HILLYARD'S MESSENGER
Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of
April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder. From time to time his
shikari would lead his camels and camp-servants out on to an open
clearing on the high river bank and announce a name still marked upon
the maps. Once there had been a village here, before the Kalifa sent his
soldiers and herded the tribes into the towns for his better security.
Now there was no sign anywhere of habitation. The red boles of the
mimosa trees, purple-brown cracked earth, yellow stubble of burnt grass,
the skimming of myriads of birds above the tree-tops and shy wild
animals gliding noiselessly in the dark of the forest--there was nothing
more now. It seemed that no human foot had ever trodden that region.
Hillyard's holiday was coming to an end, for in a month the rainy season
would begin and this great park become a marsh. He went fluctuating
between an excited eagerness for a renewal of rivalry and the
interchange of ideas and the companionship of women; and a reluctance to
leave a country which had so restored him to physical well-being. Never
had he been so strong. He had recaptured, after his five years of London
confinement, the swift spring of the muscles, the immediate response of
the body to the demand made upon it, and the glorious cessation of
fatigue when after arduous hours of heat and exertion he stretched
himself upon his camp-chair in the shadow of his tent. On the whole he
travelled northwards reluctantly; until he came to a little open space
ten days away from the first village he would touch.
He camped there just before noon, and at three o'clock on the following
morning, in the company of his shikari, his skinner and his donkey-boy
he was riding along a narrow path high above the river. It was very
dark, so that even with the vast blaze of stars overhead, Hillyard could
hardly see the flutter of his shikari's white robe a few paces ahead of
him. They passed a clump of bushes and immediately afterwards heard a
great shuffling and lapping of water below them. The shikari stopped
abruptly and seized the bridle of Hillyard's donkey. The night was so
still that the noise at the water's edge below seemed to fill the world.
Hillyard slipped off the back of his donkey and took his rifle from his
boy.
"_Gamus!_" whispered the shikari.
Hillyard almost swore aloud. There was a creek, three hours' march away,
where the reed buck came down to drink in the morning. For that creek
Hillyard was now making with a little Mannlicher sporting rifle--and he
had tumbled suddenly upon buffalo! He was on the very edge of the
buffalo country, he would see no more between here and the houses of
Senga.
It was his last chance and he had nothing but a popgun! He was still
reproaching himself when a small but startling change took place. The
snuffling and lapping suddenly ceased; and with the cessation of all
sound, the night became sinister.
The shikari whispered again.
"Now they in their turn know that we are here." He enveloped the
donkey's head in a shawl that he was carrying. "Do not move," he
continued. "They are listening."
Shikari, skinner, donkey-boy, donkey and Hillyard stood together,
motionless, silent. Hillyard had come out to hunt. Down below the herd
in its dumb parliament was debating whether he should be the hunted.
There was little chance for any one of them if the debate went against
them. Hillyard might bring down one--perhaps two, if by some miraculous
chance he shot a bullet through both forelegs. But it would make no
difference to the herd. Hillyard pictured them below by the water's
edge, their heads lifted, their tails stiffened, waiting in the
darkness. Once the lone, earth-shaking roar of a lion spread from far
away, booming over the dark country. But the herd below never stirred.
It no more feared the lion than it feared the four men on the river bank
above. An hour passed before at last the river water plashed under the
trampling hoofs.
Hillyard threw his rifle forward, but the shikari touched him on the
arm.
"They are going," he whispered, and again the four men waited, until the
shikari raised his hand.
"It will be good for us to move! They are very near." He looked towards
the east, but there was no sign yet of the dawn.
"We will go very cautiously into the forest. We shall not know where
they are, but they will know everything we are doing."
In single file they moved from the bank amongst the mimosas, the donkey
with his head covered, still led by the boy. Under the cavern of the
branches it was black as pitch--so black that Hillyard did not see the
hand which the shikari quietly laid upon his shoulder.
"Listen."
On his left a branch snapped, ahead of them a bush that had been bent
aside swished back on its release.
"They are moving with us. They are all round us," the shikari whispered.
"They know everything we do. Let us wait here. When the morning breaks
they will charge or they will go."
So once again the little party came to a halt. Hillyard stood listening
and wondering if the morning would ever come; and even in that time of
tension the habit of his mind reasserted its sway. This long, silent
waiting for the dawn in the depths of an African forest with death at
his very elbow--here was another sharp event of life in vivid contrast
with all the others which had gone before. The years in London, the
letter-box opposite the Abbey where he had posted his manuscripts at
three in the morning and bought a cup of coffee at the stall by the
kerb--times so very close to him--the terms at Oxford, the strange
hungry days on the quays of Spain, the moonlit wanderings on the
footpath over the rustic ridge and up the hill, when he composed poems
to the moon and pithy short, great thoughts--here was something fresh to
add to them if he didn't go down at daybreak under the hoofs of the
herd! Here was yet a further token, that out of the vicissitudes of his
life something more, something new, something altogether different and
unimagined was to come, as the crown and ultimate reason of all that had
gone before. Once more the shikari's hand touched him and pointed
eastwards. The tree-trunks were emerging from the darkness. Beyond them
the black cup of the sky was thinning to translucency. Very quickly the
grey light widened beyond this vast palisade of trees. Even in here
below the high branches, it began to steal vaporous and dim. About them
on every side now the buffalo were moving. The shikari's grip tightened
on Hillyard's arm. The moment of danger had come. It would be the smash
of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees
kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled
horns until long after he was dead, or--the new test and preparation to
add to those which had gone before!
Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.
"They are off"; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the
sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against
the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the
buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible. Then silence came again for a
few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the
morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets
stormed the stars.
Hillyard drew a breath.
"Let us go on," he said.
They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that
morning smote upon his eyes. A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen
donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out
among the tree-boles.
Hillyard looked at his shikari. But the shikari neither spoke nor
altered the regularity of his face. Hillyard put no question in
consequence. The Arab was ten days' journey from the nearest village
and, even so, his back was turned towards it. He was moving from
solitude into solitude still more silent and remote. It was impossible.
Hillyard's eyes were playing him false.
He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the
vision would have gone. But there was the Arab still nearer to them and
moving with a swift agility. A ray of sunlight struck through the
branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something
the man carried--a carbine with a brass hammer. And the next moment a
sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive
him. For he heard the slapping of the Arab's loose slippers upon the
hard-caked earth.
Oh yes, the man was real enough. For the shikari suddenly swerved from
the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped. The two men
talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted.
Hillyard lit his pipe.
"Who is it, Hamet?" he cried, and the shikari turned with his companion
and came back.
"It is the postman," he said as though the delivery of letters along the
Dinder River were the most commonplace of events.
"The postman!" cried Hillyard. "What in the world do you mean?"
"Yes," Hamet explained. "He carries letters between Abyssinia and Senga
on the Blue Nile. He is now on his way back to Abyssinia."
"But how long does it take him?" Hillyard asked in amazement.
"He goes and returns once a year. The journey takes him four months each
way unless he meets with a party shooting. Then it takes longer for he
goes with the party to get meat."
Hillyard stared at the Arab in amazement. He was a lean slip of a man,
almost as black as a negro, with his hair running back above the
temples, and legs like walking-sticks. He stood wreathed in smiles and
nodding confirmation of Hamet's words. But to Hillyard, with the
emotions of the dark hour just past still shivering about him, he seemed
something out of nature. Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the
carbine from the postman's hand. It was an ancient thing of Spanish
manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.
"But this can't be of any use," he cried. "Is the man never attacked?"
Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at
all; and interpreted the conversation.
"No. He has only once fired his rifle. One night--oh, a long way farther
to the south--he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey
in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away. You
must know that all these little Korans he carries on his arms and round
his neck have been specially blessed by a most holy man."
The postman's shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck were circled about by
chaplets on which little wooden Korans were strung. He fingered them and
counted them, smiling like a woman displaying her jewels to her less
fortunate friends.
"So he is safe," continued Hamet. "Yes, he will even have his picture
taken. Yes, he can afford to suffer that. He will stand in front of the
great eye and the machine shall go click, and it will not do him any
harm at all. He has a letter for you." Hamet dropped from his enthusiasm
over the wonderful immunity of the postman from the dangers of
photography into a most matter-of-fact voice.
"A letter for me? That's impossible," cried Hillyard.
But the Arab was thrusting his hand here and there in the load on the
donkey's back and finally drew out a goatskin bag. Hillyard, like other
Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the
inefficiency of all Postmasters-general. A blight fell upon such
persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest
caricatures of bureaucrats. It could not be that the postal service was
now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance. Yet the Arab
drew forth a sealed envelope and handed it to Hillyard. And it bore the
inscription of his name.
Oh, but it bore much more than that! It was written in a hand which
Hillyard had not seen for seven years, and the mere sight of it swept
him back in a glory of recollections to Oxford, its towers and tall
roofs, which mean so much more to the man who has gone down than to the
youth who is up. The forest, with its patterns of golden sunlight and
its colonnades of trees crowding away into darkness, was less visible
than those towers to Hillyard, as he stood with the envelope in his
hand. Once more he swung down the High and across the Broad from a
lecture with a ragged gown across his arm. Merton and the House, New
College and Magdalen Tower--he saw the enchanted city across Christ
Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington,
and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy
used to roam. For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell.
He tore it open and read:
"_Some one in London is asking for you. Who it is I don't
know. But the message came through in a secret cipher and it
might be important. I think you should pack your affs. and
hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you._"
Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.
"He will find food in our camp," he said to Hamet, with a nod towards
the postman. "We may as well go on."
Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that
day. The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon
the camels. The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house
of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to
gather. He had one of the green volumes of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne"
in his pocket, but this morning the splendid Four for once did not
enchain him. Who was it in London who wanted him--wanted him so much
that cipher telegrams must find him out on the banks of the Dinder
River? Was this letter the summons to the something more and something
different? Was the postman to Abyssinia the expected messenger? The
miracle of that morning predisposed him to think so.
He sat thus for an hour, and then stepping daintily, with timid eyes
alert, a tall reed-buck and his doe came through the glade towards the
water. But they did not drink; they waited, cropping the grass.
Gradually, through a long hour, others gathered, tawny and yellow, and
dappled-brown, and stood and fed until--perhaps a signal was given,
perhaps a known moment had come--all like soldiers at a command, moved
down to the water's edge.
Six nights later Hillyard camped at Lueisa, near to that big tree under
which it is not wise to spread your bed. He took his bath at ten o'clock
at night under the moon, and the water from the river was hot. He
stretched himself out in his bed and waked again that night after the
moon had set, to fix indelibly in his memory the blazing dome of stars
above his head, and the Southern Cross burning in a corner of the sky.
The long, wonderful holiday was ended. To-morrow night he would sleep in
a house. Would he ever come this way again?
In the dark of the morning he struck westwards from the Dinder, across a
most tedious neck of land, for Senga and the Blue Nile.