The Crescent Moon

FOR two days the forest below Luguru echoed the German bugle calls and the sound of rifle fire. At night the throbbing of drums never ceased, and the reflection of great fires l...

NOW it was far too light for her to think of sleep, and so she went into the house to change her clothes and to make herself clean. When she saw her own reflection in the little...

I suppose that their talk that night made a good deal of difference to the intimacy of their relation. No doubt it cost M‘Crae a considerable effort to speak of things which had...

IN those days James was never free from fever for long, despite the German method of quinine prophylaxis to which, in defiance of Manson, he had submitted. It seemed as if the t...

M‘CRAE, walking up and down the stoep, and meditating on the strangeness of life, was aware of the drumming which ushered in the dawn. In the ears of James it awakened only memo...

WHEN Eva, resolved on confession, had come to the door of her brother’s room and knocked, she had not been altogether surprised at his anxiety to be left alone. James had always...

FOR three days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods. And yet no waterways appeared. T...

WHEN I stepped on to the platform at Nairobi I hadn’t the very least idea of what I was in for. The train for which we were waiting was due from Kisumu, bringing with it a numbe...

THROUGH the garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which climbed the Sabæan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which the track could only be felt. She wa...

THERE came a day of cruel, intolerable heat. All the morning Eva lay in a long chair within the shade of the _banda_ in the garden under the sisal hedge. There was no sun, but t...

NEXT day when she woke she had forgotten all about her questionings. It was one of the peerless mornings of that hill country in which the very air, faintly chilled by night, po...

HOW many hours Eva lay alone under the thorn-tree I do not know. For a great part of the time she slept or fell into an uneasy dream that hung midway between sleep and waking. N...

NEXT morning Mr. Bullace left them. There wasn’t really anything suspicious about his haste; for if he hadn’t gone down the line that day he would have had to forfeit a month or...

HE left her standing alone under the avenue of acacia. A variety of projects swiftly filled her mind. She must go to M‘Crae, and tell him everything. It was strange that M‘Crae...