"Who with?"
"Mr. Barrington," the boy told him, and added, "It is his wagon-track
which we have been following."
Norris rose from the ground, and walked straight ahead for the
distance of a hundred yards until he reached a jasmine bush, which
stood in a bee-line with the opening of his camp fence. Thence he
moved round in a semicircle until he came upon a wagon-track in the
rear of the camp, and, after pausing there, he went forward again, and
completed the circle. He returned to his wagon chuckling. Barrington,
he remembered, had been lost while travelling northwards to the
Zambesie; but the track stopped here. There was not a trace of it to
the north or the east or the west. It was evident that the boy had
chosen Barrington's last camping-ground as the site for his own, and
he discovered a comforting irony in the fact. He felt that he was
standing in Barrington's shoes.
That night, as he was smoking by the fire, he called out to the
Ma-ongwi boy. The lad came forward from his hut behind the wagon.
"Tell me how you lost him," said Norris.
"He rode that way alone after a sable antelope." The boy pointed an
arm to the southwest. "The beast was wounded, and we followed its
blood-spoor. We found Mr. Barrington's horse gored by the antelope's
horns. He himself had gone forward on foot. We tracked him to a little
stream, but the opposite bank was trampled, and we lost all sign of
him." This is what the boy said though his language is translated.
Norris remained upon this encampment for a fortnight. Blue
wildebeests, koodoos, elands, and gems-bok were plentiful, and once he
got a shot at a wart-hog boar. At the end of the fortnight he walked
round the ant-heap early one morning, and of a sudden plumped down
full length in the grass. Straight in front of him he saw a herd of
buffaloes moving in his direction down a glade of the forest a quarter
of a mile away. Norris cast a glance backwards; the camp was hidden
from the herd by the intervening ant-heap. He looked again towards the
forest; the buffaloes advanced slowly, pasturing as they moved. Norris
crawled behind the ant-heap on his hands and knees, ran thence into
the camp, buckled on a belt of cartridges, snatched up a 450-bore
Metford rifle, and got back to his position just as the first of the
herd stepped into the open. It turned to the right along the edge of
the wood, and the others followed in file. Norris wriggled forward
through the grass, and selecting a fat bull in the centre of the line,
aimed behind its shoulder and fired. The herd stampeded into the
forest, the bull fell in its tracks.
Norris sprang forward with a shout; but he had not run more than
thirty yards before the bull began to kick. It kneeled upon its
forelegs, rose thence on to its hind legs, and finally stood up.
Norris guessed what had happened. He had hit the bull in the neck
instead of behind the shoulders, and had broken no bones. He fired
his second barrel as the brute streamed away in an oblique line
southeastwards from the wood, and missed. Then he ran back to camp,
slapped a bridle on to his swiftest horse, and without waiting to
saddle it, sprang on its back and galloped in pursuit. He rode as it
were along the base of a triangle, whereas the bull galloped from the
apex, and since his breakfast was getting hot behind him, he wished
to make that triangle an isosceles. So he jammed his heels into his
horse's ribs, and was fast drawing within easy range, when the buffalo
got his wind and swerved on the instant into a diagonal course due
southwest.
The manoeuvre left Norris directly behind his quarry, and with a long,
stern chase in prospect. However, his blood was up, and he held on to
wear the beast down. He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a
casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his
knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the
horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose over his
right shoulder.
Suddenly the buffalo disappeared in a dip of the veld, and a few
moments later came again into view a good hundred yards further to the
south. Norris pulled his left rein, and made for the exact spot at
which the bull had reappeared. He found himself on the edge of a tiny
cliff which dropped twenty feet in a sheer fall to a little stream,
and he was compelled to ride along the bank until he reached the
incline which the buffalo had descended. He forded the stream,
galloped under the opposite bank across a patch of ground which had
been trampled into mud by the hoofs of beasts coming here to water,
and mounted again to the open. The bull had gained a quarter of a
mile's grace from his mistake, and was heading straight for a huge
cone of granite.
Norris recognised the cone. It towered up from the veld, its cliffs
seamed into gullies by the rain-wash of ages, and he had used it more
than once as a landmark during the last fortnight, for it rose due
southwest of his camp.
He watched the bull approach the cone and vanish into one of the
gullies. It did not reappear, and he rode forward, keeping a close eye
upon the gully. As he came opposite to it, however, he saw through the
opening a vista of green trees flashing in the sunlight. He turned his
horse through the passage, and reined up in a granite amphitheatre.
The floor seemed about half a mile in diameter; it was broken into
hillocks, and strewn with patches of a dense undergrowth, while here
and there a big tree grew. The walls, which converged slightly towards
an open top, were robed from summit to base with wild flowers, so that
the whole circumference of the cone was one blaze of colour.
Norris hitched forward and reloaded the rifle. Then he advanced slowly
between the bushes on the alert for a charge from the wounded bull;
but nothing stirred. No sound came to his ears except the soft padding
noise of his horse's hoofs upon the turf. There was not a crackle
of the brushwood, and the trees seemed carved out of metal. He rode
through absolute silence in a suspension of all movement. Once his
horse trod upon a bough, and the snapping of the twigs sounded like so
many cracks of a pistol. At first the silence struck Norris as merely
curious, a little later as very lonesome. Once or twice he stopped his
horse with a sudden jerk of the reins, and sat crouched forwards with
his neck outstretched, listening. Once or twice he cast a quick,
furtive glance over his shoulder to make certain that no one stood
between himself and the entrance to the hollow. He forgot the buffalo;
he caught himself labouring his breath, and found it necessary to
elaborately explain the circumstance in his thoughts on the ground of
heat.
The next moment he began to plead this heat not merely as an excuse
for his uneasiness, but as a reason for returning to camp. The heat
was intense, he argued. Above him the light of an African midday sun
poured out of a brassy sky into a sort of inverted funnel, and lay in
blinding pools upon the scattered slabs of rock. Within the hollow,
every cup of the innumerable flowers which tapestried the cliffs
seemed a mouth breathing heat. He became possessed with a parching
thirst, and he felt his tongue heavy and fibrous like a dried fig.
There was, however, one obstacle which prevented him from acting upon
his impulse, and that obstacle was his sense of shame. It was not so
much that he thought it cowardly to give up the chase and quietly
return, but he knew that the second after he had given way, he would
be galloping madly towards the entrance in no child's panic of terror.
He finally compromised matters by dropping the reins upon his horse's
neck in the unformulated hope that the animal would turn of its own
accord; but the horse kept straight on.
As Norris drew towards the innermost wall of granite, there was a
quick rustle all across its face as though the screen of shrubs and
flowers had been fluttered by a draught of wind. Norris drew himself
erect with a distinct appearance of relief, loosened the clench of his
fingers upon his rifle, and began once more to search the bushes for
the buffalo.
For a moment his attention was arrested by a queer object lying upon
the ground to his left. It was in shape something like a melon, but
bigger, and it seemed to be plastered over with a black mould. Norris
rode by it, turned a corner, and then with a gasp reined back his
horse upon its haunches. Straight in front of him a broken rifle lay
across the path.
Norris stood still, and stared at it stupidly. Some vague recollection
floated elusively through his brain. He tried to grasp and fix it
clearly in his mind. It was a recollection of something which had
happened a long while ago, in England, when he was at school.
Suddenly, he remembered. It was not something which had happened, but
something he had read under the great elm trees in the close. It was
that passage in _Robinson Crusoe_ which tells of the naked footprint
in the sand.
Norris dismounted, and stooped to lift the rifle; but all at once he
straightened himself, and swung round with his arms guarding his head.
There was no one, however, behind him, and he gave a little quavering
laugh, and picked up the rifle. It was a heavy lo-bore Holland, a
Holland with a single barrel, and that barrel was twisted like a
corkscrew. The lock had been wrenched off, and there were marks upon
the stock--marks of teeth, and other queer, unintelligible marks as
well.
Norris held the rifle in his hands, gazing vacantly straight ahead. He
was thinking of the direction in which he had come, southwest, and of
the stream which he had crossed, and of the patch of trampled mud,
where track obliterated track. He dropped the rifle. It rang upon a
stone, and again the screen of foliage shivered and rustled. Norris,
however, paid no attention to the movement, but ran back to that
object which he had passed, and took it in his hands.
It was oval in shape, being slightly broader at one end than the
other. Norris drew his knife and cleaned the mould from one side
of it. To the touch of the blade it seemed softer than stone, and
smoother than wood. "More like bone," he said to himself. In the side
which he had cleaned, there was a little round hole filled up with
mould. Norris dug his knife in and scraped round the hole as one
cleans a caked pipe. He drew out a little cube of mud. There was a
second corresponding hole on the other side. He turned the narrower
end of the thing upwards. It was hollow, he saw, but packed full of
mould, and more deliberately packed, for there were finger-marks in
the mould. "What an aimless trick!" he muttered vaguely.
He carried the thing back to the rifle, and, comparing them,
understood those queer marks upon the stock. They were the mark of
fingers, of human fingers, impressed faintly upon the wood with
superhuman strength. He was holding the rifle in his hands and looking
down at it; but he saw below the rifle, and he saw that his knees were
shaking in a palsy.
On an instant he tossed the rifle away, and laughed to reassure
himself--laughed out boldly, once, twice; and then he stopped with his
eyes riveted upon the granite wall. At each laugh that he gave the
shrubs and flowers rippled, and shook the sunlight from their leaves.
For the first time he remarked the coincidence as something strange.
He lifted up his face, but not a breath of air fanned it; he looked
across the hollow, the trees and bushes stood immobile. He laughed a
third time, louder than before, and all at once his laughter got hold
of him; he sent it pealing out hysterically, burst after burst, until
the hollow seemed brimming with the din of it. His body began to
twist; he beat time to his laughter with his feet, and then he danced.
He danced there alone in the African sunlight faster and faster, with
a mad tossing of his limbs, and with his laughter grown to a yell. And
as though to keep pace with him, each moment the shiver of the foliage
increased. Up and down, crosswise and breadthwise, the flowers were
tossed and flung, while their petals rained down the cliff's face in
a purple storm. It appeared, indeed, to Norris that the very granite
walls were moving.
In the midst of his dance he kicked something and stumbled. He
stopped dead when he saw what that something was. It was the queer,
mud-plastered object which he had compared with the broken rifle, and
the sight of it recalled him to his wits. He tucked it hastily beneath
his jacket, and looked about him for his horse. The horse was standing
behind him some distance away, and nearer to the cliff. Norris
snatched up his own rifle, and ran towards it. His hand was on the
horse's mane, when just above its head he noticed a clean patch of
granite, and across that space he saw a huge grey baboon leap, and
then another, and another. He turned about, and looked across to the
opposite wall, straining his eyes, and a second later to the wall on
his right. Then he understood; the twisted rifle, the finger marks,
this thing which he held under his coat, he understood them all. The
walls of the hollow were alive with baboons, and the baboons were
making along the cliffs for the entrance.
Norris sprang on to his horse, and kicked and beat it into a gallop.
He had only to traverse the length of a diameter, he told himself, the
baboons the circumference of a circle. He had covered three-quarters
of the distance when he heard a grunt, and from a bush fifty yards
ahead the buffalo sprang out and came charging down at him.
Norris gave one scream of terror, and with that his nerves steadied
themselves. He knew that it was no use firing at the front of a
buffalo's head when the beast was charging. He pulled a rein and
swerved to the left; the bull made a corresponding turn. A moment
afterwards Norris swerved back into his former course, and shot just
past the bull's flanks. He made no attempt to shoot them; he held his
rifle ready in his hands, and looked forwards. When he was fifty yards
from the passage he saw the first baboon perched upon a shoulder of
rock above the entrance. He lifted his rifle, and fired at a venture.
He saw the brute's arms wave in the air, and heard a dull thud on the
ground behind him as he drove through the gully and out on to the open
veld.
The next morning Norris broke up his camp, and started homewards for
Johannesburg. He went down to the Stock Exchange on the day of his
arrival, and chanced upon Teddy Isaacs.
"What's that?" asked Isaacs, touching a bulge of his coat.
"That?" replied Norris, unfastening the buttons. "I told you I would
bring back Barrington if I found him," and he trundled a scoured and
polished skull across the floor of the Stock Exchange.