BEYOND THE SKYLINE
Adams, wearied to death with the events of the past day and night, slept
by the camp fire the deep dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. He had
piled the fire with wood, using broken boxes, slow-burning vangueria
brushwood, and the remains of a ruined mimosa tree that lay a hundred
yards from the camp, and he lay by it now as soundly asleep as the two
porters and Berselius. The fire stood guard; crackling and flickering
beneath the stars, it showed a burning spark that made the camping place
determinable many miles away.
Now the Zappo Zap, when he had fled from Adams, put ten miles of country
behind him, going almost with the swiftness of an antelope, taking low
bush and broken ground in his stride, and halting only when instinct
brought him to a stand, saying, "You are safe."
He knew the country well, and the thirty miles that separated him from the
eastern forest, where he could obtain food and shelter, were nothing to
him. He could have run nearly the whole distance and reached there in a
few hours' time.
But time was also nothing to him. He had fed well, and could last two days
without food. It was not his intention to desert the camp yet; for at the
camp, under that tree away to the west, lay a thing that he lusted after
as men lust for drink or love: the desire of his dark soul--the elephant
gun.
Before Adams drove him away from the camp he had made up his mind to steal
it. Sneak off with it in the night and vanish with it into his own country
away to the northeast, leaving B'selius and his broken camp to fend for
themselves. This determination was still unshaken; the thing held him like
a charm, and he sat down, squatting in the grass with his knees drawn up
to his chin and his eyes fixed westward, waiting for evening.
An hour before sunset he made for the camp, reaching within a mile of it
as the light left the sky. He watched the camp fire burning, and made for
it. Toward midnight, crawling on his belly, soundless as a snake, he crept
right up beside Adams, seized the gun and the cartridge bag, and with them
in his hands stood erect.
He had no fear now. He knew he could outrun anyone there. He held the gun
by the barrels. Adams's white face, as he lay with mouth open, snoring and
deep in slumber, presented an irresistible mark for the heavy gun-butt,
and all would have been over with that sleeper in this world, had not the
attention of the savage been drawn to an object that suddenly appeared
from beneath the folds of the improvised tent.
It was the hand of Berselius.
Berselius, moving uneasily in his sleep, had flung out his arm; the
clenched fist, like the emblem of power, struck the eye of the Zappo Zap,
and quelled him as the sight of the whip quells a dog.
B'selius was alive and able to clench his fist. That fact was enough for
Félix, and next moment he was gone, and the moonlight cast his black
shadow as he ran, making northeast, a darkness let loose on life and on
the land.
Adams awoke at sun-up to find the gun and the cartridge bag gone. The
porters knew nothing. He had picked up enough of their language to
interrogate them, but they could only shake their heads, and he was
debating in his own mind whether he ought to kick them on principle, when
Berselius made his appearance from the tent.
His strength had come back to him. The dazed look of the day before had
left his face, but the expression of the face was altered. The half smile
which had been such a peculiar feature of his countenance was no longer
there. The level eye that raised to no man and lowered before no man, the
aspect of command and the ease of perfect control and power--where were
they?
Adams, as he looked at his companion, felt a pang such as we feel when we
see a human being suddenly and terribly mutilated.
Who has not known a friend who, from an accident in the hunting field, the
shock of a railway collision, or some great grief, has suddenly changed;
of whom people say, "Ah, yes, since the accident he has never been the
same man"?
A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty, full of will power and brain,
and who to-day is a different person with drooping under-lip, lack-lustre
eye, and bearing in every movement the indecision which marks the inferior
mind.
Berselius's under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner lack the ordinary
decision of a healthy man; the change in him was slight, but it was
startlingly evident. So high had Nature placed him above other men, that a
crack in the pedestal was noticeable; as to the injury to the statue
itself, the ladder of time would be required before that could be fully
discovered.
So far from being downcast this morning, Berselius was mildly cheerful. He
washed and had his wound dressed, and then sat down to a miserable
breakfast of cold tinned meat and cassava cakes, with water fetched from
the pool in a cracked calabash.
He said nothing about the mist in his head, and Adams carefully avoided
touching on the question.
"Sleep has put him all right," said Adams to himself. "All the same, he's
not the man he was. He's a dozen times more human and like other men.
Wonder how long it will last. Just as long as he's feeling sick, I
expect."
He rose to fetch his pipe when Berselius, who had finished eating and had
also risen to his feet, beckoned him to come close.
"That is the road we came by?" said Berselius, pointing over the country
toward the west.
"Yes," said Adams, "that is the road."
"Do you see the skyline?" said Berselius.
"Yes, I see the skyline."
"Well, my memory carries me to the skyline, but not beyond."
"Oh, Lord!" said Adams to himself, "here he is beginning it all over
again!"
"I can remember," said Berselius, "everything that happened as far as my
eye carries me. For instance, by that tree a mile away a porter fell down.
He was very exhausted. And when we had passed that ridge near the skyline
we saw two birds fighting; two bald-headed vultures----"
"That is so," said Adams.
"But beyond the skyline," said Berselius, suddenly becoming excited and
clutching his companion's arm, "I see nothing. I know nothing. All is
mist--all is mist."
"Yes, yes," said the surgeon. "It's only memory blindness. It will come
back."
"Ah, but will it? If I can get to the skyline and see the country beyond,
and if I remember that, and if I go on and on, the way we came, and if I
remember as I go, then, then, I will be saved. But if I get to that
skyline and if I find that the mist stops me from seeing beyond, then I
pray you kill me, for the agony of this thing is not to be borne."
Suddenly he ceased, and then, as if to some unseen person, he cried out--
"I have left my memory on that road."
Adams, frightened at the man's agitation, tried to soothe him, but
Berselius, in the grip of this awful desire to pierce back beyond that
mist and find himself, would not be soothed. Nothing would satisfy him but
to strike camp and return along the road they had come by. Some instinct
told him that the sight of the things he had seen would wake up memory,
and that bit by bit, as he went, the mist would retreat before him, and
perhaps vanish at last. Some instinct told him this, but reason, who is
ever a doubter, tortured him with doubts.
The only course was to go back and see. Adams, who doubted if his patient
was physically fit for a march, at last gave in; the man's agony of mind
was more dangerous to him than the exhaustion of physical exercise could
prove. He gave orders to the porters to strike camp, and then turned to
himself, and helped them. They only carried what was barely needful, and
was even less than needful, to take them to Fort M'Bassa, ten days,
journey in Berselius's condition. Four water bottles that had been left
intact they filled with water; they took the tent, and the pole that Félix
had spliced. Cassava cakes and tinned meat and a few pounds of chocolate
made up the provisions. There were no guns to carry, no trophies of the
chase. Of all the army of porters only two were left. Berselius was broken
down, Félix had fled, they had no guide, and the crowning horror of the
thing was that they had struck off in pursuit of the herd at right angles
to the straight path they had taken from the forest, and Adams did not
know in the least the point where they had struck off. The porters were
absolutely no use as guides, and unless God sent a guide from heaven or
chance interposed to lead them in the right way, they were lost; for they
had no guns or ammunition with which to get food.
Truly the omen of the elephant lying down had not spoken in vain.
When all was loaded up, and Adams was loaded even like the porters, they
turned their backs on the tree and the pools, and leaving them there to
burn in the sun forever struck straight west in the direction from which
they had come.
Berselius had come in pursuit of a terrible thing and a merciless thing;
he was returning in search of a more terrible and a more merciless
thing--Memory.
It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; and two hours'
march brought them to that ridge which Berselius had indicated from the
camp as being near the skyline.
When they reached the ridge, and not before, Berselius halted and stared
over the country in front of him, his face filled with triumph and hope.
He seized Adams's hand and pointed away to the west. The ridge gave a big
view of the country.
"I can remember all that," said he, "keenly, right up to the skyline."
"And at the skyline?"
"Stands the mist," replied Berselius. "But it will lift before me as I go
on. Now I know it is only the sight of the things I have seen that is
needful to recall the memory of them and of myself in connection with
them."
Adams said nothing. It struck him with an eerie feeling that this man
beside him was actually walking back into his past. As veil after veil of
distance was raised, so would the past come back, bit by bit.
But he was yet to learn what a terrible journey that would be.
One thing struck him as strange. Berselius had never tried to pierce the
mist by questions. The man seemed entirely obsessed by the curtain of
mist, and by the necessity of piercing it by physical movement, of putting
tree to tree and mile to mile.
Berselius had not asked questions because, no doubt, he was under the
dominion of a profound instinct, telling him that the past he had lost
could only be recalled by the actual picture of the things he had seen.