THE BROKEN CAMP
The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming
and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor
interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of
mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was
not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the
reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself,
"What will come after?" The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no
fear.
Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have
been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any
manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other,
and rooting the camp to pieces, had passed on, not knowing that they had
left a living man behind them.
As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes
to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was
borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he
could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron;
they had divorced themselves from his will power, they held him there
despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because
they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety
on their own account, and he had to _think himself free_. There was no use
in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little
by little, they (fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped
down and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him and he
fell.
He was a very brave man and a very strong man, but now, just released from
Death, now that all danger was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen
and heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in maelstrom action,
Life in its loudest and most appalling phase, and he felt as a man might
feel to whom the gods had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we
call the sun.
He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which
a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay
glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his
shaving-glass, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet
unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils
trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; yet this thing, useless and fragile,
had been carefully preserved, watched over by some god of its own.
He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him
turn his head.
A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight.
It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had
tried to save. Like the looking-glass, and protected, perhaps, by some god
of his own, the columns of destruction had passed him by. The column of
cows with their calves had passed him on the other side. Old hunters say
that elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Félix, though
awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain like a dead man as the
storm swept by.
He was very much alive, now, and seemingly unconcerned as he came toward
Adams, stood beside him, and looked around.
"All gone dam," said Félix. And volumes would not have expressed the
situation more graphically. Then the savage, having contemplated the scene
for a moment, rushed forward to a heap of stuff--broken boxes and what
not--dragged something from it and gave a shout.
It was the big elephant rifle, with its cartridge-bag attached. The stock
was split, but the thing was practically intact. Félix waved it over his
head and laughed and whooped.
"Gun!" yelled Félix.
Adams beckoned to him, and he came like a black devil in the moonlight--a
black devil with filed teeth and flashing eyeballs--and Adams pointed to
the tree and motioned him to leave the gun there and follow him. Félix
obeyed, and Adams started in the direction in which he had seen Berselius
flung.
It was not far to walk, and they had not far to search. A hundred yards
took them to a break in the ground, and there in the moonlight, with arms
extended, lay the body of the once powerful Berselius, the man who had
driven them like sheep, the man whose will was law. The man of wealth and
genius, great as Lucifer in evil, yet in courage and heroism tremendous.
God-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably
great and compelling.
Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with
incurious eyes looking on.
Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and
stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous
injury to the brain. Adams tore open the collar of the hunting shirt; then
he examined the limbs.
Berselius, flung like a stone from a catapult, had, unfortunately for
himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the
injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with
blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very
slightly for a space nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but
the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner
table of the skull no doubt was splintered, hence the brain mischief.
There was only one thing to be done--trephine. And that as swiftly as
possible.
Everything needful was in the instrument-case, but had it escaped
destruction?
He raised Berselius by the shoulders. Félix took the feet, and between
them they carried the body to the tree, where they laid it down.
Before starting to hunt for the instruments, Adams bled Berselius with his
penknife. The effect was almost instantaneous. The breathing became less
stertorous and laboured. Then he started to search hither and thither for
the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the
tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know
anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so
Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre
of ground. The case had almost to a certainty been smashed to pieces;
still, there was a chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He
remembered the shaving-glass, and how it had been miraculously preserved,
and started to work. He came across a flat oblong disc of tin; it had been
a box of sardines, it was now flattened out as though by a rolling mill.
He came across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole in the
ground, as if saying, "Have a drink." It was intact. He knocked the head
off and, accepting the dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it,
and went on.
He came across long strips of the green rot-proof stuff the tents had been
made of. They looked as though they had been torn up like this for
rib-roller bandages, for they were just of that width. He came across half
a mosquito-net; the other half was sailing away north, streaming from the
tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, and giving him, no doubt, a
sufficiently bizarre appearance under the quiet light of the moon and
stars.
There were several chop boxes of stores intact; and a cigar box without a
crack in it, and also without a cigar. It looked as though it had been
carefully opened, emptied, and laid down. There was no end to the
surprises of this search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and
mortar, things easily smashable untouched.
He had been searching for two hours when he found the trephine. It lay
near the brass lock of the amputating case, attached to which there were
some pieces of mahogany from the case itself.
A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of the screw you have a
cup of steel. This steel cup has a serrated edge: it is, in fact, a small
circular saw. Applying the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle
with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from the outer table
of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes out of a sheet of dough with a
"cutter."
Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as
paper and brittle as glass, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all
events, it was not there.
He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back to the tree beneath
which the body of Berselius was lying. Berselius, still senseless, was
breathing deeply and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the
scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the pool for water to
bathe the wound; but the pool was trodden up into slush, and hours must
elapse before the mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy,
fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with his handkerchief torn
into three pieces bound it up.
There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down with his back to the
tree to wait for dawn.
The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bitterness of being
there with hands willing and able to help, yet helpless. A surgeon is as
useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are
without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied,
but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the
situation.
Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat
watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Félix,
lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping
savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant
rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.