KIGAMBO.[1]
[Footnote 1: Kigambo: unexpected calamity, slavery, or death.]
The rainy season was over. The moving wall of water was down. The
travellers were no longer kept awake at night by the ceaseless roar of
the rain. The lake lay stretched before them, sapphire dark under the
milky blueness of the tropical sky. Kingfisher and fish-eagle, and all
the birds that haunt those waters, hovered, or perched on the trees or
along the bank, or skimmed the shining surface of the great fresh-water
sea. And now the canoes were manned, and the three white men and their
followers were setting their faces towards Manyema, the cannibal
country, dreaded by Wangana and Wanyamwesis, and even by the bolder
Makololos.
For this stage of their journey they were travelling in a stronger
company, having accepted the fellowship of an Arab caravan faring
towards the Congo; and this larger troop gave an air of new gaiety to
their train. They had been forced to buy new stores of cloth and beads
at Ujiji, Geoffrey's recklessness in rewarding his men, after every
successful hunting expedition, having considerably reduced their stock.
The cloth bought at Ujiji was dear and bad, and Cecil Patrington took
Geoffrey to task with some severity; but his reproaches fell lightly
upon that volatile nature.
"Remember that the measure of the goods we carry is the measure of our
lives," said the experienced traveller gravely.
"Oh, Providence will take care of us when our goods are gone," argued
Geoffrey. "We shall fall in with some civilized Arabs who know the
value of hard cash. I cannot believe in a country where a cheque-book
is useless. We shall be within touch of the mercantile world when we
get to Stanley Pool."
"When!" echoed Patrington. "Hill and jungle, and desert and river,
mutiny or desertion, pestilence and tempest, have to be accounted with
before you see steamers and civilization. There's no use in glib talk
of what can be done at Brazzaville or at Stanley Pool. Luckily we are
going into a region where food is cheap--such as it is. But then, on
the other hand, we may run out of quinine--and quinine sometimes means
life."
Summer was in the land when they crossed the great lake, stopping for
a night or two on one of the principal islands, under the hospitable
roof of a missionary station, where it was a new sensation to sit upon
a chair, and taste a cup of coffee made in the European manner, and
to see an Englishwoman's pleasant face and neat raiment. There was
an English child also, "a real human child," as Geoffrey exclaimed,
delighted at the phenomenon--a round-limbed, fat-cheeked rosy baby, who
sat and watched the landing of the party from her perambulator, and
patronized them, waving a welcome with chubby hands, as they scrambled
out of the canoes--a child who had entered upon a world of black faces,
and who may have fancied her mother and father monstrosities in a place
where everybody else was black.
What a contrast was this blue-eyed two-year-old to such infancy as
they had seen in villages along their road, the brown naked creatures
rolling and grovelling in the dirt, and looking more like pug-dogs than
children!
When they had bidden good-bye to the friendly missionary and his
domestic circle, they were not without childish life upon their way,
for the Arabs with whom they had joined company had some women in
their train, one a slave with a couple of children; and as the Arab
law does not recognize slavery under adult age, these brats of six and
seven were free, and not being goods and chattels, no provision was
allowed for them, and the mother had to feed them out of her own scanty
rations.
Geoffrey was on more familiar terms with the Arabs than either
Patrington or Allan, and, on discovering the state of things with the
native mother and her sons, he took these two morsels of dusky humanity
into his service, and set them to clean pots and pans, and treated them
as a kind of lap-dogs, and let them dance to his wild fiddle music in
the firelight in front of the tents, and would not allow them to be
punished for their depredations among the pannikins of rice or the
baskets of bananas.
They crossed the swift and turbid Luama river, and encamped for a night
upon its shores. And then came the harassing march in single file
through the dense jungle--a hopeless monotony of rank foliage taller
than the tallest of the travellers, a coarse and monstrous vegetation
which lashed their faces and rent their clothing and caught their feet
like wire snares set for poachers. Vain was it to put the porters with
their loads in the forefront of the procession. The rank inexorable
jungle closed behind them as they passed; and a four-hours' march
through this pitiless scrub was worse than a ten-hours' tramp in the
open.
The days were sultry. The travellers deemed themselves lucky if the
evening closed without a thunderstorm; and the storms in those regions
were deadly. A fired roof and a blackened corpse in a hut next that
occupied by the three friends testified to the awfulness of an African
thunderstorm. The thatch blazed, the neighbours looked on, and the
husband of the victim sat beside the disfigured form in a curious
indifference, which might mean either bewilderment or want of feeling.
"Twenty years ago the catastrophe next door would have been assuredly
put down to our account," said Patrington, as they sat at supper after
the storm, "and we should have had to pay for that poor lady with our
persons or our goods--our goods, for choice, so much merikani, or so
many strings of sami sami. But since the advent of the Arabs, reason
has begun to prevail over unreason. The influence of Islam makes for
civilization."
They found the people of Manyema, the reputed man-eaters, friendly,
and willing to deal. Provisions were cheap. Fowls, eggs, maize, and
sweet potatoes were to be had in abundance. The natives were civil,
but curious and intrusive; and the sound of Geoffrey's amati was the
signal for a crowd round the camping-place, a crowd that could only
be dispersed by the sight of a revolver, the nature of which weapon
seemed very clearly understood by these warriors of the lance and the
knife. When the admiring throng waxed intrusive, and the black faces
and filthy figures crowded the verandah, Cecil Patrington took out his
pistols, and gave them a little lecture in their native tongue, with
the promise of an illustration or two if they should refuse to depart.
Or, were Geoffrey in the humour, he would push his way, playing,
through that savage throng, and, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, would
lead those human rats away towards hill or stream, jungle or plain,
playing, playing some diabolical strain of Tartini's, or some still
wilder war-song of the new Sclavonic school--Stojowski, Moszkowski,
Wienianwowski--something thrilling, plaintive, frightening, appealing,
which set those savage breasts on fire, and turned those savage heads
like strong drink.
"One shall be taken and the other left." That text would flash across
Geoffrey Wornock's thoughts at the unlikeliest moments. It might have
been a fiery scroll projected on the dark cloud-line of the thunderous
eventide. It might have been the sharp shrill cry of some bird crossing
the blue above his head, so unexpectedly, so strangely did the words
recur to him. So far, in all the vicissitudes of the journey, the
little band had held firmly on, with less than the average amount of
suffering and inconvenience. There had been desertion, there had been
death among their men; but on the Unyamwesi route it had been easy to
repair all such losses, and their Wanyamwesis were in most respects the
superiors of the Wangana they had lost by the way.
So far, despite of some baddish bouts of fever, the dark, inexorable
Shadow had held aloof. The dread of death had not been beside their
camp-fires or about their bed.
But now, in this region of tropical fertility, amidst a paradise of
luxuriant verdure, sheltered by the vast mountain citadel that rises
like a titanic wall above the western border of the Tanganyika, they
came upon a spot where the fever-fiend, the impalpable, invisible,
inexorable enemy reigned supreme. Geoffrey was the first to feel the
poisonous influence of the atmosphere. He laid down his fiddle, and
flung himself upon his bed, with aching back and weary limbs, one
evening, after a day of casual roaming along the banks of a tributary
stream.
"I've been walking about too long," he said. "That's all that there is
the matter with me."
* * * * *
"That's all!" But when daylight came he was in the unknown
fever-country, the dreadful topsy-turvy world of delirium. He had two
heads, and he wanted to shoot one of them. He tried to stand up and go
across the hut to fetch the rifle that hung against the opposite wall,
but his limbs refused to obey him. He lay groaning, helpless as an
infant, muttering that the other head wouldn't let him sleep. The pain
was all in that other head. In the long agony that followed all things
were blank and dark; until, after five days of raging fever, the pulse
grew regular again, the scorching body cooled down to the temperature
of healthy life, and weak and wan, but rejoicing in freedom from pain,
the patient came back to everyday life, and looked into the faces of
his companions with eyes that saw the things that were, and not the
spectral forms that people delirious dreams.
"'One shall be taken,'" he muttered to himself, as he looked from Allan
to Cecil, and back again. "I thought it was I. Then we are all three of
us alive?" he said, with a catch in his voice that was almost a sob.
"Very much alive, and we hope to remain so," answered Patrington,
cheeriest of travellers. "You've had a bad spell of the cursed
mukurungu, which I suppose must have its fling for the next decade or
two, until railroads, and hotels, and scientific drainage, and Swiss
innkeepers have altered the climate for the better. You've been pretty
bad, and you've kept us in a very unhealthy district, so as soon as
ever you've picked up your strength, we'll move on."
"I can start to-morrow morning. I feel as strong as a lion."
"Does a lion's paw shake as your hand is shaking now? My dear Geoff,
you are as weak as water. We'll give you three days to recruit. I
am too hardened a subject for the mukurungu, which is a fever of
acclimatization, for the most part, and I've been dosing Allan with
quinine, and I've been doing a good deal of ambulance surgery among
the natives, and we're a very popular party. They have seldom seen
three white men in a bunch. Your fiddling, my medicine-chest and
sticking-plaster, and Allan's good manners have made a great effect.
The blackies are assured that we are all three sultans in our own
country."
"And our Arab friends?"
"Oh, they have gone on. We have only our own men with us now. Your
Makololos have been miserable about you."
They spent a jovial night, Geoffrey's spirits rising to wild gaiety,
with that lightness which comes when a fever-patient has struggled
through the thick cloud of strange fancies, the agony of throbbing
brain and aching back.
He tuned the fiddle that had been lying mute in its velvet nest. He
tucked it lovingly under his chin, and laid his bow along the strings
with light fingers that trembled a little in the rapture of that
familiar touch.
"Shall I bore you very much if I play?" he asked, looking at his elder
companion.
"Bore us! Not a jot. I have sadly missed your wild strains. There has
been a voice wanting--a voice that is almost human, and which seems so
much a part of you that while _that_ was dumb you seemed to be dead.
Begin your spells. Play us something by one of your 'Owskis,--Jimowski,
Bilowski, Bobowski--whichever you please."
Geoffrey drew his bow across the strings with a swelling chord, a
burst of bass music like the sudden pealing of an organ, and began a
Walachian dirge.
"Does that give you the scene?" he asked, pausing and looking round
at them, after a tremendous presto movement. "Does it conjure up the
funeral train, the wild wailing of the mourners, the groaning men,
the shrieking women, even the whining and whimpering of the little
children, the stormy sky, the thick darkness, the flare of the torches,
the trampling of iron-shod hoofs? I can hear and see it all as I play."
And then he began the slow movement, the awful ghostly adagio with
its suggestion of all things horrible, its eccentric phrasing, and
dissonant chords, shaping a vision of strange unearthly forms.
"It's a very jolly kind of music," Cecil Patrington said thoughtfully;
"I mean jolly difficult, don't you know. But if you want my candid
opinion as to what it suggests, I am free to confess it sounds to me
like your improvised notion of the mukurungu--all fever and pain and
confusion."
"The mukurungu! Not half a bad name for a descriptive sonata!" laughed
Geoffrey, putting his fiddle to bed.
And then they brought out the cards, and played poker for cowries,
Cecil Patrington, as usual, the winner, by reason of that inscrutable
countenance of his, which had hardened itself in all the hazards of
an adventurous career. They were particularly jovial that evening,
and flung care to the winds that sobbed and muttered along the shore.
Geoffrey's gaiety communicated itself to the other two. They drank
their moderate potations; they smoked their pipes; and Patrington
discoursed of an ideal settlement where the surplus population of
Whitechapel and Bermondsey were to come and work in a new Arcadia, a
place of flocks and herds and coffee-fields, under a smokeless heaven.
"For my own satisfaction, I would have Africa untrodden and unknown,
a world of wonder and mystery," he said; "but the beginning has been
made, and the coming century will see every missionary settlement
of to-day develop into a populous centre of enterprise and labour.
Crowded-out England will come here, and thrive here, as it has thriven
in less fertile lands. Englishmen will flock here for sport and
pleasure and profit."
"And these native sultans--these little kings and their peoples?"
"Ah, that is the problem! God grant there may be a bloodless solution!"
That was the last night these three travellers ever sat together over
their cards and pipes, ever laughed and talked together with hearts at
ease. They were to resume their journey next morning; but when all was
ready for the start, Allan discovered that Cecil Patrington was too ill
to walk.
"I've had a bad night," he confessed; "the kind of night that lets
one know one has a head belonging to one. But the men can carry me in
a litter. I shall be all right to-morrow. I'd much rather we jogged
along. This is a vile, feverish hole."
There was no question of jogging along for this hardy traveller. The
oppressive drowsiness, which is sometimes the first stage of malarial
fever, held him like a spell. He looked at his companions dimly, with
eyes that sparkled and yet were cloudy with involuntary tears. He could
hardly see their anxious faces.
"I'm afraid I'm in for it," he faltered. "I thought I was fever-proof."
He sank upon the narrow camp-bed in a shivering fit, and Geoffrey
and Allan spread their blankets over him. They heaped every woollen
covering they possessed over those shaking limbs, but could not quiet
the ague fit or bring warmth to the icecold form.
Dreary days, dreadful nights, followed the sad waking of that sultry
morning. The two young men nursed their guide and captain with
unceasing watchfulness and devotion. Geoffrey developed a feminine
tenderness and carefulness which was touching in so wild and fitful a
nature. But they could do so little! And he whom they watched and cared
for knew not, or only knew in rare brief intervals, of their loving
care.
They tried to sustain each other's courage. They told each other that
malarial fever was only a phase of African travel; an unpleasant phase,
but not to be avoided. They knew all about the fever from bitter
experience; and here was Geoffrey but just recovered, and doubtless
Patrington would mend in a day or two, as he had mended.
"I don't suppose he's any worse than I was," said Geoffrey.
Allan shook his head sadly.
"I don't know that he's worse, but the symptoms seem different somehow.
He doesn't answer to the medicines as you did."
The symptoms developed unmistakably after this, and the fever showed
itself as typhus in the most deadly form. Swift on this revelation came
the end; and in the solemn stillness of the forest midnight they knelt
beside the unconscious form, and watched the parched, quivering lips
from which the breath was faintly ebbing. One last sobbing sigh, and
between them and the captain of their little company there stretched
a distance wider than the breadth of Africa, further than from the
Zambesi to the Congo. A land more mysterious than the Dark Continent
parted them from him who was last week their jovial, hardy comrade,
sharing the fortunes of the day, thinking of death as of a shadowy
something waiting for him far off, at the end of innumerable journeys
and long years of adventurous activity--a quiet haven, into which his
bark would drift when the timbers were worn thin with long usage, and
the arms of the rower were weary of plying the oar.
And death was close beside them all the time, lying in wait for that
gallant spirit, like a beast of prey.
"O God, is there another Africa, where we shall meet that brave,
good man again?" cried Allan. "Which of our modern teachers is
right?--Liddon, who tells us that Christ rose from the dead; or
Clifford, who tells us there is nothing--nothing: no Great Companion,
no Master or Guide: only ourselves and our faithful service for one
another--only this poor humanity?"
He looked up appealingly, expecting to see Geoffrey's face on the other
side of the bed; but he was alone. Geoffrey had fled from the presence
of death. He had rushed out into the wilderness. It was late in the
following afternoon when he came back. The men had dug a grave under a
great sycamore, and Allan was about to read the funeral service, when
his fellow-traveller reappeared.
White, haggard, with wild eyes, and clothes stained with mire and
sedge, the red clay of the forest paths, the green slime of swamp and
bog, Allan could only look at him in pitying wonder.
"Where in Heaven's name have you been?" he asked, looking up from the
rough basket-work coffin--bamboo and bulrush--interwoven by native
hands.
"I don't know. Out yonder, between the plain and the river. I was a
craven to fly from the face of death--I, a soldier," with a short,
ironical laugh. "I don't know how it was with me last night. I couldn't
bear it. I had been thinking of that verse in the gospel--'One shall be
taken,' but I didn't think it would be that one--the hardy, experienced
traveller. It might have been you or I. Not he, Allan. It was a blow,
wasn't it?--a blow that might shake a strong man's nerves!"
Allan stretched out his hand to his comrade in silence, and they
clasped hands, heartily on Allan's part; and his grip was so earnest
that he did not know it clasped a nerveless hand.
"It was a crushing blow," he said gravely. "I don't blame you for being
scared. You have come back in time to see him laid in his grave, and
to say a prayer with me."
Geoffrey shrugged his shoulders, with a hopeless look.
"Where do our prayers go, I wonder? We know no more than the natives,
when they sacrifice to their gods. Isn't it rather feeble to go on
praying when there never comes any answer? I saw you praying last
night--wrestling with God in prayer, as pious people call it. I saw
your forehead damp with agony, your lips writhing--every vein in your
clasped hands standing out like whipcord. I watched you, and was sorry,
and would have given ten years of my life to save his; but I couldn't
pray with you. And, you see, there came no answer. Inexorable Nature
worked out her own problem in her own way. Your prayers--my silence;
one was as much use as the other. Nobody heeded us; nobody cared for
us. The blow fell."
"Ah, we know not, we know not! There is compensation, perhaps. We shall
see and know our friends in heaven, and look back and know that we
were children groping in the dark. Try to believe, Geoffrey. Belief is
best."
"Belief. The pious mourner's anodyne, the Christian's patent
pain-killer. Yes, belief is best; but, you see, some people can't
believe. I can't. And I see only the hideous side of death--the dull
horror of annihilation. A week ago we had a man with us, the manliest
of men--all nerve, and fire, and brain-power, brave as a lion,
ready to do and endure--and now we have only--that," with a look of
heart-sickness, "which we are impatient to put out of sight for ever.
Put it in the ground, Allan; fill in the grave; trample it down; let us
forget that there was ever such a man."
He flung himself upon the ground and sobbed out his grief. There had
been something in the blunt, dogged straightforwardness of Cecil
Patrington's character which had attached this wayward nature to him
with hooks of steel.
"I loved him," he muttered, getting up, calm and grave even to
sullenness. "And now you and I are alone."
He stood beside the grave where native hands had gently lowered the
rough coffin, and where Allan had scattered flowers and herbs, whose
aromatic odours hung heavy on the still sultriness of the atmosphere.
He looked at Allan, and not with looks of love.
"Only we two," he muttered, "and these black beasts of burden."