The Pools of Silence Part 17

Instinct told the herd that immediate danger was past, also that for safety they would have to cover an immense s.p.a.ce of country; so they settled to the pace most suitable for the journey. And what a pace it was, and what a sight!

Drifting across the country before the great white moon, fantastic beasts and more fantastic shadows, in three divisions line ahead, with the lanes of moonlight ruled between each line; calves by the cows, bulls in the van, they went, keeping to the scent of the track they had come by as unswervingly as a train keeps to the metals.

The giraffe was still with them. He and his shadow, gliding with compa.s.s-like strides a hundred yards away from the southward column; and just as the scent of the camp came to his mammoth friends, the sight of the camp fire, like a red spark, struck his keen eyes.

With a rasping note of warning he swerved to the south.

Now was the critical moment. Everything lay with the decision of the bulls leading the van, who, with trunks flung up and crooked forward, were holding the scent as a man holds a line. They had only a moment of time, but he who knows the elephant folk knows well the rapidity with which their minds can reason, and from their action it would seem that the arbiters of Berselius's fate reasoned thus: "The enemy were behind; they are now in front. So be it. Let us charge."

And they charged, with a blast of trumpeting that shook the sky; with trunks flung up and forward-driving tusks, ears spread like great sails, and a sound like the thunder of artillery, they charged the scent, the body of the herd following the leaders, as the body of a battering-ram follows the head.

Adams, when he had flung himself down in his tent, fell asleep instantly.

This sleep, which was profound and dreamless, lasted but half an hour, and was succeeded by a slumber in which, as in a darkened room where a magic-lantern is being operated, vivid and fantastic pictures arose before him. He was on the march with the column through a country infinite as is s.p.a.ce; the road they were taking, like the road to the tombs of the Chinese kings, was lined on either side with animals done in stone. At first these were tigers, and then, as though some veil of illusion had been withdrawn, he discovered them to be creatures far larger and more cruel, remorseless, and fearful than tigers; they were elephants--great stone elephants that had been standing there under the sun from everlasting, and they dwindled in perspective from giants to pigmies and from pigmies to grains of sand, for they were the guardians of a road whose end was infinity.

Then these vanished, but the elephant country under the burning sun remained. There was nothing to be seen but the sun-washed s.p.a.ces of wind-blown gra.s.s, and broken ground, and scattered trees, till across the sky in long procession, one following the other, pa.s.sed shadow elephants.

Shadows each thrice the height of the highest mountain, and these things called forth in the mind of the sleeper such a horror and depth of dread that he started awake with the sweat running down his face.

Sleep was shattered, and in the excitement and nerve-tension of over-tiredness he lay tossing on his back. The long march of the day before, in which men had matched themselves against moving mountains, the obsession of the things they had been pursuing, had combined to shatter sleep.

He came out in the open for a breath of air.

The camp was plunged in slumber. The two sentries ordered by Berselius to keep watch and to feed the fire lay like the others, with arms outspread; the fire was burning low, as though drowned out by the flood of moonlight, and Adams was on the point of going to the pile of fuel for some sticks to feed it, when he saw a sight which was one of the strangest, perhaps, that he would ever see.

The sentry lying on the right of the fire sat up, rose to his feet, went to the wood pile, took an armful of fuel and flung it on the embers.

The fire roared up and crackled, and the sleep-walker, who had performed this act with wide-staring eyes that saw nothing, returned to his place and lay down.

It was as if the order of Berselius still rang in his ears and the vision of Berselius still dominated his mind.

Adams, thinking of this strange thing, stood with the wind fanning his face, looking over the country to the west, the country they had traversed that day in tribulation under the burning sun. There was nothing to tell now of the weary march, the pursuit of phantoms, the long, long miles of labour; all was peaceful and coldly beautiful, moonlit and silent.

He was about to return to his tent when a faint sound struck his ear. A faint, booming sound, just like that which troubles us when the eardrum vibrates on its own account from exhaustion or the effect of drugs.

He stopped his ears and the sound ceased.

Then he knew that the sound was a real sound borne on the air.

He thought it was coming to him on the wind, which was now blowing steadily in his face, and he strained his eyes to see the cause; but he saw nothing. There was no cloud in the sky or storm on the horizon, yet the sound was increasing. Boom, boom, becoming deeper and more sonorous, now like the long roll of m.u.f.fled drums, now like the sea bursting in the sea-caves of a distant coast, or the drums of the cyclone when they beat the charge for the rushing winds. But the heart-searching feature of this strange booming in the night was a rhythm, a pulsation that spoke of life.

This was no dull shifting of matter, as in an earthquake, or of air as in a storm; this sound was alive.

Adams sprang to the tent where Berselius was sleeping, and dragged him out by the arm, crying, "Listen!"

He would have cried, "See!" but the words withered on his lips at the sight which was now before him as he faced east.

An acre of rollicking and tossing blackness storming straight for the camp across the plain under the thunder that was filling the night. A thing inconceivable and paralyzing, till the iron grip of Berselius seized his arm, driving him against the tree, and the voice of Berselius cried, "Elephants."

In a moment Adams was in the lower branches of the great tree, and scarcely had he gained his position than the sky split with the trumpeting of the charge and, as a man dying sees his whole life with one glance, he saw the whole camp of awakened sleepers fly like wind-blown leaves from before the oncoming storm, leaving only two figures remaining, the figures of Berselius and Felix.

The Zappo Zap had gone apart from the camp to sleep. He had drugged himself by smoking hemp, and he was lying half a hundred yards away, face down on the ground, dead to everything in earth and heaven.

Berselius had spied him.

What Adams saw then was, perhaps, the most heroic act ever recorded of man. The soul-shattering terror of the advancing storm, the thunder and the trumpeting that never ceased, had no effect on the iron heart of Berselius.

He made the instantaneous calculation that it was just possible to kick the man awake (for sound has no effect on the hemp-drugged one) and get him to the tree and a chance of safety. And he made the attempt.

And he would have succeeded but that he fell.

The root of a dead tree, whose trunk had long vanished, caught his foot when he had made half the distance, and brought him down flat on his face.

It was as though G.o.d had said, "Not so."

Adams, in an agony, sweat pouring from him, watched Berselius rise to his feet. He rose slowly as if with deliberation, and then he stood fronting the oncoming storm. Whether he was dazed, or whether he knew that he had miscalculated his chances, who knows? But there he stood, as if disdaining to fly, face fronting the enemy. And it seemed to the watcher that the figure of that man was the figure of a G.o.d, till the storm closed on him, and seized and swung aloft by a trunk, he was flung away like a stone from a catapult somewhere into the night.

Just as a man clings to a mast in a hurricane, deaf, blind, all his life and energy in his arms, Adams clung to the tree bole above the branch upon which he was.

The storm below, the smashing of great bodies against the tree, the trumpeting whose prolonged scream never ceased--all were nothing. His mind was cast out--he had flung it away just as the elephant had flung Berselius away. To him the universe was the tree to which he was clinging, just that part which his arms encircled.

The herd had attacked in three columns, keeping the very same formation as they had kept from the start. The northern column, consisting of cows with their calves, drove on as if to safety, the others, cows and bulls--the cows even more ferocious than the bulls--attacked the camps, the tents, and the fire. They stamped and trod the fire out, smashing tent poles and chop boxes, stores and cooking utensils, tusking one another in the tight-packed _melee_, and the scream of the trumpeting never ceased.

Then they drove on.

The porters, all except two, had, unhappily for themselves, fled in a body to the west, and now mixed with the trumpeting and thunder could be heard the screams of men trodden under foot or tusked to pieces. These sounds ceased, and the trumpeting died away, and nothing could be distinguished but the dull boom, boom of the herd sweeping away west, growing fainter and fainter, and dying away in the night.

CHAPTER XX

THE BROKEN CAMP

The whole thing had scarcely lasted twenty minutes. During the storming and trumpeting, Adams, clinging to the tree, had felt neither terror nor interest. His mind was cast out, all but a vestige of it; this remnant of mind recognized that it was lying in the open palm of Death, and it was not afraid. Not only that, but it felt lazily triumphant. It is only the reasoning mind that fears death, the mind that can still say to itself, "What will come after?" The intuitive mind, which does not reason, has no fear.

Had not the herd been so closely packed and so furious, Adams would have been smelt out, plucked from the tree and stamped to pieces without any manner of doubt. But the elephants, jammed together, tusking each other, and rooting the camp to pieces, had pa.s.sed on, not knowing that they had left a living man behind them.

As the sound of the storm died away, he came to his senses as a man comes to his senses after the inhalation of ether, and the first thing that was borne in upon him was the fact that he was clinging to a tree, and that he could not let go. His arms encircled the rough bark like bands of iron; they had divorced themselves from his will power, they held him there despite himself, not from muscular rigidity or spasm, but just because they refused to let go. They were doing the business of clinging to safety on their own account, and he had to _think himself free_. There was no use in ordering them to release him, he had to reason with them. Then, little by little, they (fingers first) returned to discipline, and he slipped down and came to earth, literally, for his knees gave under him and he fell.

He was a very brave man and a very strong man, but now, just released from Death, now that all danger was over, he was very much afraid. He had seen and heard Life: Life whipped to fury, screaming and in maelstrom action, Life in its loudest and most appalling phase, and he felt as a man might feel to whom the G.o.ds had shown a near view of that tempest of fire we call the sun.

He sat up and looked around him on the pitiable ruins of the camp on which a tornado could not have wrought more destruction. Something lay glittering in the moonlight close to him. He picked it up. It was his shaving-gla.s.s, the most fragile thing in all their belongings, yet unbroken. Tent-poles had been smashed to matchwood, cooking utensils trodden flat, guns broken to pieces; yet this thing, useless and fragile, had been carefully preserved, watched over by some G.o.d of its own.

He was dropping it from his fingers when a cry from behind him made him turn his head.

A dark figure was approaching in the moonlight.