into the bedchamber; but Lilla awoke at the command of his eyes. When he had finished speaking:

"No!" she sighed, as the world burst into fragments, and, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope, slid swiftly into a new pattern. "Ah, the poor soul! The poor soul!" She saw him more clearly, she understood him better, than in life. "All for nothing!"

No, surely not all for nothing!

At any rate, these were tears of convalescence.

CHAPTER LII

A fortnight later, as she sat in a deep chair in the living room, Hamoud presented himself in the doorway, to announce:

"He is here."

Parr crept into her presence.

The little, grizzled fellow advanced a few steps, limping on his cane, then halted, frightened by this thin, white-faced woman who, her chin in her cupped hand, sat staring at him with the cold eyes of a queen about to condemn a malefactor to death. She was wrapped in a negligÉe of peach-colored silk from the flowing sleeves of which long tassels trailed on the rug. The morning light, as though lured from all other objects in the room by this motionless, fine figure, accentuated her appearance of iciness. She spoke, too, in the voice of a stranger, in accents that thrilled with a force produced incongruously from so emaciated a body.

"Come closer. I want to look at you."

He resumed his tremulous advance very slowly, because he was so heavily burdened by his loyalty to the beloved master and his treason to this once gentle benefactress. Casting down his eyes, he stood before her abjectly leaning on his cane. His honest, deeply lined face twitched painfully; for he could feel her scorn passing over him like a winter blast. He faltered:

"I was helpless, ma'am. I only did as he ordered. He thought it best. He believed it wouldn't leak out. We took all precautions." He told her how Lawrence Teck had taken him from the Greenwich Village house to an obscure hotel, where they had found a strange gentleman, slender, with a fatigued, nervous face, almost too fastidiously dressed to be another traveler, smoking constantly, saying nothing. This gentleman's name—it was altogether a disjointed, feverish business anyway—had never been pronounced in Parr's hearing. The stranger had seemed at once a torment and a comfort to Mr. Teck. Occasionally, when Parr entered, it was as if he had interrupted a distressing scene. Mr. Teck had then jumped up with a queer smile, knocking against the chairs as he went to look out of the window. There the strange gentleman would join him, to put his hand on his shoulder, soothe him in a low voice. Then one morning Mr. Teck's rooms were empty; and the hotel clerk handed Parr an envelope containing some banknotes and the scrawl, "Good-by. God bless you. Remember, keep quiet."

"Here it is, ma'am."

She snatched the note from him, pored over it fiercely, and thrust it into the bosom of her gown. Her lashes wearily veiled her implacable stare.

"You fool. You should have seen that he wasn't in his senses. Where is he now?"

"He should be there," Parr quavered. "By this time he might be inland."

She saw a stream of men flowing in through the jungle, a human river doomed to roll at last over some tragic brink. She clenched her hands, seemed about to rise and rush out, as she was, in pursuit. She said:

"You are going with me."

His jaw sagged. Gaping round him, taking the whole room as witness to this folly, he cried out, "Where to?" When she began to speak he sagged forward over his cane, drinking in the verification of her incredible desire. Her attitude did not change; her face remained cold; her lips hardly moved; but he was aware of a tremendous force behind the words, of something inflexible, invincible, grand—perhaps of a flame without heat that filled her empty heart with an unearthly coruscation, like a radiance thrown back from the walls of a cavern of ice.

"Do you want to die, ma'am?"

"I?" Her voice expressed in that syllable such arrogance as youth feels at the thought of death; yet she did not look young—she looked as old as eternity, and as passionless and overpowering.

He bowed his head beneath the pressure of this will, and the weight of his obligation. He perceived the uselessness of describing to her the dangers that she would run there, especially at the season that was beginning. Still, for a moment he pondered the trouble he would have in taking his broken body on that pilgrimage. "And this time it will get me: just one or two little chills," he reflected, thinking of black-water fever. The thought came to him, however, that his life was no longer worth much, even to himself. This sitting with folded hands, a cane between one's knees, in the tidy little house that she had given him—and but for her it might have been the crutches!

Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded stars.

CHAPTER LIII

She crossed the Atlantic, traveled swiftly down from Cherbourg to Marseilles, embarked on a ship that steamed through the Mediterranean toward the Orient. At last she saw Port Said, Suez, and the red and purple lava islands of the Red Sea, splendid in a sunset of extravagant hues.

The heat was intense.

But the ship emerged from the Gulf of Aden into a still greater heat; and suddenly the air was saturated with moisture. The walls and the ceiling of her cabin were covered with drops of water; exposed objects were defaced by rust and mildew overnight; while the human body seemed to be deliquescing in a torrid steam. A sickly breeze, filled with the odors of a strange world, hardly rippled the languid sea.

On the right, beyond a heat mist through which flying fish were darting, loomed a new coastline. Yellow beaches appeared, interrupted by lagoons where the slow waves abruptly spouted high into the air—white geysers against somber forests and jungles. From these dark green fastnesses, ascending threads of smoke inveigled the gaze far upward into space, to where, above a belt of hazy blue that one had taken for the sky, mountain peaks revealed themselves, unrelated to the earth, and half dissolved, like a mirage.

Night fell. The velvety blackness of the heavens was powdered with star dust; in the wash of the ship there gleamed a profound phosphorescence, as from a decaying ocean. The coast hung like a mass of inky vapor above the fitful shimmer of the surf from which was wafted a faint, interminable booming that suggested the roaring of lions and the thunder of savage drums.

Lilla emerged from her cabin, crossed the deck, and laid her hands upon the softly quivering rail. Close beside her the darkness gave up a ghost—Hamoud, who also stood silent, gazing toward the coast. His robes exhaled an odor of musk and aloes.

"Africa, madam," he uttered at last in a voice that lost itself in the clinging darkness and the smothering heat.

And soon a languid ecstasy stole over him.

His heart swelled as he drank in, at the same time, the exhalations of his native land and the faint fragrance of her hair. In the darkness he perceived with his mind's eye both her beauty and the well-remembered beauty of the spice isles. The palm-crowned hills encircled the lapis-lazuli harbor of Zanzibar, on whose waters he saw himself sailing, with this mortal treasure, in a handsome dhow, the tasseled prow shaped like the head of the she-camel sent from heaven to the Thamud tribesmen, the mast fluttering the pennants of ancient sultans. Then the dhow with the camel prow became a panoplied camel, on which he and she were being borne away to OmÂn, the land of his fathers, which he had never seen. There, in those rugged mountains, he would become, as his ancestors had been—vigorous of will, fierce and great, triumphant in war and love.

For a long while he stood there trembling gently in unison with the ship, thought linking itself to thought, and image to image, his fancies growing ever more bizarre yet ever more distinct, as though he were inhaling, instead of the faint perfume of her hair, the smoke of hasheesh.

But she had forgotten him.

CHAPTER LIV

In the thick sunshine, below the cloudlike mountains, sandbanks unrolled themselves between the mouths of the equatorial rivers flanked by mangrove forests. At last, in the depths of a bay of glittering, brownish water, the port town appeared, a mass of red-tiled roofs spread along the gray seawall that suggested a fortress.

Through sandy thoroughfares bordered with acacia trees rode hollow-eyed Europeans in little cars, which half-naked negroes pushed along a narrow-gauge railway. The languor of those recumbent figures was abruptly disturbed, at the apparition of a woman clad in snowy linen, who advanced between a tall, young Zanzibar Arab and a small, limping white man, with the step of a convalescent, but with eyes that were filled with an extraordinary resolution. That evening, at the club house, one brought word to the rest that she was Lawrence Teck's wife.

There was a chorus of profane surprise in half a dozen tongues; for this was the end of March, the climax of the rainy summer, when the land was full of rotting vegetation and mephitic vapors, of mosquitoes and tsetse flies, malaria and fever.

"Is he coming out, then?" said one. "Where is he this time, by the way?" "All the same," another remarked, "I'll wager that he isn't aware of this. Looks as if she were planning a reconciliation by surprise!"

"She seems ill already. She'll last in this place about as long as an orchid in a saucepan."

"But, my friend, she wants to go in after him, it appears. She's with the governor now."

At that moment, indeed, the governor was patiently repeating his remonstrances to Lilla.

They sat in a large, white room with shuttered windows, beneath a punkah that kept churning up the dead air, beside a carved table on which stood a tray of untouched coffee cups. The governor was a studious, sick-looking gentleman with a pince-nez over his jaundiced eyes, and with long mustaches frizzed out before his ears. He wore a white duck uniform adorned with gilt shoulder straps, an aiguillette, and a bar of service ribbons brilliantly plaided and striped. Anaemic from malaria, and harassed by fever, he showed while he was talking to Lilla a look of exhaustion and pain. Now and again, after puffing his cigarette, he gave a feeble cough and rolled up his eyes. Then, in a monotonous, dull tone he began again to express his various objections.

Mr. Teck had gone in from a northern port a month ago. He had passed by Fort Pero d'Anhaya, telling the commandant there that he was bound back for the region in which his principals might presently seek a concession. He was, no doubt, at present in the gorges beyond the forests of the Mambava. He had with him a strong safari and a gentleman friend.

"What friend?" asked Lilla, who had been listlessly waiting for this monologue to cease.

"I don't remember. But I can, of course, find out."

"It's not worth while. All that I want is——"

The governor raised his hand, which trembled visibly.

"Pray let me finish, madam. Mr. Teck is in a very dangerous place. We have never conquered the Mambava; they are a ferocious people, and the man who enters their country does so at his own risk. Had it not been that Mr. Teck's venture, because of his peculiar relationship to King Muene-Motapa, might end in winning over the Mambava to peaceful labor and trade, we should never have given permission. As for you, madam, such a journey is not to be thought of. I say nothing about the climate at this season. But, if you will pardon me, as I look at you the idea of your traveling inland on safari at any time of year—in fact, I ask myself——" He stared round him at the mildewed, white walls, and explained, "I ask myself, indeed, if you are real."

For even in her white terai and belted suit of white linen she was a vision appropriate only to the far-off world that this man had left behind him at the call of duty—a world of delicate living and subtle sensations, of frail flesh in luxurious settings, of sophistication that would have shrunk from every crudity, and exquisiteness that would have shriveled at the touch of hardship. This studious-looking, fever-stricken soldier, a nobleman under a bygone regime and in his youth a great amateur of love, had known well many women of whom this suppliant was the virtual counterpart, fragile, complex, too sensitive, too ardent, the predestined prey of impulses and disabilities that none but themselves, their adorers, and specialists in neurasthenia, could conceive of. In the present woman he discerned the same lovely and neurotic countenance, the same traces of mingled fastidiousness and desperation, the same promises of exceptionally passionate and tragic happenings.

"Ah, yes," he reflected, coughing feebly, so as not to make his head ache, "ah, yes, she is fatal. Twenty years ago I would have killed men for her with pleasure," he told himself, watching her pale, golden face. "Fatal! fatal!"—but he did not ask himself what fatality had brought her here. He knew her story, as by this time every one knew it who had ever heard of Lawrence Teck, or David Verne, or her.

"So it is this one that she really loves?" he thought, contemplating rather dismally her bitten lips, her lowered eyelashes, the throb of her throat, the working of her slim fingers. "I know: now she must find him quickly, quickly, quickly. She cannot sleep; she cannot eat; but she can drink, because she is always burning; and she can think, yes—but one thought, only. Ah, the lucky man!" he sighed, while beginning to shiver from his evening chill.

As though she had read his mind, or at least had discerned his capacity for understanding her, she leaned forward, laid her hand on his sleeve, and murmured:

"You have told me why I must not go. Now give me permission."

"Do you then wish to risk death just at this time? I should have thought——" He shook his head. "No, I will telegraph to Fort Pero d'Anhaya; the commandant there will send messengers to the border of the Mambava country; the Mambava will telephone your message through their forests by drum beat, and in one night every village will have the news. They will find him and tell him, and he will come here to you."

"Too much time has passed already. Even now I may be too late. Besides, he must not come to me; it's I who must go to him." She blurted out in a soft voice, "On my knees, all the way——" She recovered herself; but two tears suddenly rolled down her cheeks, and she faltered, "Look here, you know, if you prevent me you'll be doing a terrible thing."

He got up to pace the floor. He was of short stature, and his shoulders were rounded by desk work and the debility from the tropics; yet in the lost paradise of youth fair women had shed tears before him and made him wax in their hands. He came back to the table, absentmindedly drank a cup of tepid coffee, and said indignantly:

"Nevertheless, you look far from well at this moment."

"I have never been so strong," she retorted.

"She dares everything, and no doubt all the while she fears terribly what she dares. She is sublime! Who am I, a lump of sick flesh in this fever trap, to interfere so strictly with this thing of white flame?"

He said to her:

"Listen. I will give you permission to travel on safari as far as Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Beyond that point I cannot promise you protection; so beyond you are not to go. Mr. Teck must come to you there. To-morrow I will see these people of yours, to make sure that they are competent men, able to take all possible precautions for your welfare. Now, then, tell me at least that I am not as cruel and as stupid as you thought."

When she had gone, a young man in a white uniform entered with a sheaf of papers. The governor smothered a groan.

"The summary of the hut tax, Excellency. The post-office reports for last month. The reports of new public works—by the way, the new bridge at Maquival has been finished."

"Ah," said the governor profoundly, staring into space, "the new bridge of Maquival has been finished!"

CHAPTER LV

The equatorial wilds spread before the safari its wealth of extravagant hues and forms, all its perfidies veiled for the allurement of mortals who would trust nature in her richest manifestations. The sun shone on a rain-drenched world; the earth steamed; and through a mist like that which prefaced the second Biblical version of creation the splendor of the jungle seemed to be taking shape for the first time, at the command of a power for whom beauty was synonymous with peril.

Nevertheless, the safari men were singing.

Askaris led the way, Somalis in claret-colored fezzes and khaki uniforms, bare legged, with bandoliers across their chests and rifles over their shoulders. Their small, dark faces were sharp and fierce; they marched with the swing of desert men; their glances expressed their pride, their contempt for the humble, melodious horde that followed after them.

Four negroes, naked to the waist, supported a machilla, a canopied hammock of white duck that swung from a bamboo pole. They were Wasena, specially trained for this fatiguing work, maintaining a smooth step over the roughest ground. Lilla reclined in the hammock. Her face, half concealed by the fringe of the awning, appeared opalescent in the filtered sunlight. Her tapering figure had the grace of Persian queens and Roman empresses floating along in their litters on ripples of dusky muscles.

So this delicate, white product of modernity, this embodiment of civilization's perceptions and all that it pays for them, was borne at last into the primordial world on the shoulders of savages.

Behind her streamed a hundred porters balancing on their heads the personal baggage, rolled tents, chop boxes, sacks of safari food. They were men from Manica, Sofala, and Tete, some of pure strain, others with Arab and Latin blood in their veins. Their bare torsoes were the color of chocolate, of ebony, or even of saddle leather; but all their foreheads bulged out in the same way, all their noses were short and flat, all their chins receded. On their breasts and arms were charms of crocodiles' teeth and leopards' claws, to keep them safe from beasts, rheumatism, arrows, pneumonia, snake bite, and skin diseases. In the distended lobes of their ears were stuffed cigarettes, horn snuffboxes, or flowers from the port town.

They were followed by the camp servants in long, white robes, Beira-boys and Swahilis, driving before them a little flock of sheep. Parr, at the head of another squad of askaris, brought up the rear, riding a Muscat donkey. He raised his head, and his withered mouth, emerging from the shadow of his helmet, showed a melancholy smile.

He was drinking in the smell of Africa, and listening to the song of the safari.

At times the song died down into a hum. But soon a quavering falsetto was heard formulating a new motive, expressing a new thought. Other voices joined the leader's; a minor refrain swept up and down the line; and abruptly the climax swelled out in a diapason descending far into the bass. So that every one could sing, the improvisor had phrased his thoughts in Swahili, the inter-tribal language of Africa. He sang of the Bibi from afar, her skin like a bowl of milk, who was traveling as a bride to Fort Pero d'Anhaya.

"She is rich. She is the daughter of a sultan. She is ill, but she will be well. She is sad, but she will be happy. We shall eat much meat at her wedding."

The deep chorus rolled out to a banging of sticks on the sides of the balanced boxes.

"Wah! This Bibi is rich! We shall eat much meat at her wedding!"

"They sing of you," said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to strew themselves over her soft body. It was as if the machilla had suddenly become a bier.

"God forbid it!" Hamoud muttered, averting his face from that sign.

He wore a tight turban of many colored stripes cocked up over one ear; he had bared his legs, and bound sandals on his small feet; and round his waist, over the sash that held his dagger, he had fastened a web belt sustaining a bolstered pistol. He never left the side of the moving machilla.

They soon put behind them the mangroves of the coast. They passed through brakes of white-tipped feathery reeds, beyond which expanded forests whose velvety foliage was mingled with gray curtains of moss. On their left a little river kept reappearing. From the islands of marsh grass that floated down the stream, egrets and kingfishers flew away. On sandbars some dingy, log-like shapes, beginning stealthily to move toward the water, were revealed as crocodiles.

In a bend of the river cashew trees overshadowed the thatch of fishing huts. Beyond fields of lilies one made out, flitting away, sooty wanderers clad in ragged kilts and carrying thin-bladed spears. Then marshes spread afar: the transparent stalks of papyrus trembled above the bluish pallor of lotuses. As the declining sun poured its gold across the world, the air over the marshes was jeweled from a great rush of geese, ducks, heron, ibises, and storks.

They camped on the clean, white sand beside the stream.

The luxury that had always been her atmosphere still clung round her here, taking on an Oriental quality from this host of unfettered slaves, these dusky armed guards, these scurrying, white-robed servants who, in the light of the sunset, composed with the speed of enchantment her habitation for the night. The green tent, its fly extended like an awning, awaited her entrance. The floor sheet was strewn with rugs; the snowy camp bed was made; her toilet case stood open on the folding table. The tent boys, their faces obsequiously lowered, were pouring hot water into the canvas tub.

Bareheaded, but wrapped in a tan polo coat, she emerged from the tent to find the dinner table ready under the fly. They offered hors d'oeuvres, a jellied soup, a curry, fruit tarts, and coffee. She shook her head, and continued to stare at the candles on the table. Fluffy, white moths were burning themselves in the flames.

Parr protested that she must eat. In this climate one did not fast with impunity.

"I sha'n't collapse," she replied, that stony look returning to her face.

Night fell like the abruptly loosened folds of a great curtain. The air became vibrant with the shrilling of insects. Fireflies filled the darkness with a twinkling mist, so that the immense spangle of the purple sky seemed to have invaded the purple ambiguities of earth. But along the river bank shone the fires of the safari—points of flame that outlined, like a binding of copper wire, the silhouettes of squatting men, or turned a half-inchoate face to molten bronze, or illuminated, against the lustrous blackness of the water, the fragment of a muscular back, the crook of an arm, a stare of eyeballs, a display of teeth that seemed to be swimming there unrelated to a head.

The babble of the camp—a continuous chattering, crooning, and guffawing, blended with the indignant cries of monkeys. It was, she thought, all one threnody of purely natural creatures, of which one species, by some accident of structure and unplanned immunity, had enlarged its powers of experiment and imitation to this point of triumph—the kindling of fires, the eating of cooked food, the gradually enhanced capacity for suffering.

"Are you religious, Parr?" she asked the little man who sat huddled in a faded ulster, sucking at a cold pipe. What she meant was, "Do you believe, poor traveler, that you have a soul—some spark that these black savages share with you perhaps, but that those chattering monkeys lack?"

His pinched, gray countenance took on a timid look.

"I hope so, ma'am," he stammered, and tried to assume an expression of befitting dignity.

"So you can pray without laughing at yourself!"

Her cold voice was replete with the bitterness of those who have got from suffering nothing except rancor, as if at some vast hoax.

Parr was frightened by this glimpse into her disillusionment; and prayer, which he himself had abandoned in his childhood, seemed suddenly worthy of his timid championship. He mumbled something about faith; he had, it appeared, seen some of its achievements. He recalled the faith of strong men, which had accomplished prodigies; the confidence of youth——

"And when one is old and weak? So it is all a physical phenomenon?"

When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the tent-fly. But Parr, not utterly crushed, proffered faintly that he knew he could not argue with the likes of her, being without education, having taken life as it came, mostly obeying orders——

"Like Hamoud," she commented. "Hamoud has taken life as it came, obeying the orders of fate. What is your word for resignation, Hamoud? The word that brought you across the ocean into Mr. Verne's service, and then back across the ocean into this place?"

"Mektoub," he vouchsafed, after lowering his eyes so that she should not see the flames in them. "And why not, since none can hope to escape his destiny? We—this whole safari—are here in the palm of God's hand. None knows what God has prepared for us; yet every footprint that we make has been marked before our feet."

On these words, his handsome, lightly bearded visage was touched with a look of beatitude, as though speaking in his sleep he was dreaming of some unrevealed delight.

"Then our will is nothing?"

"Ah, if our will is victorious it is the will of God."

As she made no response, and since the hour called "Isheh" was approaching, he rose and departed to pray.

"Will!" she thought. "No, there is nothing else. Will is the Thing-in-Itself."

The tent curtain fell behind her. She heard Parr's voice call out the command for silence. His words were taken up by the askaris on guard. The camp noises ceased; one heard only the scolding of the monkeys, the drumming of partridges, and the far-off roar of a lion that had eaten his fill. The earth seemed to tremble slightly from that distant sound.

She lay on her bed, under the muslin mosquito net through which strained the pearly gleam of a lantern. Once more it was all an illusion which must be allowed to endure till reality could be gained. For Lilla, the only reality was comprised at this moment into one more meeting with him, in the sight of his living face, in the sound of his voice pronouncing words of forgiveness, of love, perhaps even of remorse. Should she reach him too late for that—find this longing also part of the illusion? The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from the greenish infiltration of the moonlight.

Another lion roared in the depths of the night.

"Why should one fear even these strange forms of death? What has my life been that I should find it precious? What does anything matter except one hour with him? I really ask only a moment. No, all that I fear is death before I find him, before I've won from him a last kiss of understanding and pardon. Will! That shall be my strength and my immunity all the way!"

At last she dozed, to dream that Hamoud had confronted a lion just as the beast was about to pounce upon Madame Zanidov, who, wearing the dress of oxidized silver barbarically painted, crouched in a moonlit clearing. "No, Hamoud, let him have her!" Hamoud, with a smile, stood aside. Then she saw Lawrence approaching, his face and body wrapped in a white cloth. "Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when she sat up in bed with a scream.

Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of other voices broke like a wave.

"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but, kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net, to take her hand and press it to his brow.

"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to you."

"And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp. "Oh, Hamoud, and dreams?"

In the pearly light, beneath the cloudy net, in the air that was fragrant with the odors of soap and cologne, her upturned countenance and swelling throat gave forth a gleam as if of flesh transfigured by love instead of grief. He felt himself falling through space into a bottomless anguish. He clutched at the thought, "Yet who knows His designs?" and hung in that void alive, his secret still locked in his breast, the delicious pain of her daily condescension still assured to him.

"Ah, if you were of my faith you would have heard that life is all a dream, that there is no reality except paradise and hell."

He rose, and stole away from paradise to hell.

CHAPTER LVI

In the dawn Parr hobbled down the line of yawning porters, checking the reapportionment of burdens. The machilla men, still nibbling at chunks of cold porridge, approached with the hammock swinging from their shoulders.

The safari resumed its march.

Its course was northwest, through jungles of bamboo, round the rims of marshes, past forests filmed with the blue and yellow of convolvulus. The mountains remained apparently as far away as ever, now indistinct behind the heat mist of the lowlands, now disappearing beyond the rainstorms that swept across the plateaux like the robes of colossal gods.

The safari passed leopard traps, graves decked with broken pottery and little banners of rags, then, circling fields of maize, entered a village. The huts stood in a ring inside a rude stockade. The village headman advanced, bending forward from the waist and scraping first one foot and then the other. He made obeisance before the machilla, in which men of his own kind bore up a delicate, pale prodigy, an incredible creature from another aeon or planet.

He was a wizened, old man with shreds of white wool on his chin. His eyeballs were tinctured with yellow. His right shoulder was a mass of long-healed scars from the claws and teeth of some beast. Behind him, against a solid wall of his people, young girls with shaved heads, awe-stricken, held gourds of beer as pink as coral and as thick as gruel.

The village headman revealed the news of the wilds, which had been transmitted from tribe to tribe by native travelers, or by the far-carrying beat of wooden gongs. A safari, passing to the north, had penetrated the land of the Mambava. In that safari there were two white men and many askaris. They had now journeyed through the forests of the people of Muene-Motapa. They were in the granite gorges of the waterfalls.

He pointed toward where the floating mountains rose in a peak that was lightly silvered with snow.

Parr, on the Muscat donkey, looking more haggard than ever in the sunshine, demanded:

"Is it the white man who is called the Bwana Bangana?"

That was the name that had accompanied the news.

The safari marched faster than before, toward the exalted masses that trembled behind the heat. They emerged upon rolling plains remotely dotted with herds of zebras and antelope. In the blinding sky they saw kites, buzzards, and crows, rising from the carcasses that had been left half devoured by noctambulant beasts of prey. At nightfall the lightning flashed above the mountains in yellow sheets or rosy zigzags. Thunder rolled out across the plain in majestic detonations.

Lilla, watching the storm from the doorway of her tent, told herself that he, too, must hear these sounds; that she had come near enough to share with him at any rate this sensation—unless her dread had already been realized, and he had sunk into a sleep from which even such noises could not wake him.

Hamoud appeared at her side. He quoted from the Uncreated Book:

"He showeth you the lightning, a source of awe and hope."

Her heart swelled; she turned to that fervent, handsome face beneath the turban a look of peculiar tenderness like a sword thrust, and responded in liquid tones:

"What should I have done without you?"

CHAPTER LVII

Lawrence Teck was not in the gorges of the waterfalls.

While marching in through the lowlands he had been seized with a fever that he had failed to shake off on the plateaux. Every day he had grown a little worse, indeed, till finally the choice had seemed to lie between resignation of his work and serious illness. Turning back toward the coast, he had now regained the forests of the Mambava. Here, in his second night's camp, he had suffered a collapse.

He lay abed in his tent. On the waterproof floor cloth squatted a Mambava warrior, a messenger from King Muene-Motapa.

"Give the word, Bangana. Give the word, Brother of the King. We will carry you to the King's town on a litter as soft as the clouds. The wizards shall work their charms to make you well. The Dances of the Moon are about to begin: it is the time of answered prayers. Your medicines have failed; now try ours. One word, Bangana! Gladden the heart of the King!"

The messenger's almost Semitic visage, upturned in the lamplight, was smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer; his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, as he repeated the conjuration:

"Speak! Speak the word!"

Lawrence Teck returned:

"Say this to Muene-Motapa. The medicine that might cure me is far beyond the sea. I thought I might do without it; but see what the lack of it has brought me to. A little chill, a headache—the strong man rejoicing in the world shakes his shoulders and they are gone. But death in one of its multitude of forms stands at the door of the heart that has ceased to take pleasure in life."

His voice was feeble. His bearded face, bending forward under the net, was blank from exhaustion and unnaturally flushed. His teeth clashed together, as he concluded:

"There is no medicine in this land to cure this sickness."

The messenger groaned, and said compassionately:

"It is sad to see the great deserted by their gods. Yet our gods remain!" He pressed his palms on the floor sheet and leaned forward, his filmy headdress drifting over his glittering eyes. "Surely, Bangana, now is the time to renounce the old, to embrace the true! To cast the spear of scorn and come in behind our shields till you are strong again. We will make you forget! Give yourself up but once to our ancient mysteries! Have you forgotten the Dances of the Moon?"

There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their appearance and actions, to be human—beings that danced in regiments with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums, that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest stronghold; it was that which hovers like an echo over the suave, ordered landscapes of civilization; it was the seductive horror that invades the modern brain in dreams, or in some moment of utter bitterness and despair.

For a moment he still leaned forward, peering into those glittering, dark eyes, though what he saw was something beyond that face—the destruction of all the toil of fifty thousand years, the suicide of a soul. With a shudder he lay back upon the bed.

"Return to the King."

For five minutes the messenger sat motionless; but Lawrence Teck did not speak again. Rising at last, in a fluff of his marabout plumes, he armed himself with his spear and his oval shield covered with an heraldic design.

"The King will weep," he said. "And the little sisters of the King, and all those who loved you, oh, dead man."

He raised the curtain, and stalked away through the camp, clashing superbly between the fires, while the clustered askaris and porters regarded him dismally.

A white man in a fleece-lined coat, who had been waiting in the open for the messenger to depart, entered the tent and sat down beside the bed.

He was Cornelius Rysbroek.

"Shall you try to march to-morrow?"

Lawrence Teck did not reply. There was no strength in him even to move his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek, believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.

In his eyes appeared, perfected, the light that had made them exceptional for years, a flash from that psychical lake of fire and brimstone in which his heart had so long been burning up. For the tables were turned at last: the weak one, the inferior, had become the stronger, the better. A thousand wounds seemed to heal themselves in him as he contemplated the prostration of the enemy whom he had hated, just from premonition, even before his appearance. There was true madness in that look, arising from the long privation, the interminable jealousy, the consequent monomania of revenge. "He will die," he reflected, gloating with half-shut eyes, his face, that had once been puerile, now dignified by triumph. "He will never leave this forest," he sang to himself, curling up his mouse-colored mustaches as if at a mirror before sallying out to some pleasure in which there was no sting. But suddenly he remembered that this prostrate rival was still his conqueror, had won what he had not been able to win, would recall, no doubt, in his last moment of consciousness, that love in all its details.

Out of the silent night the spirit of Africa crept into the dim tent, completing his madness.

To one of the little fires came softly Lawrence Teck's tent boy, a turbaned Persian, lemon-hued, with the beak of a parrot and the mouth of a cruel woman. He sat down close beside a Swahili gun bearer, who was frying a mess of white ants.

"Our Bwana has fallen asleep," he uttered in a voice that would have been inaudible to white men. "The other Bwana is sitting by the bed." He waited till the ants were cooked to a turn, then murmured, in a tone like aeolian harp strings caressed by the faintest zephyr, "If our Bwana does not die of the fever the other Bwana will kill him."

The brown Swahili, his pan half raised, turned his face which seemed to have been smashed flat, and gave the speaker a slow, fierce look of inquiry. The Persian breathed:

"With our Bwana's own pistol. As if he had killed himself. I peeped through the curtain. The pistol was hanging from the tent-pole. When he looked at it, and then at our Bwana, I read everything in his mind. But if this also is the will of God it will not happen until some hour when the camp is still—when we are all asleep."

CHAPTER LVIII

The safari that was seeking him marched and camped, marched and camped, marched and camped.

Every afternoon the northeastern monsoon wafted in its sticky moisture, releasing in the jungles the nauseating sweetness of incredible flowers. Smoky-brown flies were seen on the necks of the sheep. The beasts began to sicken and die. The porters ate fresh meat.

But the porters no longer sang. The Wasena, who bore the hammock, muttered to one another dolefully as they shuffled along. All knew by this time that they were not headed for Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Avoiding that last outpost of civilization, they were approaching the country of the Mambava, which lay behind the steamy sunshine, below the blue and lavender battlements of granite, in the uplands covered with forests.

The askaris alone, the lean, khaki-clad Somalia, remained indifferent to this atmosphere of disquiet that was more debilitating to the porters than the fever-laden mists. For these fierce, restless men from the northern deserts were of a breed that found its true contentment in danger and violence. They were cheered, perhaps, by the possibility of bloodshed, sustained by the automatism resulting from their faith, and, despite their disdain of women, inspired by their admiration of this frail personage who was always urging more speed toward the fabulous regions of peril.

As for her, she no longer saw anything except that deep green zone which quivered behind the heat.

"I shall find him not in the gorges, but in those forests."

For the scene of Anna Zanidov's prophecy was laid in a forest.

She lay in the machilla like a tightly drawn bow. Her skin, now ashen, now bright from a touch of fever, stretched over a visage of apparently new contours: round her cheekbones and jaws were suggestions of previously unsuspected strength. Her tender lips had assumed an almost cruel aspect; her sunken eyes, growing ever larger in her diminishing face, were harder than gems. She was the personification of will.

And Parr, sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the camp boys, were only the instrument that her will had welded together. They were wraiths obediently advancing her dream of one fleeting moment of triumph over fate. They were nothing, since she had summoned them out of the void of this world by an imperious cry. They were everything; for without them her dream would fade.

Sometimes the green zone of the uplands was lost in a blur not of heat, but of fever. Sharp pains stabbed her temples, and, when the dream became distinct again, she saw black men walking like giants, their heads in the white-hot sky. But just as she had conquered fear, so, by a supreme resolution, she conquered her vertigo, the burning of her emaciated limbs, the quaking of her body which a moment before had been bathed in moisture. At sunset she descended from the machilla to give Hamoud a look of astonishment, while replying:

"No, I am well."

Yet she cast a look of dread at the rising tent, thinking of the hours of sleeplessness, of appalling thoughts on the borderline between nightmares and flashes of fever.

Now and then, as she escaped shivering from the hot bath, she lost hold of her new strength.

"If you knew!" she whimpered.

The lost, safe life rose before her. She saw against the green tent walls the painting by Bronzino, the jeweled perspective of Fifth Avenue at night, Fanny Brassfield's necklace sparkling in the blaze of the opera house. The music of waltzes mingled with the strains of David's tone poem; and she smelled at the same time the tanbark of the horse show, the pastilles at Brantome's, and the flowers surrounding the marble warrior and the marble nymph. She was seized with panic, on realizing the remoteness of security.

"Where am I? Africa! But why?"

She stood motionless, aghast at her inability to remember why she was here.

Hamoud's voice came to her from beyond the curtain:

"There is going to be a shauri, a talk with these porters of yours."

"Ah, my God! What is it now?"

Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:

"Rebellion."

She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.

Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:

"Madam, all is ready."

She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed, her eyes as cold as ice.

On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above this spectacle.

Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance, persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.

An askari spat to the left contemptuously.

The leader of the porters from Tete sprang forward with a cry of exasperation. For this occasion he had bound round his waist the pelt of one of the slaughtered sheep, and had made a head-dress of draggled turaco feathers. He waved his sinewy arms, crouched, postured, tossed back his head. His oration was less coherent than the Wasena's, but more dramatic.

"The first moon since the rains! The season when the Mambava hold their great dances! It is now that their forest will be full of music, while their warriors gather in the place that they know of, to dance to the moon. We will not enter the country of the Mambava while they dance to the moon!"

A hoarse outcry rose toward the multitude of stars:

"We will not enter the country of the Mambava when they dance to the moon!"

The askaris, their fezzes cocked jauntily, impatiently shuffled their sandals of giraffe hide, and hitched up their belts in which were thrust broad-bladed Somali knives.

"They are rabbits," the askaris affirmed. "Even this lady shames them. They are less than women." They turned their fierce eyes toward Lilla, calling out to her, "Here we stand, Ya Bibi!" There was a savage insinuation in that cry.

In order to respond, Parr sat down in a chair, the immemorial symbol of authority. He spoke in Swahili. After each sentence he paused, so that his words might be translated by the headmen of the porters into their tribal dialects. His voice rose faintly, almost ineffectually contending against the sounds of the insects. He looked very small and ghastly in the firelight; he was sick to his bones, feeling just as he had felt before the black-water fever. The great semicircle of hostile eyes perceived all his weakness. In the opinion of his antagonists his face bore the seal of death. This representative of the white-skinned super-race was revealed as weaker than they—no trace of the white man's conquering will was to be discerned in his feeble countenance. Why listen any more?

Their leaders no longer troubled to translate his words.

He went on, however, with the last of his strength holding fast to the thought of paying his debt in full.

In that land, he declared, none would dare to hurt the friends of Muene-Motapa's friend. They should return telling how they had passed unharmed, even honored, through the country of the Mambava. He promised them double pay—while groping for some further argument, he seemed to be sinking in upon himself. His face drooped forward.

From the horde of porters came scattered shouts:

"Enough! The shauri is over! In the morning we return!"

"What do they say, Hamoud?"

"They say that in the morning they will return to the coast."

She sat stunned.

The orator from Tete moved with a kind of spasmodic dancing gait toward Parr. Never thus had the white man's genius lain prostrate before him. He was the symbol of a race abruptly exalted from inferiority to dominance. There came over him a frenzy of pride and malice; it was the realization of the dreams that burn the brains of all the dark people of the earth. "Do you hear?" he howled, and brandished his fists as though about to strike that lowered head.

An askari glided forward reversing his rifle. There was a cracking sound as the gun butt struck the orator from Tete in the middle of the forehead. With a drowsy look the smitten man sank down as gently as if falling into a mound of feathers, and deliberately composed himself in sleep, his brown face against the brown earth.

In all that throng there was suddenly not the slightest movement, and no sound was to be heard except the trill of the insects.

She was standing, staring from the prostrate body to the mass of porters, whose eyes were fixed upon the victim with one look, of mournful awakening. Then they saw her whom they had forgotten, or, in their transport, considered negligible. But when they had read her face it was they who were frightened.

"You! You! To stop me!"

And a homicidal gesture completed her appearance of fury.

"Wallahi!" the askaris called out to one another. "She has given the order!"

They spread out to right and left with a clicking of their rifle locks; they drove the porters together, close to the fire. A soft moan arose from the huddled crowd. They had seen the whips of hippopotamus hide, long and flexible, translucent in the firelight like streams of amber.

As the lash described a flourish above the first outstretched back she turned away to her tent. Hamoud was before her, raising the curtain. He said:

"They will speak no more about the coast when we are through with them."

CHAPTER LIX

At dawn he came to tell her that Parr had the black-water fever.

The sick man was unconscious when they sent him off, in the machilla, toward Fort Pero d'Anhaya, with three of the askaris and fifteen of the porters. They soon disappeared into a jungle of spear grass, above which the sunrise was spreading its bands of smoky gold and rose. The chosen porters forgot their lacerated bodies; a song floated back from them to those who must still press onward.

"I have killed him, Hamoud."

"Who knows? It is true that he is old and has had this fever before. But we do not need him. Maybe he has fulfilled his destiny. And we have not." In the glory of the sunrise he turned to meditate over her thin, tortured face. He observed, with a lyrical sadness, "What is life? A running this way and that after mirages. A thirsting for sweet wells of which one has heard in a dream. Does one ever taste those waters? Are they sweet or bitter? Perhaps this is the secret—that to taste them is death."

The safari marched on. She rode the Muscat donkey, which was dying from the bites of tsetse flies.

CHAPTER LX

Next morning she marched afoot in the blaze of the sun. Trailing thorns pierced her ankles; the stipa shrubs showered her with little barbs, and from another bush was detached an invisible pollen that penetrated her clothing and burned her skin. At the noon halt they made a hammock of tent cloth, in which she was carried all the afternoon by four porters. At nightfall they saw, across a valley, the edge of the Mambava forests, the towering tree trunks banked with huge thickets and bound together by nets of vines.

They camped in the valley, where a stream flowed through a tangle of indigo plants. The warm bath steamed in her tent; the fresh evening garments were laid out; everything was the same in this canvas ark that proceeded farther and farther into the wilds with its atmosphere of rude luxury intact. When she emerged from the tent, in her polo coat and suede mosquito boots, the table glistened with its china and glassware.

She sat looking at the black forest.

"He is there!"

But she was very tired.

Ah, to lie down, grope no longer for her will, drift away into a region where there was no love or remorse, sleep forever! Why should she feel like this with the goal so near at last, unless from a premonition that all her efforts were useless?

Never before had this land and its phenomena appeared so cruel, so perfectly the manifestation of a superhuman force that clothed its malignancy in a primordial splendor. Here, she reflected, was the quintessence of earthly beauty inextricable from the quintessence of horror; here was the source of all that she had trusted elsewhere in countless perfidious disguises and refinements.

Poisonous in some subtle element behind its visible vapors, it corrupted not only the flesh, but also the souls that had emerged elsewhere into forms of affection and compassion. Two nights ago even she had greeted the crack of the whips with the furious thought, "Strike again!"—and now there stole into her brain, together with the light hallucinations of fever, a hatred of these cringing black men who for a moment had dared to stand before her as antagonists. The evening breeze brought to her, from the porters' fires, the odor of savage bodies that had labored and been beaten for the cause of love; and her disgust was tinctured with the fierce intolerance of all those impressionable beings from what is called civilization, whom Africa had debased—or else, made "natural" again.

Through the buzz of insects there came from the forest, gradually blending over wide distances, a gentle throbbing. The porters lifted their round heads beyond the fires. The sharp profiles of the askaris were motionless. A wail floated over the camp:

"The drums of the Mambava!"

The throbbing died away. But soon it began again in the north, then in the south, and swelled to a continuous rumbling.

On the edge of the sky the moon appeared, blood red, nearly full.

There was a rush of feet, a scuffle in the bushes, and two askaris advanced into the firelight, dragging between them a creature that they seemed to have plucked out of some grotesque dream.

He was an albino. His gray skin, because of its lack of pigmentation, was splotched with eczema; his wool was a dirty, yellowish white; his features were permanently distorted because of his lifelong efforts to keep the light from paining his pink eyes. The askaris threw this monstrosity upon his face before Lilla's chair. He lay moaning and feebly moving his hands, as if he were caressing the earth.

Suddenly he sat up on his haunches. His body jumped from the beating of his heart. He fixed on Lilla a look that was the utmost caricature of terror and entreaty.

An askari let out a neighing laugh:

"So this is one of the dangerous Mambava!"

But the albino was not one of the Mambava.

He was a man of the Manyazombe, who dwelt in the north—an exile, a solitary wanderer, a lost soul. Who knew what aversion, what indefinable dread, his dissimilarity had produced in his own people, what village calamities he had been blamed for, what persecutions he had suffered? For some reason he had fled from his own tribe, to be greeted at the outskirts of alien villages with showers of spears. He had learned to reciprocate the horror of mankind. Then he had dwelt in the jungle, joining the furtive beasts. But still, moved by an obscure, invincible need, he crept in thickets from which he might watch the life of human beings, feasting his eyes on the fire-splashed bodies of men and women, listening to the songs and the laughter, filling his nostrils with the savor of his kind, as a damned spirit might creep back to the warmth of life from a desolate hereafter.

But what did he see now? Was she who sat before him human or divine—one of those who must be placated by strict deeds, by charms or the blood of animals and captives; some spirit of the jungle that had made herself visible, in her marvelous pallor and uncanny costume, amid a retinue of mortals inured to her magic?

"Tell him that he is safe," she said, with a movement of loathing.

Falling forward, he embraced her boots with his hands.

A porter who understood his language was summoned to question him. The albino had just now crept through the country of the Mambava. He had not dared to linger there; for on all the forest trails bands of warriors were moving in toward the rendezvous where, as soon as the moon was full, they would hold the dances. Yet in the midst of those forests he had seen the camp of white men.

"He has seen it!" she cried, leaning forward to devour with her eyes that hideous and precious instrument of fate. "Hamoud, he has seen him! He can guide us there!" And with a look of tenderness she murmured, "You will show us the way? Ah, I will give you—I will give you——"

She saw herself pouring gold over the pariah.

He bowed his head till his dirty, yellowish poll nearly touched his gray knees that were covered with callouses. Amid the close-packed, silent audience a smothered phrase rose to the ears of the interpreter. Hamoud, turning away his face, cast forth the words:

"Too late."

For the albino, while creeping round that camp in the Mambava forests, had heard of a strange thing, of the shooting of one of the white men in the night. Those discussing the matter had not known how it had happened, since they had all been asleep. The white man was then dying. By this time, no doubt, he was dead.

She sank back as if she, too, had received a bullet. But after a time, during which that dark throng had not stirred, she rose and entered her tent. There Hamoud found her standing, swaying slightly, with closed eyes. An invisible hand had brushed across her countenance, effacing the last traces of her beauty.

"Do we still go on?" breathed Hamoud.

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

"He shall not die till I get there."

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

CHAPTER LXI

At daybreak the safari entered the forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He described what he had seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER LXII

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

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

"Dying. Dying. Dying."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, without warning, came the charge.

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

More shields were rushing upon the guns, however.

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

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

Lilla stood paralyzed, alone before that inexorable advance.

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah, my mirror is broken."

She wandered through the wreckage, uttering peals of laughter.

CHAPTER LXIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Delusion!" she moaned.

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

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

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

The drum music swelled through the forest.

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

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

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

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

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

"Ah, Hamoud——"

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

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

CHAPTER LXIV

At daybreak they went on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knelt down to peer at those almost imperceptible punctures.

"From that?"

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

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

CHAPTER LXV

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

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

Now both will and love lay vanquished.

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

She began to speak, urgently, seductively:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole vision vanished.

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

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

"God, then!"

And in one last flash of distracted irony:

"If I called God in Arabic?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The albino had heard her.

CHAPTER LXVI

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

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

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

The albino was gone.

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

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

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

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

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Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will be renamed.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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