We were going down some unseen slope, I remember, when the change
occurred. My horse was plunging a good deal, and I had to use both
hands to prevent his getting away from me. The man on my right seemed
to be having similar difficulty with his animal. Strange! they were
all quiet enough a minute ago, and now----"Look out!" The words were
shot at me by No. 3 of the section as, with his horse completely out of
control, he raced past me into the darkness and the dust. "Rummy," said
the man on my right, "I don't know what's the matter with the beasts.
They're scared out of their lives, that I'll swear--Good Lord!" His
ejaculation was spoken away from me, for his pony had swung suddenly
about with a quick, frightened movement, and was now staring into the
blackness from whence we had come. A moment later and my own beast had
spun around. We waited in silence.
"Where's T----?" said the other man suddenly. (T---- was of my section,
and I seemed vaguely to remember that he had been riding behind us.)
If my memory was right, then T---- was somewhere out there in the
blackness, and the--the--whatever it was that was frightening our
horses was out there with him. It was not a nice thought. We waited
again, and I found myself wondering what it would sound like to call
out T----'s name, when out of the darkness came the sound of a snort,
followed by what seemed like the frenzied plunging of some heavy beast.
Then a voice uplifted itself in earnest supplication, and the voice was
the voice of T----.
He seemed to be calling upon the name of a god not altogether
orthodox. I caught, here and there, strong expressions of his
disapproval of some person or thing. The voice was growing louder and
clearer, and it became obvious that T---- was being borne towards us at
a high rate of speed. The pale sheet of the sky held him in silhouette
for an instant, and then he flung down upon us in a perfect flood of
invective.
I had never heard him talk quite like that before. It was really,
and almost literally, illuminating, and we reined aside in a sort
of reverential awe to let him pass. He did so on the wings of some
of the most golden eloquence that it has ever been my lot to hear.
"Goddam!" I heard distinctly, followed by a string of words which I
do not know how to spell; and then some fine but strictly censorable
phrases, out of which I collected fragments that made a disconnected
yet interesting whole. In this way I was puzzled for some moments by
the many variations of the word camel. "Camel!" I found myself saying,
"camel!" when "Look!" said the other man suddenly, and I looked, and
saw striding down upon us from the same pale sheet of sky that had held
T---- only a few minutes before three gaunt, long-legged shadows.
"The camels!" said the other man, and I looked at him, and he looked at
me, and what there was in that shrouding darkness to tell each other
what the other thought I do not know; but, as our frenzied horses
waltzed and plunged away from the acrid fear behind them, we clung
to our saddles with both hands, and rocked and choked with insane
laughter. Later, when we met T----, leading a dead-lame pony out of the
rocks, we broke out afresh, and between paroxysms, told him something
of our admiring respect. Indeed, a man who could steer a madly racing
pony through pitch darkness and over and between rocks, and at the
same time conduct ably a rhetorical discourse on the (presumed)
illegitimacy of camels and the moral degeneracy of men who ride upon
them, well deserved some more tangible expression of merit than was
held in mere words. Iron crosses have been given for less.
The remainder of that ride left to us only recurring fits of laughter,
dust, and noise and darkness, and when the camels came too near, which,
in spite of concise injunctions to them to go "to another place," they
often did, spasms of wrathful and sulphurous abuse.
A note in my diary says of our return to Luderitzbucht: "Surprised to
find myself looking on the beastly place as 'home!'"
But was there real cause for surprise?
(The narrator here begins to tell about "Alarums and Excursions" along
the African deserts; a wild night ride; hunting the Germans like big
game; and numberless anecdotes that put the African fever into one's
blood.)