Chapter 55

The equatorial wilds spread before the safari its wealth of extravagant hues and forms, all its perfidies veiled for the allurement of mortals who would trust nature in her richest manifestations. The sun shone on a rain-drenched world; the earth steamed; and through a mist like that which prefaced the second Biblical version of creation the splendor of the jungle seemed to be taking shape for the first time, at the command of a power for whom beauty was synonymous with peril.

Nevertheless, the safari men were singing.

Askaris led the way, Somalis in claret-colored fezzes and khaki uniforms, bare legged, with bandoliers across their chests and rifles over their shoulders. Their small, dark faces were sharp and fierce; they marched with the swing of desert men; their glances expressed their pride, their contempt for the humble, melodious horde that followed after them.

Four negroes, naked to the waist, supported a machilla, a canopied hammock of white duck that swung from a bamboo pole. They were Wasena, specially trained for this fatiguing work, maintaining a smooth step over the roughest ground. Lilla reclined in the hammock. Her face, half concealed by the fringe of the awning, appeared opalescent in the filtered sunlight. Her tapering figure had the grace of Persian queens and Roman empresses floating along in their litters on ripples of dusky muscles.

So this delicate, white product of modernity, this embodiment of civilization's perceptions and all that it pays for them, was borne at last into the primordial world on the shoulders of savages.

Behind her streamed a hundred porters balancing on their heads the personal baggage, rolled tents, chop boxes, sacks of safari food. They were men from Manica, Sofala, and Tete, some of pure strain, others with Arab and Latin blood in their veins. Their bare torsoes were the color of chocolate, of ebony, or even of saddle leather; but all their foreheads bulged out in the same way, all their noses were short and flat, all their chins receded. On their breasts and arms were charms of crocodiles' teeth and leopards' claws, to keep them safe from beasts, rheumatism, arrows, pneumonia, snake bite, and skin diseases. In the distended lobes of their ears were stuffed cigarettes, horn snuffboxes, or flowers from the port town.

They were followed by the camp servants in long, white robes, Beira-boys and Swahilis, driving before them a little flock of sheep. Parr, at the head of another squad of askaris, brought up the rear, riding a Muscat donkey. He raised his head, and his withered mouth, emerging from the shadow of his helmet, showed a melancholy smile.

He was drinking in the smell of Africa, and listening to the song of the safari.

At times the song died down into a hum. But soon a quavering falsetto was heard formulating a new motive, expressing a new thought. Other voices joined the leader's; a minor refrain swept up and down the line; and abruptly the climax swelled out in a diapason descending far into the bass. So that every one could sing, the improvisor had phrased his thoughts in Swahili, the inter-tribal language of Africa. He sang of the Bibi from afar, her skin like a bowl of milk, who was traveling as a bride to Fort Pero d'Anhaya.

"She is rich. She is the daughter of a sultan. She is ill, but she will be well. She is sad, but she will be happy. We shall eat much meat at her wedding."

The deep chorus rolled out to a banging of sticks on the sides of the balanced boxes.

"Wah! This Bibi is rich! We shall eat much meat at her wedding!"

"They sing of you," said Hamoud, turning his limpid eyes toward her face which was veiled by swaying fringes of the awning. She unclenched her fists; her body slowly relaxed; and a look of incredulity appeared in her eyes, as she returned from afar to this oscillating world of steamy heat, throbbing with aboriginal song, impregnated with the smell of putrefying foliage and of sweat. From under the feet of the machilla carriers a cloud of mauve butterflies rose like flowers to strew themselves over her soft body. It was as if the machilla had suddenly become a bier.

"God forbid it!" Hamoud muttered, averting his face from that sign.

He wore a tight turban of many colored stripes cocked up over one ear; he had bared his legs, and bound sandals on his small feet; and round his waist, over the sash that held his dagger, he had fastened a web belt sustaining a bolstered pistol. He never left the side of the moving machilla.

They soon put behind them the mangroves of the coast. They passed through brakes of white-tipped feathery reeds, beyond which expanded forests whose velvety foliage was mingled with gray curtains of moss. On their left a little river kept reappearing. From the islands of marsh grass that floated down the stream, egrets and kingfishers flew away. On sandbars some dingy, log-like shapes, beginning stealthily to move toward the water, were revealed as crocodiles.

In a bend of the river cashew trees overshadowed the thatch of fishing huts. Beyond fields of lilies one made out, flitting away, sooty wanderers clad in ragged kilts and carrying thin-bladed spears. Then marshes spread afar: the transparent stalks of papyrus trembled above the bluish pallor of lotuses. As the declining sun poured its gold across the world, the air over the marshes was jeweled from a great rush of geese, ducks, heron, ibises, and storks.

They camped on the clean, white sand beside the stream.

The luxury that had always been her atmosphere still clung round her here, taking on an Oriental quality from this host of unfettered slaves, these dusky armed guards, these scurrying, white-robed servants who, in the light of the sunset, composed with the speed of enchantment her habitation for the night. The green tent, its fly extended like an awning, awaited her entrance. The floor sheet was strewn with rugs; the snowy camp bed was made; her toilet case stood open on the folding table. The tent boys, their faces obsequiously lowered, were pouring hot water into the canvas tub.

Bareheaded, but wrapped in a tan polo coat, she emerged from the tent to find the dinner table ready under the fly. They offered _hors d'oeuvres_, a jellied soup, a curry, fruit tarts, and coffee. She shook her head, and continued to stare at the candles on the table. Fluffy, white moths were burning themselves in the flames.

Parr protested that she must eat. In this climate one did not fast with impunity.

"I sha'n't collapse," she replied, that stony look returning to her face.

Night fell like the abruptly loosened folds of a great curtain. The air became vibrant with the shrilling of insects. Fireflies filled the darkness with a twinkling mist, so that the immense spangle of the purple sky seemed to have invaded the purple ambiguities of earth. But along the river bank shone the fires of the safari--points of flame that outlined, like a binding of copper wire, the silhouettes of squatting men, or turned a half-inchoate face to molten bronze, or illuminated, against the lustrous blackness of the water, the fragment of a muscular back, the crook of an arm, a stare of eyeballs, a display of teeth that seemed to be swimming there unrelated to a head.

The babble of the camp--a continuous chattering, crooning, and guffawing, blended with the indignant cries of monkeys. It was, she thought, all one threnody of purely natural creatures, of which one species, by some accident of structure and unplanned immunity, had enlarged its powers of experiment and imitation to this point of triumph--the kindling of fires, the eating of cooked food, the gradually enhanced capacity for suffering.

"Are you religious, Parr?" she asked the little man who sat huddled in a faded ulster, sucking at a cold pipe. What she meant was, "Do you believe, poor traveler, that you have a soul--some spark that these black savages share with you perhaps, but that those chattering monkeys lack?"

His pinched, gray countenance took on a timid look.

"I hope so, ma'am," he stammered, and tried to assume an expression of befitting dignity.

"So you can pray without laughing at yourself!"

Her cold voice was replete with the bitterness of those who have got from suffering nothing except rancor, as if at some vast hoax.

Parr was frightened by this glimpse into her disillusionment; and prayer, which he himself had abandoned in his childhood, seemed suddenly worthy of his timid championship. He mumbled something about faith; he had, it appeared, seen some of its achievements. He recalled the faith of strong men, which had accomplished prodigies; the confidence of youth----

"And when one is old and weak? So it is all a physical phenomenon?"

When she had slowly and relentlessly flung this retort at him, for want of a better object for her scorn, she turned her head away. Her eyes fell upon Hamoud who, sitting on his heels near her chair, was watching her face by the light of the talc-sided lanterns that dangled from the tent-fly. But Parr, not utterly crushed, proffered faintly that he knew he could not argue with the likes of her, being without education, having taken life as it came, mostly obeying orders----

"Like Hamoud," she commented. "Hamoud has taken life as it came, obeying the orders of fate. What is your word for resignation, Hamoud? The word that brought you across the ocean into Mr. Verne's service, and then back across the ocean into this place?"

"Mektoub," he vouchsafed, after lowering his eyes so that she should not see the flames in them. "And why not, since none can hope to escape his destiny? We--this whole safari--are here in the palm of God's hand. None knows what God has prepared for us; yet every footprint that we make has been marked before our feet."

On these words, his handsome, lightly bearded visage was touched with a look of beatitude, as though speaking in his sleep he was dreaming of some unrevealed delight.

"Then our will is nothing?"

"Ah, if our will is victorious it is the will of God."

As she made no response, and since the hour called "Isheh" was approaching, he rose and departed to pray.

"Will!" she thought. "No, there is nothing else. Will is the Thing-in-Itself."

The tent curtain fell behind her. She heard Parr's voice call out the command for silence. His words were taken up by the askaris on guard. The camp noises ceased; one heard only the scolding of the monkeys, the drumming of partridges, and the far-off roar of a lion that had eaten his fill. The earth seemed to tremble slightly from that distant sound.

She lay on her bed, under the muslin mosquito net through which strained the pearly gleam of a lantern. Once more it was all an illusion which must be allowed to endure till reality could be gained. For Lilla, the only reality was comprised at this moment into one more meeting with him, in the sight of his living face, in the sound of his voice pronouncing words of forgiveness, of love, perhaps even of remorse. Should she reach him too late for that--find this longing also part of the illusion? The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from the greenish infiltration of the moonlight.

Another lion roared in the depths of the night.

"Why should one fear even these strange forms of death? What has my life been that I should find it precious? What does anything matter except one hour with him? I really ask only a moment. No, all that I fear is death before I find him, before I've won from him a last kiss of understanding and pardon. Will! That shall be my strength and my immunity all the way!"

At last she dozed, to dream that Hamoud had confronted a lion just as the beast was about to pounce upon Madame Zanidov, who, wearing the dress of oxidized silver barbarically painted, crouched in a moonlit clearing. "No, Hamoud, let him have her!" Hamoud, with a smile, stood aside. Then she saw Lawrence approaching, his face and body wrapped in a white cloth. "Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when she sat up in bed with a scream.

Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of other voices broke like a wave.

"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but, kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net, to take her hand and press it to his brow.

"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to you."

"And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp. "Oh, Hamoud, and dreams?"

In the pearly light, beneath the cloudy net, in the air that was fragrant with the odors of soap and cologne, her upturned countenance and swelling throat gave forth a gleam as if of flesh transfigured by love instead of grief. He felt himself falling through space into a bottomless anguish. He clutched at the thought, "Yet who knows His designs?" and hung in that void alive, his secret still locked in his breast, the delicious pain of her daily condescension still assured to him.

"Ah, if you were of my faith you would have heard that life is all a dream, that there is no reality except paradise and hell."

He rose, and stole away from paradise to hell.