Nothing but Etcham’s fever of solicitude could have taken him in five
days over the track. It took him eight days to retrace with full
knowledge of it and our party to help. We could not have done it in
seven, and Etcham urged us on, in a repressed fury of anxiety, no mere
fever of duty to his chief, but a real ardor of devotion, a glow of
personal adoration for Stone which blazed under his dry conventional
exterior and showed in spite of him.
We found Stone well cared for. Etcham had seen to a good, high thorn
_zareeba_ round the camp, the huts were well built and thatched
and Stone’s was as good as their resources would permit. Hamed Burghash
was not named after two Seyyids for nothing. He had in him the making
of a sultan. He had kept the Mang-Battu together, not a man had slipped
off, and he had kept them in order. Also he was a deft nurse and a
faithful servant.
The two other Zanzabaris had done some creditable hunting. Though all
were hungry, the camp was far from starvation.
Stone was on a canvas cot and there was a sort of collapsible
camp-stool-table, like a Turkish tabouret, by the cot. It had a
water-bottle and some vials on it and Stone’s watch, also his razor in
its case.
Stone was clean and not emaciated, but he was far gone; not
unconscious, but in a daze; past commanding or resisting anyone.
He did not seem to see us enter or to know we were there. I should
have recognized him anywhere. His boyish dash and grace had vanished
utterly, of course. But his head was even more leonine; his hair was
still abundant, yellow and wavy; the close, crisped blond beard he had
grown during his illness did not alter him. He was big and big-chested
yet. His eyes were dull and he mumbled and babbled mere meaningless
syllables, not words.
Etcham helped Van Rieten to uncover him and look him over. He was in
good muscle for a man so long bedridden. There were no scars on him
except about his knees, shoulders and chest. On each knee and above
it he had a full score of roundish cicatrices, and a dozen or more on
each shoulder, all in front. Two or three were open wounds and four or
five barely healed. He had no fresh swellings except two, one on each
side, on his pectoral muscles, the one on the left being higher up and
farther out than the other. They did not look like boils or carbuncles,
but as if something blunt and hard were being pushed up through the
fairly healthy flesh and skin, not much inflamed.
“I should not lance those,” said Van Rieten, and Etcham assented.
They made Stone as comfortable as they could, and just before sunset we
looked in at him again. He was lying on his back, and his chest showed
big and massive yet, but he lay as if in a stupor. We left Etcham with
him and went into the next hut, which Etcham had resigned to us. The
jungle noises were no different there than anywhere else for months
past, and I was soon fast asleep.
V
Sometime in the pitch dark I found myself awake and listening. I could
hear two voices, one Stone’s, the other sibilant and wheezy. I knew
Stone’s voice after all the years that had passed since I heard it
last. The other was like nothing I remembered. It had less volume than
the wail of a new-born baby, yet there was an insistent carrying power
to it, like the shrilling of an insect. As I listened I heard Van
Rieten breathing near me in the dark, then he heard me and realized
that I was listening, too. Like Etcham I knew little Balunda, but I
could make out a word or two. The voices alternated with intervals of
silence between.
Then suddenly both sounded at once and fast, Stone’s baritone basso,
full as if he were in perfect health, and that incredibly stridulous
falsetto, both jabbering at once like the voices of two people
quarreling and trying to talk each other down.
“I can’t stand this,” said Van Rieten. “Let’s have a look at him.”
He had one of those cylindrical electric night-candles. He fumbled
about for it, touched the button and beckoned me to come with him.
Outside of the hut he motioned me to stand still, and instinctively
turned off the light, as if seeing made listening difficult.
Except for a faint glow from the embers of the bearers’ fire we were in
complete darkness, little starlight struggled through the trees, the
river made but a faint murmur. We could hear the two voices together
and then suddenly the creaking voice changed into a razor-edged,
slicing whistle, indescribably cutting, continuing right through
Stone’s grumbling torrent of croaking words.
“Good God!” exclaimed Van Rieten.
Abruptly he turned on the light.
We found Etcham utterly asleep, exhausted by his long anxiety and the
exertions of his phenomenal march and relaxed completely now that the
load was in a sense shifted from his shoulders to Van Rieten’s. Even
the light on his face did not wake him.
The whistle had ceased and the two voices now sounded together. Both
came from Stone’s cot, where the concentrated white ray showed him
lying just as we had left him, except that he had tossed his arms above
his head and had torn the coverings and bandages from his chest.
The swelling on his right breast had broken. Van Rieten aimed the
center line of the light at it and we saw it plainly. From his flesh,
grown out of it, there protruded a head, such a head as the dried
specimens Etcham had shown us, as if it were a miniature of the head
of a Balunda fetish-man. It was black, shining black as the blackest
African skin; it rolled the whites of its wicked, wee eyes and showed
its microscopic teeth between lips repulsively negroid in their red
fullness, even in so diminutive a face. It had crisp, fuzzy wool on its
minikin skull, it turned malignantly from side to side and chittered
incessantly in that inconceivable falsetto. Stone babbled brokenly
against its patter.
Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty.
When he was awake and saw it all, Etcham stared and said not one word.
“You saw him slice off two swellings?” Van Rieten asked.
Etcham nodded, chokingly.
“Did he bleed much?” Van Rieten demanded.
“Ve’y little,” Etcham replied.
“You hold his arms,” said Van Rieten to Etcham.
He took up Stone’s razor and handed me the light. Stone showed no sign
of seeing the light or of knowing we were there. But the little head
mewled and screeched at us.
Van Rieten’s hand was steady, and the sweep of the razor even and true.
Stone bled amazingly little and Van Rieten dressed the wound as if it
had been a bruise or scrape.
Stone had stopped talking the instant the excrescent head was severed.
Van Rieten did all that could be done for Stone and then fairly grabbed
the light from me. Snatching up a gun he scanned the ground by the cot
and brought the butt down once and twice, viciously.
We went back to our hut, but I doubt if I slept.