The Pools of Silence Part 18

It was the Zappo Zap. The man whom Berselius, with splendid heroism, had tried to save. Like the looking-gla.s.s, and protected, perhaps, by some G.o.d of his own, the columns of destruction had pa.s.sed him by. The column of cows with their calves had pa.s.sed him on the other side. Old hunters say that elephants will not trouble with a dead man, and Felix, though awakened by the shaking of the earth, had lain like a dead man as the storm swept by.

He was very much alive, now, and seemingly unconcerned as he came toward Adams, stood beside him, and looked around.

"All gone dam," said Felix. And volumes would not have expressed the situation more graphically. Then the savage, having contemplated the scene for a moment, rushed forward to a heap of stuff--broken boxes and what not--dragged something from it and gave a shout.

It was the big elephant rifle, with its cartridge-bag attached. The stock was split, but the thing was practically intact. Felix waved it over his head and laughed and whooped.

"Gun!" yelled Felix.

Adams beckoned to him, and he came like a black devil in the moonlight--a black devil with filed teeth and flashing eyeb.a.l.l.s--and Adams pointed to the tree and motioned him to leave the gun there and follow him. Felix obeyed, and Adams started in the direction in which he had seen Berselius flung.

It was not far to walk, and they had not far to search. A hundred yards took them to a break in the ground, and there in the moonlight, with arms extended, lay the body of the once powerful Berselius, the man who had driven them like sheep, the man whose will was law. The man of wealth and genius, great as Lucifer in evil, yet in courage and heroism tremendous.

G.o.d-man or devil-man, or a combination of both, but great, incontestably great and compelling.

Adams knelt down beside the body, and the Zappo Zap stood by with incurious eyes looking on.

Berselius was not dead. He was breathing; breathing deeply and stertorously, as men breathe in apoplexy or after sunstroke or ruinous injury to the brain. Adams tore open the collar of the hunting shirt; then he examined the limbs.

Berselius, flung like a stone from a catapult, had, unfortunately for himself, not broken a limb. That might have saved him. His head was the injured part, and Adams, running his fingers through the hair, matted with blood, came on the mischief. The right parietal bone was dented very slightly for a s.p.a.ce nearly as broad as a penny. The skin was broken, but the bone itself, though depressed slightly, was not destroyed. The inner table of the skull no doubt was splintered, hence the brain mischief.

There was only one thing to be done--trephine. And that as swiftly as possible.

Everything needful was in the instrument-case, but had it escaped destruction?

He raised Berselius by the shoulders. Felix took the feet, and between them they carried the body to the tree, where they laid it down.

Before starting to hunt for the instruments, Adams bled Berselius with his penknife. The effect was almost instantaneous. The breathing became less stertorous and laboured. Then he started to search hither and thither for the precious mahogany case which held the amputating knives, the tourniquets and the trephine. The Zappo Zap was no use, as he did not know anything about the stores, and had never even seen the instrument case, so Adams had to conduct the search alone, in a hurry, and over half an acre of ground. The case had almost to a certainty been smashed to pieces; still, there was a chance that the trephine had escaped injury. He remembered the shaving-gla.s.s, and how it had been miraculously preserved, and started to work. He came across a flat oblong disc of tin; it had been a box of sardines, it was now flattened out as though by a rolling mill.

He came across a bottle of brandy sticking jauntily up from a hole in the ground, as if saying, "Have a drink." It was intact. He knocked the head off and, accepting the dumb invitation, put it back where he had found it, and went on.

He came across long strips of the green rot-proof stuff the tents had been made of. They looked as though they had been torn up like this for rib-roller bandages, for they were just of that width. He came across half a mosquito-net; the other half was sailing away north, streaming from the tusk of a bull in which it was tangled, and giving him, no doubt, a sufficiently bizarre appearance under the quiet light of the moon and stars.

There were several chop boxes of stores intact; and a cigar box without a crack in it, and also without a cigar. It looked as though it had been carefully opened, emptied, and laid down. There was no end to the surprises of this search: things brayed to pieces as if with a pestle and mortar, things easily smashable untouched.

He had been searching for two hours when he found the trephine. It lay near the bra.s.s lock of the amputating case, attached to which there were some pieces of mahogany from the case itself.

A trephine is just like a corkscrew, only in place of the screw you have a cup of steel. This steel cup has a serrated edge: it is, in fact, a small circular saw. Applying the saw edge to the bone, and working the handle with half turns of the wrist, you can remove a disc from the outer table of the skull just as a cook stamps cakes out of a sheet of dough with a "cutter."

Adams looked at the thing in his hands; the cup of chilled steel, thin as paper and brittle as gla.s.s, had been smashed to pieces, presumably; at all events, it was not there.

He flung the handle and the shaft away and came back to the tree beneath which the body of Berselius was lying. Berselius, still senseless, was breathing deeply and slowly, and Adams, having cut away the hair of the scalp round the wound with his penknife, went to the pool for water to bathe the wound; but the pool was trodden up into slush, and hours must elapse before the mud would settle. He remembered the bottle of brandy, fetched it, washed the wound with brandy, and with his handkerchief torn into three pieces bound it up.

There was nothing more to be done; and he sat down with his back to the tree to wait for dawn.

The bitterness of the thing was in his heart, the bitterness of being there with hands willing and able to help, yet helpless. A surgeon is as useless without his instruments as the cold, lifeless instruments are without a hand to guide them. It is not his fault that his hands are tied, but if he is a man of any feeling, that does not lessen the anguish of the situation.

Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the gra.s.s waved in the wind. Felix, lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his G.o.d, the big elephant rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.

CHAPTER XXI

THE FEAST OF THE VULTURES

Adams, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a whoop from Felix.

It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Felix, were all that remained of Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there----

Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts and kites were holding a clamorous meeting; over there, where the ground was black with birds.

The two wretches approaching the camping place rolled their eyes in terror, glancing over there. They had run for miles and hidden themselves in a donga. They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, torn to pieces, trampled to pulp; they had heard the thunder of the vanishing herd, and they had listened to the awful silence that followed, lying on their faces, clinging to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the camp.

"Hi yi!" yelled Felix, and a response came like the cry of a seagull. They were shivering as dogs shiver when ill or frightened; their teeth were chattering, and they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on their necks and ankles showed white and leprous-looking in the bright morning sunshine.

But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent over him, and started back in surprise.

Berselius's eyes were open; he was breathing regularly and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened from sleep, was yet too lazy to move.

Adams touched him upon the shoulder, and Berselius, raising his right hand, drew it over his face as if to chase away sleep. Then his head dropped, and he lay looking up at the sky. Then he yawned twice, deeply, and turning his head on his left shoulder looked about him lazily, his eyes resting here and there: on the two porters who were sitting, with knees drawn up, eating some food which Felix had given them; on the broken camp furniture and the heaps of raffle left by the catastrophe of the night before; on the skyline where the gra.s.s waved against the morning blue.

Adams heaved a sigh of relief. The man had only been stunned. None of the vital centres of the brain had been injured. Some injury there must be, but the main springs of life were intact. There was no paralysis, for now the sick man was raising his left hand, and, moving about as a person moves in bed to get a more comfortable position, he raised both knees and then, turning over on his right side, straightened them out again. Now, by the movements of a sick person you can tell pretty nearly the condition of his brain.

All the movements of this sick man were normal; they indicated great tiredness, nothing more. The shock and the loss of blood might account for that. Adams the night before had made a pillow from his own coat for the stricken one's head; he was bending now to rearrange it, but he desisted.

Berselius was asleep.

Adams remained on his knees for a moment contemplating his patient with deep satisfaction. Then he rose to his feet. Some shelter must be improvised to protect the sleeping man from the sun, but in the raffle around there did not seem enough tent cloth to make even an umbrella.

Calling Felix and the two porters to follow him, he started off, searching amidst the _debris_ here and there, setting the porters to work to collect the remains of the stores and to bring them back to the tree, hunting in vain for what he wanted, till Felix, just as they reached the northern limit of destruction, pointed to where the birds were still busy, clamorous and gorging.

"What is it?" asked Adams.

"Tent," replied Felix.

To the left of where the birds were, and close to them, lay a mound of something showing dark amidst the gra.s.s. It was a tent, or a large part of one of the tents; tangled, perhaps, in a tusk, it had been brought here and cast, just as a storm might have brought and cast it. Even at this distance the air was tainted with the odour of the birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before a savage.

"Come," said he, and they started.

The birds saw them coming, and some flew away; others, trying to fly away, rose in the air heavily and fluttering a hundred yards sank and scattered about in the gra.s.s, looking like great vermin; a few remained waddling here and there, either too impudent for flight or too greatly gorged.

Truly it had been a great killing, and the ground was ripped as if by ploughs. Over a hundred square yards lay blistering beneath the sun, red and blue and black; and the torment of it pierced the silence like a shout, though not a movement was there, save the movement of the bald-headed vulture as he waddled, or the flapping of a rag of skin to the breeze.

They seized on the tent, the Zappo Zap laughing and with teeth glinting in the sun. It was the smallest tent, ripped here and there, but otherwise sound; the mosquito net inside was intact and rolled up like a ball, but the pole was broken in two.

As they carried it between them, they had to pa.s.s near a man. He was very dead, that man; a great foot had trodden on his face, and it was flattened out, looking like a great black flat-fish in which a child, for fun, had punched holes for eyes and mouth and nose; it was curling up at the edges under the sun's rays, becoming converted into a cup.

"B'selius," said Felix, with a laugh, indicating this thing as they pa.s.sed it.

Adams had his hands full, or he would have struck the brute to the ground.