And here will I, in honour of thy love,
Dwell by thy grave, forgetting all those joys
That former times made precious to mine eyes.
_The Faithful Shepherdess_.
Ten months later Roger sat swathed in blankets under mosquito netting,
steering a boat upstream. He was in the cold fit of a fever. The bows
of the boat were heaped with the cages of laboratory animals and with
boxes, on the top of which a negro sat, singing a song. The singer
clapped gravely with his hands to mark the time. "Marumba is very far
away," he sang. "Yes. It is far away, and nobody ever got there." At
times, pausing in his song to lift a hand to Roger, he pointed out a
snag or shoal. At other times the rowers, lifting their paddles
wearily, sang for a few bars in chorus, about the bones on the road to
Marumba. Then the chorus died; the paddles splashed; the tholes
grunted. The boat lagged on into the unknown, up the red, savage
river, which loitered, and steamed, and stank, like a river of a
beginning earth.
Lionel, heaped with blankets, lay at Roger's feet. His teeth were
chattering. The wet rag round his forehead had slipped over his eyes.
The debile motion of the hand which tried to thrust the rag away, so
that he might see, told of an intense petulant weakness. By him lay a
negro, wasted to a skeleton, who watched Roger with a childish grave
intentness out of eyes heavy with death.
The boat ground slowly past a snag. Roger, raising himself upon a box,
looked out painfully over the river bank to the immense distance
beyond, where, in a dimness, mists hung. To the right, a mile or two
from the river, was forest, sloping to an expanse of water, intensely
blue. Beyond the water was grass sloping up to forest. The forest
jutted out, immense, dark, silent. Nothing lay beyond it but forest,
trees towering up, trees fallen, uprooted, rotting, a darkness, a green
gloom. Over it was the sky, of hard, bright blue metal, covered with
blazing films. Outside it, like captains halted at the head of a
horde, were solitary, immense trees, with ruddy boles. To each side of
them, the forest stretched, an irregular wilderness of wood, grey,
rather than green, in the glare aloft; below, darker. The water at the
foot of the slope opened out in bays, ruffled by the wind, shimmering.
Reeds grew about the bays. A cluster of tall, orange-blossomed
water-plants hid the rest from Roger's sight as the boat loitered on.
To the left it was a sometimes swampy plain-land, reaching on into the
mists, with ants' nests for milestones. Little gentle hills rose up,
some of them dotted with thorn-trees. They were like the stumps of
islands worn away by the river, when, long ago, it had brimmed that
plain-land from the forest to the far horizon.
Far ahead, to the left of the river, Roger noticed a slightly larger
hill. It held his gaze for a few minutes. It stood up from the plain
exactly like a Roman camp which he had visited in England long before,
one Christmas Day. He liked to look at it. There was comfort in
looking at it. It was like a word from Europe, that hill beyond there,
greyish in the blinding light. It was like a Roman camp, like military
virtue, order, calm, courage, dignity. He needed some such message.
He was in command of a shipload of suffering. He was wandering on into
the unknown, in charge of dying men. Smoke was rising from below the
hill, a single spire of smoke. He hailed the singer.
"Merrylegs," he cried, "what is the smoke there?"
"Jualapa," said the man, standing up to look. "Jualapa."
"It can't be Jualapa," said Lionel petulantly, struggling to lift his
blankets. "Oh, stop that noise, Roger. It shakes my head to pieces."
"Jualapa," cried the rowers excitedly. "Jualapa." They dropped their
paddles. Standing on the thwarts they peered under the sharps of their
hands at the rising smoke. They rubbed their bellies, thinking of
meat. One of them, beating his hands together, broke into a song about
Jualapa.
Roger, stumbling forward, shaken by sickness, bade them to give way,
quietly. The jabbering died down as the tholes began again to grunt.
Merrylegs, still clapping his hands, broke into another song.
Jualapa is near. Yes, Jualapa is near. Not like Marumba.
We will eat meat in Jualapa. Much meat. Much meat.
The men of Little Belly will eat meat in Jualapa.
"Shut your silly head, Merrylegs," cried Roger angrily. The song broke
off. Merrylegs began to tell the bow-oar what meat there would be in
Jualapa. He said that there would be cattle, and perhaps a diseased
cow among them. The rowing seemed to freshen a little. The boat
dragged on a little quicker.
"How are you, Lionel?" Roger asked. It was a foolish question.
"Oh, for God's sake don't ask silly questions," said Lionel very
weakly. "Do leave me alone."
For answer, Roger gently renewed the compress round the sick man's
head. From the thirst which was torturing him he guessed that his
fever's hot fit would soon begin. He prayed that it might keep off
until they had reached the smoke. They were probably nearing some
village. They might camp at the village. Only he would have to be
well when they reached the village. He would have to get Lionel
ashore, into some comfortable hut. He would have to feed him there
with some strong comforting broth. Before he could do that, he would
have to see the village headman. He would have to look after the
bearers. The boat would have to be moored. Some of her gear would
have to be unloaded.
There could be no thought of going on, upstream, to Jualapa, in their
present state. A native had told them, the day before, that Jualapa,
three days' journey upstream, was stricken with sleeping sickness.
"All were sleeping," he said. "Men, women, and little children. The
cattle were not milked at Jualapa." It was the first time that they
had heard of the disease since leaving the coast. They had decided to
attempt Jualapa.
They were both suffering from fever. They would have been glad to camp
for a few days before pushing on; but Lionel forbade it. The rowers
were getting homesick. Three of them had contracted dysentery. He
felt that if they called a halt anywhere their men would desert them.
The important thing was to push on, he said, to carry the men so far
that they would be afraid to run. If the men deserted after the
leaders had engaged the disease, well and good, there would be the work
to do. But if they deserted before that, the expedition would end
before Roger took his first lumbar puncture. It was the last sensible
decision Lionel had been able to make. His fever had recurred within
the hour. Since then he had been dangerously ill, so ill, and with
such violent changes of temperature, that his weakness, now that the
fever lifted, frightened Roger.
Roger shook and chattered, trying to think. He was ill; so ill that he
could not think clearly. The horrible part of it, to him, was to be
just clear enough in his head to fear to change Lionel's decision. He
wanted to change for Lionel's sake; but with this fever smouldering in
his brain, surging and lifting, like a hot blast withering him, the
plan seemed august, like a law of the Medes and Persians. He was
afraid of changing. At last, in a momentary clearing of the head, he
made up his mind to change. He would anchor. They would halt at the
smoke. They would land and camp. Nothing could be done till the
leaders were cured. If the men deserted, he would trust to luck to be
able to hire new men. He could not go on like this; Lionel might die.
The fever closed in upon his mind again, surging and withering. The
air seemed strangely thick. Merrylegs wavered and blurred. The boat
grounded on a mud-bank, and brushed past some many-shimmering reeds
with a long swish. The dying negro, stirred by some memory, which the
noise had awakened in him, raised himself faintly, asking something.
He fell back faint, closing his eyes, then opening them. He beat with
one hand, jabbering the name Mpaka. His teeth clenched. He was in the
death agony. One of the stroke-oars, clambering over the boxes in the
stern-sheets, beat the dying man upon the chest. He was beating out
the devil, he explained. He soon grew tired. He shouted in the sick
man's ear, laughed delightedly at his groans, and went forward to
explain his prowess. He broke out into a song about it.
Kilemba has a big devil in his belly.
Big devil eat up Kilemba. Eat all up.
But Muafi a strong man. Very strong man. Devil no good.
Not eat Muafi.
They swept round a bend, where crocodiles, like great worm-casts,
sunned and nuzzled, with mud caking off their bellies. The boat passed
into a broad, above which, the hill like a Roman camp rose up. Pink
cranes stood in the shallows. Slowly, one of them rose aloft, heavily
flagging. Another rose, then another, then another, till they made a
pinkish ribbon against the forest. Following the line of their flight
Roger saw a few delicate deer leave their pasture, startled by the
starting of the cranes. They moved off daintily, looking uneasily
behind them. Soon they broke into a run.
On the left bank, in a space of poor soil, covered with shingle by a
freshet, some vultures cowered and sidled about a dead thing. Roger
stared stupidly at them. Something of a warning of death moved through
the surging of his fever. He said to himself that there was death
here. Words spoke in his brain, each word like a fire-flash. "No
white man has ever been here before. You are the first. Take care.
There is death here." Some vague fear of possible war, so vague that
he was not quite certain that it was not a memory of a war-scare at
home, made him look to his revolver. He thrust up the catch with his
thumb, and stared at the seven dull brass discs pulled slightly forward
by the extractor. There were seven, and we are seven, and there were
seven planets. The fever made him stare at the opened breech for a
full minute.
Out of some tall water-plants, whose long, bluish-grey leaves looked
very cool in the glare of heat, came flies. They came to the attack
with a whirling fierceness like clegs. They were small, brown,
insignificant flies. They were tsetse flies. The boat pulled out into
the open to avoid them. After a few more minutes Roger called upon the
rowers to stop rowing.
He was in the middle of the broad, looking at the left bank, where a
trodden path led to the water's edge. For many centuries men and
beasts had watered there. The path had worn a deep rut into the bank.
What struck Roger about it was its narrowness. It was the narrow track
of savages. The people who made it had used it fearfully, one at a
time, full of suspicion, like drinking deer. Their fear had had a kind
of idealism about it. It might truly be said of those nervous drinkers
that when they drank, they drank to the good health of their State.
Even in his fever, the sight of the path shocked Roger with a sense of
the danger of life in this place. What was the danger? What was the
life?
Beyond the track, at a little distance from the river, was a thick
thorn hedge surrounding a village. From the midst of the village a
single stream of smoke arose. It went up straight for a foot or two,
behind the shelter of the hedge. Then it blew down gustily, in
wavering puffs. There was no other sign of life in the village. A few
hens were picking food in the open. A cow, standing with drooped head
above the corpse of her calf, awaited death. Her bones were coming
through her skin, poor beast. There were black patches of flies upon
her. Three vultures waited for her. One of them was stretching his
wings with the air of a man yawning. Vultures were busy about a dead
cow in the middle distance. Dark heaps, further off, had still
something of the appearance of cows. The men, looking earnestly about
from the tops of the boxes, jabbered excitedly, pointing. Roger
unslung his binoculars and stared at the silent place. He could see no
one. There were dead cows, a dying cow, and those few clucking hens.
He wondered if there could be an ambush. The grass was tall enough, in
the clumps, to shelter an enemy; but the wild birds passed from clump
to clump without fear. In a bare patch two scarlet-headed birds were
even fighting together. Their neck feathers were ruffled erect. They
struck and tugged. They rose, flapping, to cuff each other with their
wings. Leaping aloft they thrust with their spurs. A hen, less
brilliantly coloured, watched the battle. But for these birds the
place was peaceful. The wind ruffled the grass; the smoke was gusty;
one of the poultry crooned with a long gurgling cluck.
Something made Roger look from the village to the hill like a Roman
camp. It glistened grey in the sun-blaze. The dance of the air above
it was queer, almost like smoke. He stared at it through his glasses.
After a long look he turned to stare into the water to rest his eyes.
"I am mad," he said to himself. "I am dreaming this. Presently I
shall wake up." He looked again. There could be no doubt of it. The
hill was covered with a grey stone wall at least thirty feet high.
There, about three-quarters of a mile away, was the ruin of an ancient
town, as old, perhaps, as the Pharaohs. There was no doubt that it was
old. Parts of it, undermined by burrowing things, or thrust out by
growing things, were fallen in heaps. Other parts were overgrown
twelve feet thick, with vegetation. Trees grew out of it. A few cacti
upon the wall-top were sharply outlined against the sky. On the
further end of the wall there was a fire-coloured blaze, where some
poisonous weed, having stifled down all weaker life, triumphed in
sprawling yellow blossoms, spotted and smeared with drowsy juice.
There were dense swarms of flies above it as Roger could guess from the
movements of the birds across the path. He watched the ruin. There
was no trace of human occupation there. No smoke shewed there.
Apparently the place had become a possession for the bittern. Wild
beasts of the forests lay there, owls dwelt there, and satyrs danced
there. It was as desolate as Babylon at the end of Isaiah xiii.
He looked at the men to see what effect the ruin had upon them. They
did not look at it. They had the limited primitive intelligence, which
cannot see beyond the facts of physical life. They were looking at the
village, jabbering as they looked.
"What are we stopping for?" said Lionel.
"There's a village," said Roger. "It seems to have cattle plague."
Lionel struggled weakly to a sitting position, and looked out with
vacant eyes.
"There's a ruin on the hill, there," said Roger.
"Plague and ruin are the products of this land," said Lionel. "Don't
stand there doddering, Naldrett. Find out what's happening here."
"Look here, you rest," said Roger with an effort. "Just lie back on
the blankets here, and rest."
"How the devil am I to rest when you won't keep the gang quiet?"
"You just close your eyes, Lionel," said Roger. "Close them. Keep
them closed." He sluiced a rag in the shallow water. "Here's a new
compress for you."
He ordered the men to pull in to the watering-place, while he looked
about in what he called the toy box for presents for the village chief.
He took some copper wire, a few brass cartridge shells, some green
beads, some bars of brightly coloured sealing wax, a doll or two, of
the kind which say, "Mamma," when stricken on the solar plexus, a
doll's mirror, a knife, an empty green bottle, and a tin trumpet. He
tilted a white-lined green umbrella over Lionel's head. He slipped
over the side as the boat grounded. Merrylegs followed him, carrying
the presents. They slopped through shallow water, and climbed the bank.
Merrylegs, clapping his hands loudly, called to the villagers in the
Mwiri dialect that a king, a white man, a most glorious person, was
advancing to them. Roger asked him if he had heard of this village at
their stopping-place the day before. No, he said, he had never heard
of this village. It was a poor place, very far away; he had never
heard of it. He called again, batting with his hands. No answer came.
Roger, looking anxiously about, saw no sign of life. No sign shewed on
the city wall. A new vulture, lighting by the dying cow, eyed him
gravely, without enthusiasm. One of those already there flapped his
wings again as though yawning. "Merrylegs," said Roger, "we must go
into the village." He shifted round his revolver holster, so that the
weapon lay to hand. They skirted the zareba till they came to the low
hole, two feet square, which led through the thorns into the town. The
mud of the road was pounded hard by the continual passing of the
natives. Fragments of a crudely decorated pottery were trodden in here
and there. Lying down flat, Merrylegs could see that the stakes which
served as door to the entrance, were not in place inside the stockade.
The visitor was free to enter. "Think all gone away," said Merrylegs.
"Slave man he catch."
Roger did not now believe in the theory of slave man.
"It is nonsense," he said. "Nonsense. There must be death here." He
stood by the gate, breathing heavily, not quite knowing, from time to
time, what he was doing, at other times knowing clearly, but not
caring. Little things, the crawling of a tick, the cluck of a hen, the
noise of his own breath, seemed important to his fever-clogged brain.
"I'll go in," he said, at last.
"Not go in," said Merrylegs promptly. "Perhaps inside. Perhaps make
him much beer. All drunk him." He called again in Mwiri, but no
answer came. A hen, perhaps expecting food, came clucking through the
hole, cocking her eyes at the strangers. Roger, finding a bit of
biscuit in his pocket, dropped it before her. She worried it away from
his presence, and gulped it down gluttonously before the other hens
could see.
Roger knelt down. Peering up the tunnel he tried to make out what lay
within. He could not see. The entrance passage had been built with a
bend in the middle for the greater safety of the tribe. For all that
he could know, a warrior might lie beyond the bend, ready to thrust a
spear into him. He did not think of this till a long time afterwards.
He began to shuffle along the passage on all fours. Nothing lay beyond
the bend. He clambered to his feet inside the village. "Come on in,
Merrylegs," he called. Merrylegs came. They looked about them.
The village formed an irregular circle about two hundred yards across.
Inside the thorn hedge it was strongly palisaded with wooden spikes,
nine feet high, bound together with wattle, and plastered with a
mud-dab. The huts stood well away from the palisade. They formed a
rough avenue, shaped rather like a sickle. There were thirty-five huts
still standing. The frames of two or three others stood, waiting
completion. One or two more had fallen into disrepair. Several
inhabitants were in sight, both men and women.
They were sitting on the ground, propped against the palisades or the
walls of their huts, in attitudes which recalled the attitude of the
negro, seen long before in the photograph in the Irish hotel. One of
the men, rising unsteadily to his feet, walked towards them for some
half-dozen paces, paused, seemed to forget, and sank down again, with a
nodding head. A child, rising up from a log, crawled towards a hen.
The hen, suspecting him, moved off. The child watched it strut away
from him as though trying to remember what he had planned to do to it.
He stood stupidly, half asleep. Slowly he laid himself down upon the
ground, with the movement of an old man careful of the aches of his
joints. It seemed to Roger that the child had never really been awake.
It was the slow deliberate movement of the child which convinced him,
through his fever, that he was in the presence of the enemy. "These
people have sleeping sickness," he said. The words seemed to echo
along his brain, "sleeping sickness, sickness, sickness." This was
what he had come out to see. Here was his work cut out for him. This
was sleeping sickness. Here was a village down with it. It was
shocking to him. Had he been in health it would have staggered him.
These sleepers were never going to awake. All these poor wasting
wretches were dying. He had never seen death at work on a large scale
before. He checked a half-formed impulse to bolt by stepping forward
into the enclosure, into the reek of death. The place was full of
death. He drove Merrylegs before him. Merrylegs knew the disease.
Merrylegs had no wish to see more of it. He was for bolting. "Go on,
Merrylegs," said Roger. "Sing out to them."
Merrylegs got no answer. "Only dead men here," he said. "Young men,
no catch him, run."
"Come on round the huts then," said Roger. "We'll see how many have
run." They went to the hut from which the smoke rose.
An old, old hideous woman was crouched there over a little fire. She
was trembling violently, and mumbling with her gums. She cowered away
from Roger with a wailing cry, very like the cry of a rabbit caught by
a weasel. "Tiri," she said, "tiri," expecting death. Merrylegs asked
her questions; Roger tried her. It was useless. She did not
understand them. She mumbled something, shaking her poor old head,
whimpering between the words. Roger gave her a doll, which she hugged
and whimpered over. She was like a child of a few months old in the
body of a baboon. They tried another hut.
From the number of food pots stored there, Roger guessed that this hut
had once belonged to a chief. Two women lay there, one in the last
stages of the sickness, very ill, and scarcely stirring, the other as
yet only apathetic. She blinked at them as they entered the hut,
without interest, and without alarm, just like an animal. She might
once have been a comely woman, but the drowsiness of the sickness had
already brought out the animal in her face. Her ornaments of very thin
soft gold shewed that she was the wife of an important person; she may
perhaps have been the chief's favourite. She did not understand
Merrylegs' dialect, nor he hers. Possibly, as sometimes happens in the
disease, she had no complete control over her tongue. Roger thought
that she might be thirsty. He poured water for her. She did not
drink. It occurred to Roger then that she might be welcoming the
disease, giving way to it without a struggle, after losing husband and
child. He could see that she had had a child, and there was no child
there. "Poor woman," he said to himself. "Poor wretch." They went
out into the open again.
At the further end of the village Roger found evidence which helped him
to make a theory of what had happened. Just outside the palisade were
the bones of a few bodies, which, as he supposed, were those who had
died, after the first breaking out of the epidemic. If the epidemic
had begun two months before, as seemed likely, these men and women must
have been dead for about a fortnight. The sickness and mortality had
steadily increased since then. The able, uninfected inhabitants, had
at last migrated together. They had gone off with their arms and
cattle to some healthier place, leaving the infected to die. He could
make no other explanation. Many of the huts were deserted. In others,
still living sleepers lay among corpses. Three young men, a boy, and
an old man were the liveliest of the remaining inhabitants. Roger had
only to look at their tongues to see that they, too, were sealed for
death. The tongue moved from the root with a helpless tremor. Their
lymphatic glands were swollen. They themselves were under no delusions
about their state. The cloud was on them. They would not speak unless
they were spoken to with some sharpness. They were gloomily waiting
until the ailment should blot everything away from them. Merrylegs
tried to understand them; but gave it up. "Very poor men," he said.
"Know nothing." They were some relic (or outpost) of a strange tribe,
speaking an unknown tongue. Perhaps they were the descendants of some
little wandering band, separated from its parent tribe, by war,
pestilence, or mischance. They had had their laws, their arts, their
customs. They had even thriven. The game of life had gone pleasantly
there. Life there had been little more than a sitting in the sun,
between going to the river for a drink and to the patch for a mealie.
The beauties had sleeked themselves with oil, and the strong ones had
made themselves fat with butter. They had lived "naturally," like
plants or animals, sharing the wild things' immunity from ailments.
They were completely adjusted. Now some little change had altered
their relations to nature. Something had brought the trypanosome. Now
they died like the animals, deserted by their kind.
The first shock of the sight of this harvest of death came upon Roger
dully, through the shield of his fever. He did not realise the full
horror of it. Nor was he conscious of the passage of time. He stayed
in the village for a full hour before he returned to the boat. In that
hour he made rough notes of the twenty-nine cases still present there.
Sixteen of them, he hoped, might yield to treatment. The others were
practically dead already from wasting. The preparation of the notes,
brief as they were, was a great drain upon his strength. The fever was
gaining on him. He found himself staring vacantly between the writing
of two words. His brain was a perpetual surging tumult. His eyes
seemed to burn in their sockets. He remembered Lionel with a great
start. "Lionel," he repeated. "I must tell Lionel. We shall stop
here."
Outside the infected village he looked for tracks. A track led towards
the ruin. Another led away across the plain. Both were as narrow as a
horse's girth, and beaten as hard as earthenware. The old tracks of
cattle crossed them. Merrylegs, looking about upon the ground, cried
out that the tribe had gone over the plain with their cattle ten or
eleven days before. He pointed to marks on the ground. Roger took his
word for it.
He climbed into the stern-sheets of the boat, feeling as though hot
metal were being injected into his joints. "How are you now, Lionel?"
he asked. "You're looking pretty bad. This is a plague spot. They've
got the sickness here. They're dying of it."
"Couldn't you have come and told me before this?" said Lionel. "I've
been lying here not knowing whether you were dead or alive."
"I'd a lot of huts to examine," he answered. "What do you think? We
had better stop here, eh? We had better make this our station. The
first thing I shall do will be to get you into a bed."
"That's like you," said Lionel. "You make plans when I'm sick and
can't veto them. My God, if I'd known it was going to be like this!
Well, I'll never work with a griff again."
"It's time for your medicine," said Roger stolidly, in order to change
the subject. He poured the white powder into a cigarette paper, and
handed it to the patient.
"Don't you dare to give me medicine," Lionel answered, knocking the
dose away. "I believe you're poisoning me. I've watched you. You're
poisoning me."
"Don't say things like that, Lionel," said Roger. "You're awfully
tired, I know, but they hurt. I wish I could get you well," he mused.
"It's not so easy as you seem to think," he added.
"What isn't?"
"Life here."
"That's because you're such a silly ass. I'm all right. I only want
to be left alone. Well. Get the men ashore, can't you? Get some sort
of a camp pitched."
"I am going to," said Roger. "I am going to camp on the hill there for
to-night, among the ruins." He gave some orders.