Chapter 58

The safari that was seeking him marched and camped, marched and camped, marched and camped.

Every afternoon the northeastern monsoon wafted in its sticky moisture, releasing in the jungles the nauseating sweetness of incredible flowers. Smoky-brown flies were seen on the necks of the sheep. The beasts began to sicken and die. The porters ate fresh meat.

But the porters no longer sang. The Wasena, who bore the hammock, muttered to one another dolefully as they shuffled along. All knew by this time that they were not headed for Fort Pero d'Anhaya. Avoiding that last outpost of civilization, they were approaching the country of the Mambava, which lay behind the steamy sunshine, below the blue and lavender battlements of granite, in the uplands covered with forests.

The askaris alone, the lean, khaki-clad Somalia, remained indifferent to this atmosphere of disquiet that was more debilitating to the porters than the fever-laden mists. For these fierce, restless men from the northern deserts were of a breed that found its true contentment in danger and violence. They were cheered, perhaps, by the possibility of bloodshed, sustained by the automatism resulting from their faith, and, despite their disdain of women, inspired by their admiration of this frail personage who was always urging more speed toward the fabulous regions of peril.

As for her, she no longer saw anything except that deep green zone which quivered behind the heat.

"I shall find him not in the gorges, but in those forests."

For the scene of Anna Zanidov's prophecy was laid in a forest.

She lay in the machilla like a tightly drawn bow. Her skin, now ashen, now bright from a touch of fever, stretched over a visage of apparently new contours: round her cheekbones and jaws were suggestions of previously unsuspected strength. Her tender lips had assumed an almost cruel aspect; her sunken eyes, growing ever larger in her diminishing face, were harder than gems. She was the personification of will.

And Parr, sagging, shivering, softly groaning on the back of the Muscat donkey, and Hamoud, ever pacing beside her, and the askaris with their rifle barrels glinting against their fezzes, and the porters and the camp boys, were only the instrument that her will had welded together. They were wraiths obediently advancing her dream of one fleeting moment of triumph over fate. They were nothing, since she had summoned them out of the void of this world by an imperious cry. They were everything; for without them her dream would fade.

Sometimes the green zone of the uplands was lost in a blur not of heat, but of fever. Sharp pains stabbed her temples, and, when the dream became distinct again, she saw black men walking like giants, their heads in the white-hot sky. But just as she had conquered fear, so, by a supreme resolution, she conquered her vertigo, the burning of her emaciated limbs, the quaking of her body which a moment before had been bathed in moisture. At sunset she descended from the machilla to give Hamoud a look of astonishment, while replying:

"No, I am well."

Yet she cast a look of dread at the rising tent, thinking of the hours of sleeplessness, of appalling thoughts on the borderline between nightmares and flashes of fever.

Now and then, as she escaped shivering from the hot bath, she lost hold of her new strength.

"If you knew!" she whimpered.

The lost, safe life rose before her. She saw against the green tent walls the painting by Bronzino, the jeweled perspective of Fifth Avenue at night, Fanny Brassfield's necklace sparkling in the blaze of the opera house. The music of waltzes mingled with the strains of David's tone poem; and she smelled at the same time the tanbark of the horse show, the pastilles at Brantome's, and the flowers surrounding the marble warrior and the marble nymph. She was seized with panic, on realizing the remoteness of security.

"Where am I? Africa! But why?"

She stood motionless, aghast at her inability to remember why she was here.

Hamoud's voice came to her from beyond the curtain:

"There is going to be a shauri, a talk with these porters of yours."

"Ah, my God! What is it now?"

Hamoud cast back at her through the curtain, in a tone of bitterness:

"Rebellion."

She wrapped herself in her robe and cowered on the bed.

Half an hour passed. Hamoud's voice was heard again:

"Madam, all is ready."

She emerged victorious once more, her face stony, her lips compressed, her eyes as cold as ice.

On each side of her tent a clump of askaris stood leaning on their rifles. Over against her chair the porters were aligned in a great semicircle, tribe by tribe. The intervening flames of a camp fire shone richly on the massed bronze bodies and the brutish faces that had turned, for once, inexpressive. As Lilla sat down in her chair, a low murmur passed through their ranks and lost itself in the gilded fronds of palm trees that hung stiffly, like the scenery of a theater, above this spectacle.

Amid the shrilling of crickets a Wasena, the leader of the machilla bearers, spoke first. He was a thin mulatto with filed teeth; the sores on his shoulders were smeared with an ointment made of charcoal and oil. His voice rose explosively, in a sort of childish defiance, persisted for a long while, then suddenly died away. One heard from the depths of the jungle the tittering of a hyena.

An askari spat to the left contemptuously.

The leader of the porters from Tete sprang forward with a cry of exasperation. For this occasion he had bound round his waist the pelt of one of the slaughtered sheep, and had made a head-dress of draggled turaco feathers. He waved his sinewy arms, crouched, postured, tossed back his head. His oration was less coherent than the Wasena's, but more dramatic.

"The first moon since the rains! The season when the Mambava hold their great dances! It is now that their forest will be full of music, while their warriors gather in the place that they know of, to dance to the moon. We will not enter the country of the Mambava while they dance to the moon!"

A hoarse outcry rose toward the multitude of stars:

"We will not enter the country of the Mambava when they dance to the moon!"

The askaris, their fezzes cocked jauntily, impatiently shuffled their sandals of giraffe hide, and hitched up their belts in which were thrust broad-bladed Somali knives.

"They are rabbits," the askaris affirmed. "Even this lady shames them. They are less than women." They turned their fierce eyes toward Lilla, calling out to her, "Here we stand, Ya Bibi!" There was a savage insinuation in that cry.

In order to respond, Parr sat down in a chair, the immemorial symbol of authority. He spoke in Swahili. After each sentence he paused, so that his words might be translated by the headmen of the porters into their tribal dialects. His voice rose faintly, almost ineffectually contending against the sounds of the insects. He looked very small and ghastly in the firelight; he was sick to his bones, feeling just as he had felt before the black-water fever. The great semicircle of hostile eyes perceived all his weakness. In the opinion of his antagonists his face bore the seal of death. This representative of the white-skinned super-race was revealed as weaker than they--no trace of the white man's conquering will was to be discerned in his feeble countenance. Why listen any more?

Their leaders no longer troubled to translate his words.

He went on, however, with the last of his strength holding fast to the thought of paying his debt in full.

In that land, he declared, none would dare to hurt the friends of Muene-Motapa's friend. They should return telling how they had passed unharmed, even honored, through the country of the Mambava. He promised them double pay--while groping for some further argument, he seemed to be sinking in upon himself. His face drooped forward.

From the horde of porters came scattered shouts:

"Enough! The shauri is over! In the morning we return!"

"What do they say, Hamoud?"

"They say that in the morning they will return to the coast."

She sat stunned.

The orator from Tete moved with a kind of spasmodic dancing gait toward Parr. Never thus had the white man's genius lain prostrate before him. He was the symbol of a race abruptly exalted from inferiority to dominance. There came over him a frenzy of pride and malice; it was the realization of the dreams that burn the brains of all the dark people of the earth. "Do you hear?" he howled, and brandished his fists as though about to strike that lowered head.

An askari glided forward reversing his rifle. There was a cracking sound as the gun butt struck the orator from Tete in the middle of the forehead. With a drowsy look the smitten man sank down as gently as if falling into a mound of feathers, and deliberately composed himself in sleep, his brown face against the brown earth.

In all that throng there was suddenly not the slightest movement, and no sound was to be heard except the trill of the insects.

She was standing, staring from the prostrate body to the mass of porters, whose eyes were fixed upon the victim with one look, of mournful awakening. Then they saw her whom they had forgotten, or, in their transport, considered negligible. But when they had read her face it was they who were frightened.

"You! You! To stop me!"

And a homicidal gesture completed her appearance of fury.

"Wallahi!" the askaris called out to one another. "She has given the order!"

They spread out to right and left with a clicking of their rifle locks; they drove the porters together, close to the fire. A soft moan arose from the huddled crowd. They had seen the whips of hippopotamus hide, long and flexible, translucent in the firelight like streams of amber.

As the lash described a flourish above the first outstretched back she turned away to her tent. Hamoud was before her, raising the curtain. He said:

"They will speak no more about the coast when we are through with them."