Chapter 57

Lawrence Teck was not in the gorges of the waterfalls.

While marching in through the lowlands he had been seized with a fever that he had failed to shake off on the plateaux. Every day he had grown a little worse, indeed, till finally the choice had seemed to lie between resignation of his work and serious illness. Turning back toward the coast, he had now regained the forests of the Mambava. Here, in his second night's camp, he had suffered a collapse.

He lay abed in his tent. On the waterproof floor cloth squatted a Mambava warrior, a messenger from King Muene-Motapa.

"Give the word, Bangana. Give the word, Brother of the King. We will carry you to the King's town on a litter as soft as the clouds. The wizards shall work their charms to make you well. The Dances of the Moon are about to begin: it is the time of answered prayers. Your medicines have failed; now try ours. One word, Bangana! Gladden the heart of the King!"

The messenger's almost Semitic visage, upturned in the lamplight, was smeared with ambassadorial signs in yellow paint. On his head he wore a bonnet of marabout feathers that floated like a tiara of gossamer; his arms and legs were armored with copper bangles. In his voice there throbbed a tenderness and pathos, as if he were making vocal the very essence of the king's desire. His eyes even swam in moisture, as he repeated the conjuration:

"Speak! Speak the word!"

Lawrence Teck returned:

"Say this to Muene-Motapa. The medicine that might cure me is far beyond the sea. I thought I might do without it; but see what the lack of it has brought me to. A little chill, a headache--the strong man rejoicing in the world shakes his shoulders and they are gone. But death in one of its multitude of forms stands at the door of the heart that has ceased to take pleasure in life."

His voice was feeble. His bearded face, bending forward under the net, was blank from exhaustion and unnaturally flushed. His teeth clashed together, as he concluded:

"There is no medicine in this land to cure this sickness."

The messenger groaned, and said compassionately:

"It is sad to see the great deserted by their gods. Yet our gods remain!" He pressed his palms on the floor sheet and leaned forward, his filmy headdress drifting over his glittering eyes. "Surely, Bangana, now is the time to renounce the old, to embrace the true! To cast the spear of scorn and come in behind our shields till you are strong again. We will make you forget! Give yourself up but once to our ancient mysteries! Have you forgotten the Dances of the Moon?"

There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their appearance and actions, to be human--beings that danced in regiments with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums, that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest stronghold; it was that which hovers like an echo over the suave, ordered landscapes of civilization; it was the seductive horror that invades the modern brain in dreams, or in some moment of utter bitterness and despair.

For a moment he still leaned forward, peering into those glittering, dark eyes, though what he saw was something beyond that face--the destruction of all the toil of fifty thousand years, the suicide of a soul. With a shudder he lay back upon the bed.

"Return to the King."

For five minutes the messenger sat motionless; but Lawrence Teck did not speak again. Rising at last, in a fluff of his marabout plumes, he armed himself with his spear and his oval shield covered with an heraldic design.

"The King will weep," he said. "And the little sisters of the King, and all those who loved you, oh, dead man."

He raised the curtain, and stalked away through the camp, clashing superbly between the fires, while the clustered askaris and porters regarded him dismally.

A white man in a fleece-lined coat, who had been waiting in the open for the messenger to depart, entered the tent and sat down beside the bed.

He was Cornelius Rysbroek.

"Shall you try to march to-morrow?"

Lawrence Teck did not reply. There was no strength in him even to move his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek, believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.

In his eyes appeared, perfected, the light that had made them exceptional for years, a flash from that psychical lake of fire and brimstone in which his heart had so long been burning up. For the tables were turned at last: the weak one, the inferior, had become the stronger, the better. A thousand wounds seemed to heal themselves in him as he contemplated the prostration of the enemy whom he had hated, just from premonition, even before his appearance. There was true madness in that look, arising from the long privation, the interminable jealousy, the consequent monomania of revenge. "He will die," he reflected, gloating with half-shut eyes, his face, that had once been puerile, now dignified by triumph. "He will never leave this forest," he sang to himself, curling up his mouse-colored mustaches as if at a mirror before sallying out to some pleasure in which there was no sting. But suddenly he remembered that this prostrate rival was still his conqueror, had won what he had not been able to win, would recall, no doubt, in his last moment of consciousness, that love in all its details.

Out of the silent night the spirit of Africa crept into the dim tent, completing his madness.

To one of the little fires came softly Lawrence Teck's tent boy, a turbaned Persian, lemon-hued, with the beak of a parrot and the mouth of a cruel woman. He sat down close beside a Swahili gun bearer, who was frying a mess of white ants.

"Our Bwana has fallen asleep," he uttered in a voice that would have been inaudible to white men. "The other Bwana is sitting by the bed." He waited till the ants were cooked to a turn, then murmured, in a tone like aeolian harp strings caressed by the faintest zephyr, "If our Bwana does not die of the fever the other Bwana will kill him."

The brown Swahili, his pan half raised, turned his face which seemed to have been smashed flat, and gave the speaker a slow, fierce look of inquiry. The Persian breathed:

"With our Bwana's own pistol. As if he had killed himself. I peeped through the curtain. The pistol was hanging from the tent-pole. When he looked at it, and then at our Bwana, I read everything in his mind. But if this also is the will of God it will not happen until some hour when the camp is still--when we are all asleep."