THE SENTENCE OF THE DESERT
Berselius had not asked a single question as to the catastrophe. His own
misfortune had banished for him, doubtless, all interest in everything
else.
Adams had said to him nothing of Félix, his horrible deeds or his theft of
the rifle. Félix, though he had vanished from Adams's life completely and
forever, had not vanished from the face of the earth. He was very much
alive and doing, and his deeds and his fate are worth a word, for they
formed a tragedy well fitting the stage of this merciless land.
The Zappo Zap, having secured the gun and its ammunition, revelling in the
joy of possession and power, went skipping on his road, which lay to the
northeast. Six miles from the camp he flung himself down by a bush, and,
with the gun covered by his arm, slept, and hunted in his sleep, like a
hound, till dawn.
Then he rose and pursued his way, still travelling northeast, his
bird-like eyes skimming the land and horizon. He sang as he pursued his
way, and his song fitted his filed teeth to a charm. If a poisoned arrow
could sing or a stabbing spear, it would sing what Félix sang as he went,
his long morning shadow stalking behind him; he as soulless and as
heartless as it.
What motive of attachment had driven him to follow Verhaeren to Yandjali
from the Bena Pianga country heaven knows, for the man was quite beyond
the human pale. The elephants were far, far above him in power of love and
kindness; one had to descend straight to the alligators to match him, and
even then one found oneself at fault.
He was not. Those three words alone describe this figure of india-rubber
that could still walk and talk and live and lust, and to whom slaying and
torture were amongst the æsthetics of life.
An hour before noon, beyond and above a clump of trees, he sighted a
moving object. It was the head of a giraffe.
It was the very same bull giraffe that had fled with the elephant herd and
then wheeled away south from it. It was wandering devious now, feeding by
itself, and the instant Félix saw the tell-tale head, he dropped flat to
the ground as if he had been shot. The giraffe had not seen him, for the
head, having vanished for a moment, reappeared; it was feeding, plucking
down small branches of leaves, and Félix, lying on his side, opened the
breech of the rifle, drew the empty cartridge case, inserted a cartridge
in each barrel, and closed the breech. Now, unknown to Adams, when he had
fired the gun the day before, there was a plug of clay in the left-hand
barrel about two inches from the muzzle; just an inconsiderable wad of
clay about as thick as a gun wad; the elephant folk had done this when
they had mishandled the gun, and, though the thing could have been removed
with a twig, Puck himself could not have conceived a more mischievous
obstruction. He certainly never would have conceived so devilish a one.
Adams had, fortunately for himself, fired the right-hand barrel; the
concussion had not broken up the plug, for it was still moist, being clay
from the trodden-up edge of the pool. It was moist still, for the night
dew had found it.
The Zappo Zap knew nothing of the plug. He knew nothing, either, of the
tricks of these big, old-fashioned elephant guns, for he kept both barrels
full cock, and it is almost three to two that if you fire one of these
rifles with both barrels full cock, both barrels will go off
simultaneously, or nearly so, from the concussion.
With the gun trailing after him--another foolish trick--the savage crawled
on his belly through the long grass to within firing distance of the tree
clump.
Then he lay and waited.
He had not long to wait.
The giraffe, hungry and feeding, was straying along the edge of the clump
of trees, picking down the youngest and freshest leaves, just as a
_gourmet_ picks the best bits out of a salad.
In a few minutes his body was in view, the endless neck flung up, the
absurd head and little, stumpy, useless horns prying amidst the leaves,
and every now and then slewing round and sweeping the country in search of
danger.
Félix lay motionless as a log; then, during a moment when the giraffe's
head was hidden in the leaves, he flung himself into position and took
aim.
A tremendous report rang out, the giraffe fell, squealing, and roaring and
kicking, and Félix, flung on his back, lay stretched out, a cloud of gauzy
blue smoke in the air above him.
The breech of the rifle had blown out. He had fired the right-hand barrel,
but the concussion had sprung the left-hand cock as well.
It seemed to the savage that a great black hand struck him in the face and
flung him backward. He lay for a moment, half-stunned; then he sat up,
and, behold! the sun had gone out and he was in perfect blackness.
He was blind, for his eyes were gone, and where his nose had been was now
a cavity. He looked as though he had put on a red velvet domino, and he
sat there in the sun with the last vestige of the blue smoke dissolving
above him in the air, not knowing in the least what had happened to him.
He knew nothing of blindness; he knew little of pain. An Englishman in his
wounded state would have been screaming in agony; to Félix the pain was
sharp, but it was nothing to the fact that the sun had "gone down."
He put his hand to the pain and felt his ruined face, but that did not
tell him anything.
This sudden black dark was not the darkness which came from shutting one's
eyes; it was something else, and he scrambled on his feet to find out.
He could feel the darkness now, and he advanced a few steps to see if he
could walk through it; then he sprang into the air to see if it was
lighter above, and dived on his hands and knees to see if he could slip
under it, and shouted and whooped to see if he could drive it away.
But it was a great darkness, not to be out-jumped, jumped he as high as
the sun, or slipped under, were he as thin as a knife, or whooped away,
though he whooped to everlasting.
He walked rapidly, and then he began to run. He ran rapidly, and he seemed
to possess some instinct in his feet which told him of broken ground. The
burst gun lay where he had left it in the grass, and the dead giraffe lay
where it had fallen by the trees; the wind blew, and the grass waved, the
sun spread his pyramid of light from horizon to horizon, and in the
sparkle above a black dot hung trembling above the stricken beast at the
edge of the wood.
The black figure of the man continued its headlong course. It was running
in a circle of many miles, impelled through the nothingness of night by
the dark soul raging in it.
Hours passed, and _then_ it fell, and lay face to the sky and arms
outspread. You might have thought it dead. But it was a thing almost
indestructible. It lay motionless, but it was alive with hunger.
During all its gyrations it had been followed and watched closely. It had
not lain for a minute when a vulture dropped like a stone from the sky and
lit on it with wings outspread.
Next moment the vulture was seized, screeching, torn limb from limb, and
in the act of being devoured!
* * * * *
But the sentence of the desert on the blind is death, trap vultures as
cunningly as you will, and devour them as ferociously. The eye is
everything in the battle of the strong against the weak. And so it came
about that two days later a pair of leopards from the woods to the
northeast fought with the figure, which fought with teeth and hands and
feet, whilst the yellow-eyed kites looked on at a battle that would have
turned with horror the heart of Flamininus.