For three days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods. And yet no waterways appeared. That dry land drank the water as it fell to reach the hidden channels by which it had drained for centuries into the central ooze of the M’ssente Swamp. On Sunday, the fourth day, the rain ceased about the time of a sullen and misty dawn, and by ten o’clock in the morning the sun had triumphed. No one would have believed that any rain had lately fallen; for the bush was full of dry and brittle sound; the leaves of the undergrowth were of the same ashen hue; the straggling candelabra cactus stood as withered as if they were dying of drought; the hornbills were calling on every side. Only on the higher mountain slopes, where the grassland had been burnt to a shade of pale amber, a sudden and surprising flush of the most tender green appeared, as transitory, alas! as it was beautiful.

There could have been no more lovely or affecting augury for James’ return to work. He was up early, walking to and fro upon the stoep, watching a flight of starlings, whose glossy plumes shone in flight with the blue of the kingfisher. The night before he had struggled through a long conversation with the headman of the nearest Waluguru village, that circle of squat bandas from which their own servant, Hamisi, came. He had made it the occasion of an experiment upon the new lines which his reading of the life of Mackay had suggested. He had found the man more curious about the use of the steel carpentering tools with which the mission was well supplied than any questions of morality or faith, and when he had gone James had also missed a chisel. But that didn’t matter. It was the price of an interest which he hadn’t imagined to be possible in the apathetic mind of the Waluguru. He was beginning to see his way. Even if it meant the sacrifice of some sabbatarian scruples, he was prepared to go through with it. “To-morrow, M’zinga,” he said at parting, “I will show you other things. To-morrow, after the service at the church. All these things and many more wonderful you can learn from books. In a little while we will have a school, and I will teach your totos to read Swahili.” And M’zinga had smiled with that soft, sly smile of Africa . . .

On Sunday mornings, at half-past nine, it had been the privilege of the boy Hamisi to go down to the chapel and ring the little bell. It pleased him, for it was a work that needed little effort; the toy produced an unusual noise and the performance exalted him above his fellows. At the best it was a small and pathetic sound in the midst of so great a wilderness, but very pleasing to the ears of James. This Sunday morning he was a little restless. As he paced the stoep, with his Bible in his hands behind his back, the time seemed to pass more slowly than usual. He looked at his watch. It was already half-past nine. He called to Eva in the kitchen to see if his watch was fast. “Five and twenty to ten,” she called. He was annoyed. The Africans, no doubt, were sleeping. They would sleep for ever unless they were disturbed. But Hamisi had never failed him before. He hurried across the compound to the hut in which they slept. They were neither of them there. For a moment he was angry, but then remembered that forbearance was the better part; that even the best of Africans were unreliable. Some day a time would come when things would be different. Until then he must work for himself.

He set off, almost cheerfully, down the sandy path toward the chapel. The rain had scoured its surface clean of the red sand and disclosed beneath a mosaic of quartz, pure white and yellow and stained with garnet-red. The fine crystals sparkled in the sun. “So many hidden wonders,” he thought. It came into his mind that there might even be precious stones among them. He picked up a little fragment of pure silicon and held it up to the sun. “So many hidden wonders . . .” He put it in his pocket.

In the middle of the path, in a pocket of sand round which the storm water had swirled, one of the lily-like flowers of Africa had thrust its spiky leaves. The rain and sun had nursed it into sudden bloom, and the pale cups drooped at his feet. “In this way,” he thought, “the whole world praises God. Behold the lilies of the field . . .”

His first instinct was to pick the flower; but on second thoughts he had left it, hoping that Eva would see it also on her way down. He passed for a little while between close walls of tall grasses on the edge of the bush. Through this channel a clean wind moved with a silky sound, and its movement gave to the air, newly washed by rain, a feeling of buoyancy and freedom, a quality which was almost hopeful. It was a wonderful thing, he thought, to be alive and well. His soul was full of thankfulness.

He came at last to the church. Hamisi was not there, and so he settled down comfortably to toll the bell himself. The incident would be an amusing one to write home about. There were many little things like that in Mackay’s letters. From that high slope the note of the bell would penetrate the edge of the forest, and soon his congregation would appear, the men in their decent gowns of white, the women in their shawls of amerikani print, the bright-eyed, pot-bellied children. And this was a new beginning . . .

He tolled the bell until his watch showed the time to be five minutes short of the hour, but up to this time none of his congregation had appeared. He began to feel a little nervous and puzzled. It couldn’t be that he had mistaken the hour, for the Waluguru took their time from his chapel bell. He wondered if, by some ridiculous miscalculation, he had mistaken the day. The idea was grotesque. And yet when he was ill he had missed two whole days as completely as if he had been lying dead. No . . . it couldn’t be that. Only the day before he had verified it. It was Sunday. He remembered the text on the German calendar, which he had struggled to translate, and above the number of the day the little concave shape of the new moon. He remembered telling Eva that the weather would be likely to change.

At ten o’clock exactly he entered the church. Eva was sitting there in her usual place; otherwise the building was empty. It smelt stale and slightly musty with the odour of black flesh. He remembered suddenly that once before he had entered an empty church that smelt like that. Where or when, he couldn’t imagine . . . either in some other life or in a dream. The coincidence made him shiver.

And Eva was sitting there, very pale. When he stalked past her her lips moved in a piteous shape, as if she wanted to speak or to cry. But he would not stay for her to speak. He went straight to his desk and began to read the form of worship which their own Church prescribed, just as if he might have been conducting a service in the small stone chapel at Far Forest. For Eva this was a very terrible experience. It seemed to her somehow unreasonable to prolong what she could only think of as an elaborate and insane pantomime. She felt that, after all, it would have been so much simpler for her to explain, to take him aside and tell him that this was nothing but a freakish demonstration of the power of Godovius, a hint to her of the kind of torture which it would be easy for him to employ. But James spared her nothing. Instead of the familiar Swahili words, they sang together a hymn of Moody and Sankey, which had been a favourite of her father’s, a wearisome business of six long verses. The performance nearly did for her. All the time she was ridiculously conscious of the feebleness of their two voices in that empty, echoing church. She was almost driven to distraction by the impersonality of James. “Afterwards I will tell him,” she thought. She wanted to tell him there and then, but the immense force of tradition restrained her. It wouldn’t have been any use for her to tell him: for the time he was no longer her brother—only a ministering priest rapt in the service of his Deity. Never in her life had she felt more irreligious. No vestige of the illusion of religion could overcome the excitement of her own fear. Reading alternate verses they recited a psalm of David, a passionate song against idolaters; and a little of the passion came through into the voice of James, so that he spoke less precisely than usual, like a peasant of Far Forest, forgetting the accent which the training college had taught him. His voice rose and fell and echoed in the little church:

“Insomuch that they worshipped their idols, which turned to their own decay; yea, they offered their sons and their daughters unto devils.”

And she heard herself reply:

“And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and their daughters; whom they offered unto the idols of Canaan; and the land was defiled with blood.”

—heard her own voice, lowered and reverentially unreal. She supposed that women always spoke like that in church; as if they were afraid of hurting the words they spoke. She was thankful when the psalm was over.

And then James prayed. In their denomination the long extempore prayer was an important part of the service, and ministers were apt to acquire a rather dangerous fluency. But that morning James was inspired, if ever a man was inspired, with religious ecstasy. He wrestled with God. In his words, in the commonplaces of religious phrase, glowed a passion to which she could not be wholly insensible. She pitied him . . . pitied him. It seemed to her that God must surely pity a man whose soul was so abased and in such agony. At times he rose to something that was very like eloquence. One phrase she always remembered. He had been speaking of Africa—that sombre and mighty continent and its vast recesses of gloom—and then he burst into a sudden and fervent appeal for light, for a cleansing light which might penetrate not only Africa but “these dark continents of my heart . . .” The dark continents of my heart. Those were the words which she remembered in after days.

For a little while he knelt in silence, praying, and then, hurriedly, he left the church before she knew what he was doing. She put out her hand to detain him, but he shook his head and said: “Not now, Eva, not now . . .”

She was left standing alone at the door of the church. No other soul was near. In the mid-day quiet of the bush she heard a small bird singing. It was a rain-bird, and its simple song of three descending notes subtly wooed her dazed mind to a remembrance of the bells of the little church at Mamble, whose homely music floats above the wooded valleys to the green beyond Far Forest. And in a moment of vision she was assailed by the tender, wistful atmosphere of a Sunday in the March of Wales, where simple people and children were perhaps at that moment moving to church between the apple orchards, and men were standing in their shirt-sleeves at their garden gates. A gust of warm wind swept through the bush, carrying with it the odour of aromatic brushwood. It was this scent that broke and dispelled her dream.

II

Above all other things James wanted to be alone, not in his church nor in the horror of the forest, but in his own room at the mission. He passed swiftly over the path which he had followed that morning so happily; he entered the empty mission-house and locked himself in his bedroom. The sudden disillusionment which had come to him in the empty church had overwhelmed him; but when the first shock of the incident had passed and he lay upon his bed, with his hands pressed to his eyes, conscious only of the extreme heat and of his throbbing pulse, he suddenly found himself able to think more clearly. In spite of his passion he was almost calm. He realised, in the hardest terms, that he was facing a power which might be the ruin of his mission; that he wasn’t merely opposed by the vast apathy of Africa, but by something definite and appallingly strong. He saw that his real troubles were beginning; that, even if he failed, he had got to fight. It was the first time in his life that he had been forced to stand with his back to the wall.

Already he had a suspicion of the cause of the trouble. The problem towards which M‘Crae had been attracted in his amateur studies of ethnology by the stories of the Masai was presented to James for solution, with no evidence beyond the few dark hints which he had gathered in his work among the Waluguru and the collateral testimony, the significance of which he had hardly realised before, present in the only book with which he was intimately acquainted: his Bible. But already he had picked up the scent. A lucky mischance, the purest accident in the world, had arranged that the psalm which he had chosen for the day’s service had been the hundred and sixth. In the idolatry of the children of Israel, which the Psalmist so passionately lamented, he found a significant parallel. In a little while his imagination was at work. He sat at the table, turning over the worn pages of his Bible, finding everywhere in the songs of the prophets words which strengthened his incredible surmise.

The new moon. . . . That was the key to his suspicions. A number of sinister remembrances came to reinforce the idea. He remembered the young girl in the Waluguru village who had disappeared about the time of the new moon. He remembered the story of the boy Onyango, who had said that on the night of the new moon the Waluguru would kill him if he were found in the forest. He remembered, astonished that he should not have noticed it before, the name of that smooth mountain and of the house of Godovius itself. The moon. . . . He wondered how he could have been so blind. And the heathen inhabitants of Canaan worshipped the moon in abominable rites. Ashtoreth, the Goddess of Groves, was a moon deity. And Moloch. . . . Who was Moloch? The Bible would tell him; and most of all his own passionate prophets. He opened Isaiah.

“Bring no more vain oblations: incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.

“Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth; they are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them . . .”

Someone was knocking at the door. He supposed it was Eva. Well, Eva must wait. He was sorry for her; he would explain later. He came to the door and spoke. He was astonished at the steadiness of his own voice. He said: “Don’t be frightened and please don’t disturb me. I must be alone to-day.”

“But your door was locked. I wanted to see you if I could. I want to speak to you,” she said.

“Later, later. . . . Not now.”

She told him that his dinner was nearly ready.

“I don’t want food,” he said. “Don’t think I’m doing anything desperate. I’m not. I only want to think. Now be a good girl . . .”

Baal and Ashtoreth and Moloch. . . . He wished that he could go into the library at college and look the business up. In those days he had never taken that sort of thing seriously. It had seemed to him so utterly divorced from the spiritual needs of the present day.

A strange people, the Waluguru. He remembered that once Godovius had told him that they were of Semitic blood, a remnant of those SabÆans whose queen had corrupted the court of Solomon, a fair-skinned people who had sailed to Africa for gold. And Godovius was a Jew. . . . It was plausible, plausible. And yet, in these days . . .

For all that, the Jews had never failed to be attracted by the worship of lascivious Syrian deities. Ahaz, he remembered, who “burnt incense in the valley of Hinnom and burnt his children in the fire after the abominations of the heathen. . . . He sacrificed also and burnt incense in the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.”

“The high places and on the hills . . .” Kilima ja Mweze: the hill of the moon.He remembered the denunciations of the prophet Ezekiel: “For when I brought them into the land for the which I lifted up my hand to give it to them, then they saw every high hill and all the thick trees, and they offered there their sacrifices. . . . Thou hast built thy high place at the head of every way and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredom.”

And then, with a chilly heart, he passed from these prophecies to the awful legends of Tophet and the sacrifice of children in the fires of Moloch. These passages, in their mystery, had always seemed to him among the most terrible in the Old Testament. He seemed to remember a lecture in which he had been told that Moloch was the male counterpart of Ashtoreth or Astarte, the great goddess of fertility; that the worship of both, and the licentious rites with which their mysteries were celebrated on Syrian hill-tops, were really ceremonies of homoeopathic magic by the practice of which the fertility of fields and cattle might be increased.

So far, at any rate, the planter, Godovius, if he believed in any such superstitions, had an object. But there must be more in it than this. It was possible that in his rÔle of hierophant he might be able to exert a more terrible power over his slaves, the Waluguru. A man will do almost anything for the lust of power; and one presupposed that Godovius was in some way a psychopathic and a megalomaniac. Those were the two types of mind in which the moral decadence of modern Germany had been most productive. Was this the ecstasy which had won him the name of Sakharani? Or was it a simpler, more crudely carnal passion, for which this worship gave him an excuse, a celebration of those phallic rites with which the Cilician high places had been defiled?

“Soon, at any rate, I shall know,” he thought. Perhaps the Waluguru, whom the boy Onyango had feared, would kill him, before he had surprised their secret. For a long time he lay on his bed contemplating the dangers of his new duty. And then, for a long time, he prayed.

III

Now, at any cost, he was determined to see for himself. Nothing must stand between him and his duty. This was a man’s work. He decided that Eva must have no part in it; and so, a little later in the afternoon, when the fiercer heat of the day was waning, he left his locked room by way of the folding windows and took his way towards the forest. This time he went there with none of the vague terrors which had troubled him before: apart from a suspicion of shame in his deliberate secrecy, he had no misgivings. He was happy to find himself so firm in his purpose, thankful that the fever had left him free to meet this ordeal.

By the time of sunset he had reached the edge of the forest, in the very hour at which its life awakened. As he passed into its shadow he was conscious of this, as of a faint stirring in many millions of awakened leaves suddenly aware of his presence. In this he found nothing sinister. He was only filled with a wonder which had never come to him in moments less intense at the existence of these countless multitudes of green living creatures to whom the power of motion was denied. He was impressed with the patience and helplessness of vegetable life, seeing an aged and enormous tree strangled where it grew by the writhing coils of some green parasite. And yet it seemed to him that life must be far easier for a tree than for a man. A light breeze, herald of the evening, threw the plumes of the forest edge into tossing confusion. The ways of the wood were full of gentle sound.

And suddenly it was dark. He was on the edge of the nearest Waluguru village, the home of the mission boy, Hamisi. He did not want all the people of the forest to know of his errand; but blundering in the dark he found himself under the shadow of their bandas, and seeing that concealment was useless, he entered the circle of the village. The sound of his step set up a small commotion among their goats, who were folded within a boma of thorns, but no human shape came to welcome him in the village. He went to the door of the headman’s hut, expecting to find the man M’zinga, who had stolen his chisel. But M’zinga was not there, nor any of the wives of M’zinga. And this struck him as strange; for only a little time before the youngest of these women had given birth to a baby, whom it was his ambition to baptize. He tried another hut. All were empty. The village was empty and stank more foully than if it had been crammed with Waluguru. It was as if some plague had stricken its people, leaving nothing behind but the stench of corruption.

He pushed on. In a little while he came to the M’ssente river, whose crossings he now knew so well. By this time his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom of the forest, so that when he came to the felled tree which served him for a bridge he was astonished at the amount of light which still lingered in the sky and its faint reflections cast upwards from that swift, dark water. Lingering here a moment, entranced by the sound of the stream and the glimpse of open sky, his eye was surprised by a sudden gleam of silver. It was the broken image of the new moon’s silver sickle. He raised his eyes to the sky in which that pale and lovely shape was rising. He watched her sailing upwards through the indigo air. And while he watched, it seemed to him that other eyes must have seen her. In the distance, over towards Kilima ja Mweze, he heard the throbbing of a drum.

At length he came to the village at which he had first surprised the devil dance. This, too, was empty, empty and stinking. He wondered why it was that Waluguru villages smelt so horrible at night. Where had the people of all these villages assembled? The words of Isaiah returned to him: “The new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies I cannot away with. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth.” And the baffling sound of drums drew nearer. On every side he heard the throbbing of drums. It was as though all the drums of Africa had been gathered together for this assembly. Every moment it seemed to him that the night grew more suffocating. He felt afraid of the darkness, as children are afraid. . . .

He had come to that thinner zone of the forest in which the terraced walks which had puzzled Eva began. And now it seemed to him that the wood was full of more than shadows. On every side of him, in the darkness, he heard the rustle of bodies moving through the leaves. He was conscious of the smell of the castor oil with which the Waluguru smear their limbs. Sometimes he heard the sound of heavy breathing and once or twice a laugh or a stifled cry. A terrible and bewildering experience. He could see nothing; and yet he knew that the darkness was crowded with men and women hurrying to and fro, who heeded him no more than if he had been a shadow, and were as intangible as shadows themselves.

Nor was this all; for it seemed to him that this atmosphere of hidden evil—for assuredly it was a devilish thing—aroused in him a curious excitement. It was as though there were in his composition nerve-endings of which his senses had never been cognisant, and his mind never master, which were responding against his will to these ancient and most subtle stimuli. He didn’t feel sure of the self of which he thought he had explored the utmost hidden recesses. Perhaps it was the hypnotic influence of the drums’ monotonous rhythm; perhaps some special enchantment hidden in this darkness full of whispers and breathings and stifled cries. He understood now what the old writers had experienced when they invented a devil, an incarnation of the spirit of evil. He wanted to turn his back and run away from the whole adventure. He lay in the grass and prayed.

Thus fortified, he struggled on, climbing the zigzag path which skirted the SabÆan terraces. In the act of climbing he was happily less conscious of that populous darkness. In front of him many lights flickered through the trees. The noise of the drums grew very near. Suddenly, rounding a corner in the twisting way, he found himself on the edge of an open expanse, a wide shoulder of the hill, from which the light had come. For fear of being discovered he dropped down on his stomach in the grass. He slipped, and the blades at which he clutched cut his hands. In the middle of that shoulder of the hill stood the circular building of undressed stone which had astonished Eva on the night of her visit to the House of the Moon; but here there was no longer mystery or desertion; the open ground was crowded with black men and women. From his place of concealment in the spear-grass he could look straight through the gateway in the outer wall to the circular kiln which rose in the centre of the building. Here a fierce fire of wood was burning, the core, indeed, of all that buzzing activity. Towards it the men and women of the Waluguru, whom he had heard moving and panting in the darkness, were carrying bundles of dry fuel. They ran to and fro like the black ants, which the Swahili call maji ya moto (boiling water), from the seething noise which they make when they are disturbed. Even so this welter of the Waluguru boiled and sweated; and to add to the fantastic horror of the scene, which resembled some ancient picture of a corner in hell, the flames in the central kiln crackled and flared, casting immense shadows from the black forms which leapt around them, flinging tongues of light to search the dark sky and lighten the swaying crowns of the forest trees. Sometimes, in this upper darkness, the vagrant lights would pick out the wings of pale birds that fluttered there. These were the doves which had nested within crevices of the walls.

But what most deeply filled the heart of James with dread was the expression of the faces of the naked men and women who danced about the flame. They were not the faces, the pitiable human masks of the Waluguru, but the faces of devils. He saw the transformed features of men whom he knew well: the mouth of the mission boy Hamisi, opened wide in horrible laughter, the red eyes of the headman, M’zinga. M’zinga was carrying the stolen chisel, waving it as his muscles twitched to the rhythm of the drums. He danced right up to the mouth of the kiln, then suddenly collapsed before it, hacking at himself with the sharpened edge till his legs streamed with blood. James could not see the end of this horror, for a company of sweating fuel-bearers from the depths of the forest swarmed before him, pushing the crowd to right and left. They threw the branches which they had carried on the fire. There followed a hissing of sap, for the boughs were green, and a cloud of smoke spouted from the chimney of the kiln. At the crackling of the furnace the fuel-bearers shouted for joy, scattering in the crowd of women, some of whom they dragged away into the edge of the forest. The acrid wood-smoke made the eyes of James smart.

And now the furnace was so heated that the stones which lined it shone with a white heat. No more loads of fuel were brought to it from the outer woods, and though the drumming never ceased, it seemed as though the wilder ecstasy of the dancers had worn itself out. They lay stretched out, many of them, on the sandy ground in attitudes of abandonment and fatigue, their sweaty bodies shining like wet ebony. James noticed a thing which he had not seen before: a group of women, swathed in the black cloth, which the Waluguru affect, who had been sitting patiently on the right hand of the opening in the temple wall. The nearest of them he recognised as that slim girl the wife of the headman M’zinga; in her arms, held tightly to her breast, she carried her baby. From time to time she covered it with her black cotton cloth to shield its face from the scorching fire.

Already James had guessed what was coming. Standing at the side of the furnace door, he saw a tall man in white. He heard a whisper of the word Sakharani . . . Sakharani. In a moment another figure had leapt out into the light. It was the headman, M’zinga, still dripping blood from his most terrible mutilation. He pulled his baby from the arms of its mother. She clung to it, but the other women tore at her arms, and the rest of the Waluguru snarled. He held the child high above his head in the face of the furnace. The Waluguru shouted. For the moment the sacrifice of Ashtoreth was forgotten. And the white figure of Godovius was Moloch, the king.