ESCAPE
The elephant, with a heavy swinging gait, made its way through the
green shade of the forest. Hanging from its side Lursac, with wide open
eyes, shivered all over. Around him floated the stagnant, decaying
smell of the undergrowth, like the sickening and enervating atmosphere
of a hot greenhouse. The vegetation became thicker. A dull greenish
half-light, like an illumination at the bottom of the sea, seemed to
suck the color from the bushes and spread over the massed verdure a
uniform light as of the interior of a tomb.
Hours passed thus, and finally the light grew dimmer. An acrid mist
rising from the soil spread itself in long streamers and floated upward
like a pallid veil. Under the frondage the dusk became more sombre and
violent in tint; a shaft of reddish light struck through the branches,
lingered for a moment; then suddenly darkness spread over the mountain
and invaded the depths of the forest. The mahout continued to urge on
his beast. The voices of the night arose, and unknown cries came out of
the darkness. But now Pierre was delirious. Great phantoms, grotesque
and nameless, danced and fled before his eyes. Imaginary scenes rose up
before him, and with all his strength he tried to pursue them. He could
not sleep; he hung there motionless watching the peopled night before
him with fixed eyes....
In his waxen and rigid face only his eyes seemed to be still alive.
They stared straight in front with a burning gaze focussed in the far
distance. Now and again the strange shapes which inhabited the darkness
caused him to break into a terrified laugh. The suspension of his
reasoning powers had left him just a wounded animal clinging to life in
spite of everything, with nothing but a persistent instinct to guide
him.
Suddenly Father Ravennes, his head hanging loose and jerking with
the steps of the elephant, began to groan. His moans broke the heavy
silence of the night steadily, persistently, with a sound that was
gently monotonous. And this was the last noise which Pierre remembered
before falling into the depths of an unconsciousness as deep as death.
* * * * *
It was still this moaning that he heard when he came out of his
insensibility and had begun reaching towards life again. He opened his
eyes. It was day. Above his head he saw the leafy summit of a tree--the
only thing within his circle of vision--with branches of a green that
was almost black and leaves of a more vivid hue. He tried to move, to
sit up, but an intense weakness held him full length on the earth, his
backbone pressed to the cold damp soil and his face staring at the sky
and watching through the leaves the trailing streaks of gray cloud.
He did not understand it yet. What was he doing there? Why were these
trees all round him?
The groaning continued. Now and then it stopped, but went on again more
heavily. He turned his head in the direction of the sound and he found,
a few paces away from him, the missionary, his back supported against
the trunk of a tamarind, his eyes closed, his face livid, and his
half-open mouth emitting this endless moaning.
Suddenly his brain was flooded by a wave of remembrance which swept
away his passive acceptance of things as they were. He struggled to his
knees and cried out:
"Wanda!... Wanda!..."
Clutching the tree under which he had been lying, he managed to stand
up, but he had to cling to the trunk to prevent himself falling.
Leaning against it he cast a hesitating glance about him. He was on
the outside of the forest, opposite a narrow clearing which ended in
a definite opening, looking out upon a valley of which he was able to
see the further end stretching southward to the horizon. Close by him,
at his very feet, a ray of light struck down between two branches and
broke in fragments of gold on the patches of moss. The dense shadows of
the trees fell on the ground in parallel bars of black shade. A lizard,
pressed into the warm hollows of the rock, shrilled its short musical
cry. Dazed, and with flickering eyes, Lursac remained motionless.
The sun flamed overhead, flooding the scene beyond the forest with
merciless light. The radiant air seemed to vibrate.
The young man drew in one deep breath after another; the blood came
back to his face and he cried again:
"Wanda!... Wanda!..."
At the sound of his voice the priest opened his eyes and his groaning
became louder and more heart-rending. Pierre shook his head, trying
with every ounce of strength that was in him to conquer his weakness.
He managed to walk heavily and slowly in the direction of the
missionary. When he got close up to him he felt like fainting at the
terrible sight which he saw.
The whole side of the priest's tunic was stiff with coagulated blood.
In the middle of this, through the rents made by the Moï sword, two
ghastly wounds could be seen covered with ants,--the terrible red ants
of the Lao-ese forest--which swarmed to the attack in a column along
the leg of the helpless man.
Before the horror of the martyrdom which the missionary was undergoing
and must have suffered for hours, Lursac shuddered and had to clench
his teeth to prevent himself from crying out. He ran at the insects
and dispersed them with stamps and blows, sweeping them away with his
hands and tramping them into the ground. Then he pushed the priest
a little further off to protect him from their attacks and laid him
gently down. Tenderly raising the edges of the tears in the clothes
he exposed the two wounds: a great deep slash in the side through
which at every respiration the blood pumped afresh, and down the leg a
long jagged tear. With a strip from the lining of his military tunic,
Pierre cleaned the wounds, sweeping out the voracious insects which
still clung there, and did his pitiful best to make the dying man
comfortable. It was when he saw his own hands bathed in the blood of
his friend like those of a butcher that once again a mortal sickness
came over him and he was on the point of fainting.
The priest closed his eyes; he was no longer groaning. He murmured:
"Thank you.... I am not in pain now...."
Trying to raise his hand, he whispered:
"My cross."
Pierre, taking off the rosary of black wood which hung from the
missionary's neck, put it between his fingers. The pale hand fumbled
with the beads until it reached the silver cross, which it gripped
caressingly. His features suddenly relaxed and took on an appearance of
peaceful sweetness.
"And you ... you? ..." he muttered.
Pierre understood his thought; tears rose to his eyes.
He shrugged his shoulders wearily.
"Don't worry about me," he said, "I will take you home....
Afterwards ... afterwards ... I do not know...."
The priest moved his head; his voice became stronger, almost clear:
"No.... I am done for.... I am dying ... here in the heart of this
country which I have loved so much and where I have suffered so
much...."
His gray beard suddenly seemed to become darker against the livid
pallor of his face.
"And then, I have seen," he said, "that wonderful thing, the Red Gods:
a prehistoric tribe such as used to be thirty thousand years ago...."
A scarcely visible smile fluttered on his colorless lips.
"My God," he whispered, "pardon me!... This is my last attack of
pride...."
He gave a groan; the movement having sent a spasm of torture through
his side, he shut his eyes. His wax-like lids became gradually mauve,
then white with a whiteness that seemed unreal and almost transparent.
Pierre bent over him, heard him murmuring softly, peacefully:
"Since it is here that you have willed that I should die.... Thy holy
will be done, O God!..."
Then in a voice now vague and indistinct he said once more:
"Sweet Jesus, give me rest!..."
His words became still more indistinct and confused, and he repeated
several times:
"Rest ... rest...."
And then he was silent. The pale and shrunken hand which pressed the
crucifix against his lips stiffened, slipped, and fell back on his
breast.
* * * * *
For a long time Pierre remained on his knees in contemplation
before this ascetic, sad, waxen face now smiling with a curious
smile--peaceful, tender and serene--a last gleam from this great sweet
and kindly soul....
Then in a sort of unconscious torpor, against which vague images
floated, flickered and vanished, he thought of the conventional rites;
but the earth in which he would have dug a bed for this poor martyred
body was cold and hard, full of tangled roots and crossed by veins of
rock, and he had to content himself with drawing the corpse to the
foot of a tree and covering it with a thick mass of leaves, branches
and moss. From the branch of the tree above he hung the rosary of the
priest, and over the rough and ready tomb the silver crucifix swung
softly in the breeze.
When Pierre had finished this last office for his dead friend, he sat
down and wiped the sweat from his face. He stayed motionless, delving
among the remembrances of his childhood for the words of a prayer, but
nothing came--only a single phrase kept recurring to his mind, and he
repeated it mechanically over and over again:
"Our Father which art in Heaven.... Our Father which art in Heaven...."
The rest of the invocation had lost itself in the troubled night of
forgetfulness, in a mingling and changing wave of images, thoughts and
feelings which rushed into his mind, passed through it and fled....
Wanda.... The Post.... Redeski.... The temple.... The ravine of
Gondwana.... The aurochs.... The mammoths.... Jieng.... The battle in
the sanctuary.... The caverns.... And then Wanda again.... Wanda....
Wanda.... Wanda...!
He stood up: an immense despair fell upon him. He looked again at the
simple tomb in which the missionary was sleeping; then he went. His
legs bent under him with weakness, his brain reeled, as he walked
towards the edge of the clearing. At the same moment a bell in the
distance began to sound slowly. Stupefaction struck Pierre motionless,
then a shock drove him forwards. A bell: houses, ... white men, ...
help, ... life.... He ran forward stumbling, and, suddenly opening his
arms wide, he fell on his knees.
At the bottom of the green, level valley, which he saw before him and
recognized immediately, there was no longer any Post 32.... Its wrecked
palisades showed great breaches. Against the background of the canal,
which flowed peaceably on its way as usual, the burned piling showed
its blackened stumps: of the huts which had sheltered Wanda and himself
so recently, of the sheds which served as lodgings for the riflemen, of
the stables and the guardhouse, nothing was left but five gray patches
out of which stuck blackened beams.
But on the horizon, in the midst of its green peaceful oasis the bell
of the Mission still sounded, and across the military post, which the
people of the forest had just destroyed for the third time, its frail
metallic voice was wafted on the wind, ringing the evening Angelus.