Part 8 (1/2)
Instantly everyround the fire leapt to his feet and rushed in the direction of the echoes of Janee's yell It was ien sleep and know nothing We will follow you Your father is with us”
Then I bolted back into the bushes, which Hans had reached already
A minute or two later ere clear of the hubbub and nearing our own camp, Hans remarked to me sententiously, ”The Great Medicine worked well, Baas, but not quite well enough, for what ainst a woman's folly?”
”It was our own folly we should blairl would shriek, and taken precautions”
”Yes, Baas, we ought to have killed her too, for nothing else would have kept her quiet,” replied Hans in cheerful assent ”Noe shall have to pay for our o on”
At this aas ith the others, and every living thing within a mile or two had also heard Janee's yell, and briefly told our story When he learned how near we had been to rescuing his daughter, Robertson groaned, but Uaas only said, ”Well, there are two less of the men-eaters left to deal with Still, for once your wisdom failed you, Macumazahn When you had found the caht all attack it together Had we done so, before the dawn there would not have been one of them left”
”Yes,” I answered, ”I think that my wisdom did fail me, if I have any to fail But come; perhaps wethe road But e reached the place it was too late, for all that reer, or of Inez and Janee, were the two dead men e had killed, and in that darkness pursuit was impossible So ent back to our own ca up the trail, only to find ourselves confronted with a new trouble All the Strathmuir half-breeds e had left behind as useless, had taken advantage of our absence and that of the Zulus, to desert They had just bolted back upon our tracks and vanished into the sea of bush What becaain, but my belief is that these cowardly fellows all perished, for certainly not one of them reached Strathmuir
Fortunately for us, however, they departed in such a hurry that they left all their loads behind theuns they carried Evidently Janee's yell was the last strahich broke the back of such nerve as renal of attack by hordes of cannibals
As there was nothing to said or done, since any pursuit of these curs was out of the question, we s as they were It proved a simple business From the loads we selected such articles as were essential, ammunition for the most part, to carry ourselves-and the rest we abandoned, hiding it under a pile of stones in case we should ever couns they had thrown aside we distributed aht that they possessed them, so far as I was concerned, added another terror to life The prospect of going into battle with those wild axe off bullets in every direction was not pleasant, but fortunately when that crisis came, they cast them away and reverted to the weapons to which they were accustomed
Now all this sounds much like a tale of disaster, or at any rate of failure It is, however, wonderful by what strange ways good results are brought about, soaccidents ence superior to our own, to fulfil through us purposes of which we know nothing, and frequently, be it admitted, of a nature sufficiently obscure Of course this is a fatalistic doctrine, but then, as I have said before, within certain limits I am a fatalist
To take the present case, for instance, the whole Inez episode at first sight ht appear to be an excrescence on my narrative, of which the object is to describe how I met a certain very wonderful woman and what I heard and experienced in her company Yet it is not really so, since had it not been for the Inez adventure, it is quite clear that I should never have reached the home of this wo this becaht upon which Hans and I failed to rescue Inez we had nothe trail of the cannibals, who thenceforere never more than a few hours ahead of us and had no time to be careful or to attempt to hide their spoor Yet so fast did they travel that do ould, burdened and wearied as ere, it proved impossible to overtake theh scattered, rolling bush-veld of the character that I have described, but tending continually down hill When we broke ca a hasty ly plentiful, so that we did not lack food) the rising sun showed beneath us an endless sea of billowy ht could carry
To the north, however, it did coed fifty or sixty e fortress, which I knew must be one of those extraordinary in to volcanic action, that are to be met with here and there in the vast expanses of Central and Eastern Africa Being so distant it was iuessed ht reat mountain in which Zikali said the marvellous white Queen lived, and wondered whether it could be the saht be, that is, if such a place existed at all If so the map had shown it as surrounded by swahty swa the spoor of those Aed into a morass so vast that in all my experience I have never seen or heard of its like It was a veritable ocean of papyrus and other reeds, soh, so that it was impossible to see a yard in any direction
Here it was that the Aer ahead of us proved our salvation, since without theantic swamp there ran a road, as I think an ancient road, since in one or two places I saw stone hich must have been laid by man Yet it was not a road which it would have been possible to folloithout a guide, seeing that it also was overgroith reeds Indeed, the only difference between it and the surrounding sas that on the road the soil was comparatively firm, that is to say, one seldom sank into it above the knee, whereas on either side of it quagmires were often apparently bottomless, and what is more, partook of the nature of quicksand
This we found out soon after we entered the swaerness which seelected to keep his eye upon the spoor and stepped off the edge on to land that appeared to be exactly sireasy and tenacious aas and I were only twenty yards behind, yet by the tiulfed up to hisdown so rapidly that in another ot hi to him like the tentacles of an octopus After this ere ht; on the contrary, it curved about and soles, doubtless to avoid a piece of swamp over which it had proved impossible for the ancients to construct a causeway, or to follow some out-crop of harder soil beneath
The difficulties of that horrible place are beyond description, and indeed can scarcely be irew aes like to those of knives As Robertson and I wore gaiters we did not suffer so s were terribly cut about and in some cases lame
Then there were the mosquitoes which lived here by the million and all seemed anxious for a bite; also snakes of a peculiarly deadly kind were numerous A Zulu was bitten by one of them of so poisonous a nature that he died within three ht to his heart We threw his body into the swamp, where it vanished at once
Lastly there was the all-pervading stench and the intolerable heat of the place, since no breath of air could penetrate that forest of reeds, while a minor trouble was that of the multitude of leeches which fastened on to our bodies By looking one could see the creatures sitting on the under side of leaves with their heads stretched out waiting to attack anything that went by As wayfarers there could not have been numerous, I wondered what they had lived on for the last few thousand years By the way, I found that paraffin, of which we had a small supply for our hand-lamps, rubbed over all exposed surfaces, was to so wor like a dirty oil tin
During the day, except for the occasional rush of sos of the flocks of wildfowl passing over us froht it was different, for then the bull-frogs booreat swa birds uttered their weird cries Also there wereof areas of swaas
Strange lights, too, played about, will-o'-the-wisps or St Elhtened the Zulus very much, since they believed them to be spirits of the dead Perhaps this superstition had soend that ined that the ghosts of h here to accommodate those of the entire Zulu nation Any way they were much scared; even the bold witch-doctor, Goroko, was scared and went through incantations with the little bag of medicines he carried to secure protection for himself and his coaas hih he did inforht and did not care whether it ith man, or wizard, or spirit
In short, of all the journeys that I have e of the desert on our way to King Soloh this enormous sas theundertaken such a quest in a wild attempt to allay that sickness, or rather to quench that thirst of the soul which, I iine, at times assails most of those who have hearts and think or dream
For this was at the bottom of the business: this it hich had delivered me into the hands of Zikali, Opener-of-Roads, who, as now I a use of me for his private occult purposes He desired to consult the distant Oracle, if such a person existed, as to great schemes of his own, and therefore, to attain his end, s which I had been so foolish as to reveal to him, quite careless of what happened to me in the process [A bit narrow and uncharitable, this view It see him the Great Medicine-JB]
Well, I was in for the business and ht be After all it was very interesting and if there were anything in what Zikali said (if there were not I could not conceive what object he had in sending eese and ducks), itpretty well fever-proof I did not think I should die in that morass, as of course nine white e er and clearer
Nor did Hans, ith a childlike trust, pinned his faith to the Great Medicine This, he reh which he had ever travelled, but as the Great Medicine would never consent to be buried in that stinking h it some time I replied that this wonderful medicine of his had not saved one of our corave in the sameto do with the Medicine which was given to you, and to me who accompanied youthe Opener-of-Roads Therefore perhaps they will all die, except Uaas, whom you were told to take with you If so, what does it h there be but one Macuan by offending a snake and therefore it is quite natural that this snake's brother should have bitten the Zulu”
”If you are right, he should have bitten me, Hans”
”Yes, Baas, and so no doubt he would have done had you not been protected by the Great Medicine, and randfather been a snake-char on me as well The snakes know those that they should bite, Baas”
”So do thea handful of them ”The Great Medicine has no effect upon theh it pleases them to bite, the bites do us no harm, or at least not et out of these reeds of which I never want to see another, and Baas, please keep your rifle ready for I think I hear a crocodile stirring there”
”No need, Hans,” I remarked sarcastically ”Go and tell him that I have the Great Medicine”
”Yes, Baas, I will; also that if he is very hungry, there are some Zulus camped a few yards further down the road,” and he went solean to talk to them
”You infernal donkey!” I murmured, and drew my blanket over my head in a vain atte furiously with the saet to sleep
At last the swaan to slope upwards a little, with the result that as the land dried through natural drainage, the reeds grew thinner by degrees, until finally they ceased and we found ourselves on firreat mountain that I have mentioned, that noered above us, forbidden and majestic
I had made a little map in my pocket-book of the various twists and turns of the road through that vast Slough of Despond,thes On studying this at the end of that part of our journey I realised afresh how utterly impossible it would have been for us to thread that misty maze where a few false steps would always have meant death by suffocation, had it not been for the spoor of those A immediately ahead of us ere acquainted with its secrets Had they been friendly guides they could not have done us a better turn
What I wondered hy they had not tried to ambush us in the reeds, since our fires must have shown them that ere close upon their heels That they did try to burn us out was clear from certain evidences that I found, but fortunately at this season of the year in the absence of a strong wind the rank reeds were too green to catch fire For the rest I was soon to learn the reason of their neglect to attack us in that dense cover
They aiting for a better opportunity!
CHAPTER X
THE ATTACK
We won out of the reeds at last, for which I fervently thanked God, since to have crossed that endless uided, with the loss of only one ed fro wearied out, stopped for a while to rest and eat of the flesh of a buck that I had been fortunate enough to shoot upon their fringe Then we pushed forward up the slope, proposing to caht on the crest of it a ht we should escape fro, and obtain a clear view of the country ahead
Following the bank of a streath to this crest just as the sun was sinking Below us lay a deep valley, a fold, as it were, in the skin of the mountain, well but not densely bushed The woods of this valley climbed up the ave way to grassy slopes that ended in steep sides of rock, which were crowned by a black and frowning precipice of unknown height