THE LOST GUIDE
They improvised a shelter against the tree with the tent cloth over the
sleeping man, and then Adams set Félix to work splicing and mending the
tent pole. The two porters, who had stuffed themselves with food, were
looking better and a shade more human; the glossy look was coming back to
their skins and the fright was leaving their faces. He set them to work,
piling the recovered stores in the bit of shade cast by the tree and the
improvised tent, and as they did so he took toll of the stuff.
He judged that there was enough provisions to take them back along the
road they had come by. The hunt was ended. Even should Berselius recover
fully in a couple of days, Adams determined to insist on a return. But he
did not expect any resistance.
It was a long, long, wearisome day. The great far-stretching land,
voiceless except just over there where birds were still busy and would be
busy till all was gone; the cloudless sky, and the shifting shadow of the
tree; these were the best company he had. The blacks were not companions.
The two porters seemed less human than dogs, and Félix poisoned his
sight.
His dislike for this man had been steadily growing. The thought that
Berselius had risked his life for this creature, and the remembrance of
how he had pointed to the dead man with a grin and said "B'selius," had
brought matters to a head in the mind of Adams, and turned his dislike
into a furious antipathy. He sat now in what little shadow there was,
watching the figure of the Zappo Zap.
Félix, the tent-pole finished, had slunk off westward, hunting about, or
pretending to hunt for salvage. Little by little the black figure dwindled
till it reached where the birds were discoursing and clamouring, and Adams
felt his blood grow cold as he watched the birds rise like a puff of black
smoke and scatter, some this way, some that; some flying right away, some
settling down near by.
The black figure, a tiny sketch against the sky, wandered hither and
thither, and then vanished.
Félix had sat him down.
Adams rose up and took the elephant rifle, took from the bag a great solid
drawn brass cartridge, loaded the rifle, and sat down again in the shade.
Berselius was sleeping peacefully. He could hear the even respirations
through the tent cloth. The porters were sleeping in the sun as only
niggers can sleep when they are tired; but Adams was feeling as if he
could never sleep again, as he sat waiting and watching and listening to
the faint whisper, whisper of the grass as the wind bent it gently in its
passage.
A long time passed, and then the black sketch appeared again outlined on
the sky. It grew in size, and as it grew Adams fingered the triggers of
the gun, and his lips became as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them
and keep on licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his
palate dry as his tongue.
Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had come to speaking
distance. Adams advanced to meet him. There was a dry, dull glaze about
the creature's lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight
of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to where the birds were
again congregating, cried "Gr-r-r," as a man cries to a dog that has
misbehaved, and flung the rifle to his shoulder.
Félix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, and bounding as a buck
antelope bounds with a leopard at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering
report of the great rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust
broke from the ground near the black bounding figure. Adams, cursing
himself for having missed, grounded the gun-butt and stood watching the
dot in the distance till it vanished from sight.
He had forgotten the fact that Félix was the guide and that without him
the return would be a hazardous one; but had he remembered this, it would
have made no difference. Better to die in the desert twenty times over
than to return escorted by _that_.
It was now getting toward sundown. The great elephant country in which the
camp lay lost had, during the daytime, three phases. Three spirits
presided over this place; the spirit of morning, of noon, and of evening.
In towns and cities, even in the open country of civilized lands, these
three are clad in language and bound in chains of convention, reduced to
slaves whose task is to call men to rise, to eat, or sleep. But here, in
this vast place, one saw them naked--naked and free as when they caught
the world's first day, like a new-minted coin struck from darkness, and
spun it behind them into night.
Under the presidency of these three spirits the land was ever changing;
the country of the morning was not the country of the noon, nor was the
country of the noon the country of the evening.
The morning was loud. I can express it in no other terms. Dawn came like a
blast of trumpets, driving the flocks of the red flamingoes before it,
tremendous, and shattering the night of stars at the first fanfare. A
moment later, and, changing the image, imagination could hear the sea of
light bursting against the far edge of the horizon, even as you watched
the spindrift of it surging up to heaven and the waves of it breaking over
ridge and tree and plain of waving grass.
Noon was the hour of silence. Under the pyramid of light the land lay
speechless, without a shadow except the shadow of the flying bird, or a
sound except the sigh of the grass, touched and bent by the wind, if it
blew.
Evening brought with it a new country. There was no dusk here, no beauties
of twilight, but the level light of sunset brought a beauty of its own.
Distance stood over the land, casting trees farther away, and spreading
the prairies of grass with her magic.
The country, now, had a new population. The shadows. Nowhere else,
perhaps, do shadows grow and live as here, where the atmosphere and the
level light of evening combine to form the quaintest shadows on earth. The
giraffe has for his counterpart a set of shadow legs ten yards long, and
the elephant in his shadow state goes on stilts. A man is followed by a
pair of black compasses, and a squat tent flings to the east the shadow of
a sword.
Adams was sitting looking at the two porters whom he had set to hunt for
firewood; he was watching their grotesque figures, and more than grotesque
shadows, when a movement of the sick man under the tent-cloth caused him
to turn.
Berselius had awakened. More than that, he was sitting up, and before
Adams could put up a hand, the tent-cloth was flung back, and the head and
shoulders of the sick man appeared.
His face was pale, his hair in disorder; but his consciousness had fully
returned. He recognized Adams with a glance, and then, without speaking,
struggled to free himself of the tent-cloth and get on his feet.
Adams helped him.
Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, looked around him, and
then stood looking at the setting sun.
The glorious day was very near its end. The sun huge and half-shorn of his
beams, was sinking slowly, inevitably; scarce two diameters divided his
lower edge from the horizon that was thirsting for him as the grave
thirsts for man. Thus fades, shorn of its dazzle and splendour, the
intellect so triumphant at noon, the personality, the compelling will; the
man himself when night has touched him.
"Are you better?" asked Adams.
Berselius made no reply.
Like a child, held by some glittering bauble, he seemed fascinated by the
sun. The western sky was marked by a thin reef of cloud; dull gold, it
momentarily brightened to burnished gold, and then to fire.
The sun touched the horizon. Ere one could say "Look!" he was half gone.
The blazing arc of his upper limb hung for a moment palpitating, then it
dwindled to a point, vanished, and a wave of twilight, like the shadow of
a wing, passed over the land.
As Berselius, leaning on the arm of his companion, turned, it was already
night.
The camp fire which the porters had lit was crackling, and Berselius,
helped by his friend, sat down with his back to the tree and his face
toward the fire.
"Are you better?" asked Adams, as he took a seat beside him and proceeded
to light a pipe.
"My head," said Berselius. As he spoke he put his hand to his head as a
person puts his hand to his forehead when he is dazed.
"Have you any pain?"
"No, no pain, but there is a mist."
"You can see all right?"
"Yes, yes, I can see. It is not my sight, but there is a mist--in my
head."
Adams guessed what he meant. The man's mind had been literally shaken up.
He knew, too, that thought and mental excitement were the worst things for
him.
"Don't think about it," said he. "It will pass. You have had a knock on
the head. Just lean back against the tree, for I want to dress the
wound."
He undid the bandage, fetched some water from the pool, which was now
clear, and set to work. The wound was healthy and seemed much less severe
than it had seemed the night before. The dent in the bone seemed quite
inconsiderable. The inner table of the skull might, after all, be not
injured. One thing was certain: whatever mischief the cortex of the brain
had suffered, the prime centres had escaped. Speech and movement were
perfect and thought was rational.
"There," said Adams, when he had finished his dressings and taken his
seat, "you are all right now. But don't talk or do any thinking. The mist,
as you call it, in your head will pass away."
"I can see," said Berselius; then he stopped, hesitated, and went on--"I
can see last night--I can see us all here by the camp fire, but beyond
that I cannot see, for a great white mist hides everything. And still"--he
burst out--"I seem to know everything hidden by that mist, but I can't
see, I can't see. What is this thing that has happened to me?"
"You know your name?"
"Yes, my name is Berselius, just as your name is Adams. My mind is clear,
my memory is clear, but I have lost the sight of memory. Beyond the camp
fire of last night, everything is a thick mist--I am afraid!"
He took Adams's big hand, and the big man gulped suddenly at the words and
the action.
The great Berselius afraid! The man who had faced the elephants, the man
who cared not a halfpenny for death, the man who was so far above the
stature of other men, sitting there beside him and holding his hand like a
little child, and saying, "I am afraid!"
And the voice of Berselius was not the voice of the Berselius of
yesterday. It had lost the decision and commanding tone that made it so
different from the voices of common men.
"It will pass," said Adams. "It is only a shake-up of the brain. Why, I
have seen a man after a blow on the head with his memory clean wiped out.
He had to learn his alphabet again."
Berselius did not reply. His head was nodding forward in sleep. He had
slept all day, but sleep had taken him again suddenly, just as it takes a
child, and Adams placed him under the improvised tent with the coat for a
pillow under his head, and then sat by the fire.
Memory of all things in this wonderful world is surely the most wonderful.
It is there now, and the next moment it is not. You leave your house in
London, and you are next found in Brighton, sane to all intents and
purposes, but your memory is gone. A dense fog hides everything you have
ever done, dreamed or spoken. You may have committed crimes in your past
life, or you may have been a saint. It is all the same, for the moment,
until the mist breaks up and your past reappears.
Berselius's case was a phase of this condition. He knew his
name--everything lay before his mind up to a certain point. Beyond that,
he knew all sorts of things were lying, but he could not see them. To use
his own eloquent expression, he had lost the sight of memory.
If you recall your past, it comes in pictures. You have to ransack a great
photographic gallery. Before you can think, you must see.
Beyond a certain point Berselius had lost the sight of memory, In other
words, he had lost his past.