The Pools of Silence Part 9

"Good," said Berselius.

Adams wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He had never gone through a moment of more deadly nerve tension.

He was moving toward his quarry, now stretched stiff and stark, when he was arrested by Felix.

"Cow," said Felix again.

The cow had broken cover at the report of the gun and had got their wind.

Just as two automatic figures of the same make will, when wound up, and touched off, perform the same actions, the cow did exactly what the bull had done--ran about in a fierce and distressed manner and then charged right in the eye of the wind.

"Mine," said Berselius, and he went forward twenty paces to meet her.

Berselius, chilling and aloof to the point of mysteriousness, had, since the very starting of the expedition, shown little of his true character to his companion. What he had shown up to this had not lowered Adams's respect for him.

Self-restraint seemed the mainspring of that commanding force which this strange man exercised. His reprimand to the porters for the loss of the boy, expressed in a few quiet words, had sent them shivering to their places, cowed and dumb. Animal instinct seemed to tell them of a terrible animal which the self-restraint of that quiet-looking little man, with the pointed beard, alone prevented from breaking upon them.

Berselius had allowed the bull to approach to a little over a hundred yards before letting Adams fire. He had gauged the American's nerve to a nicety and his power of self-restraint, and he knew that beyond the hundred-yard limit he dared not trust them; for no man born of woman who has not had a good experience of big game can stand up to a charging rhinoceros and take certain aim when the hundred-yard limit has been pa.s.sed.

The thunderous drumming of the oncoming brute echoed from the forest. Had its head been a feather-pillow the impact of the three tons of solid flesh moving behind it would have been certain death; but the head was an instrument of destruction, devised when the megatherium walked the world, and the long raking horn would have ripped up an elephant as easily as a sharp penknife rips up a rabbit.

Before this thing, and to the right of it, rifle in hand, stood Berselius.

He did not even lift the gun to his shoulder till the hundred-yard limit was pa.s.sed, and then he hung on his aim so horribly that Adams felt the sweat-drops running on his face like ants, and even Felix swallowed like a man who is trying to choke down something nauseous. It was a magnificent exhibition of daring and self-restraint and cool a.s.surance.

At twenty-five yards or a little under, the cordite rang out. The brute seemed to trip, just as the other had done, over some invisible taut-stretched wire, and skidding with its own impetus, squealing, striking out and tearing up the gra.s.s, it came right up to Berselius's feet before stiffening in death. Like the great automaton it was, it had scented the human beings just as the bull had scented them, "fussed" just as he had fussed, charged as he had charged, and died as he had died.

And now from the camp rose a great outcry, "Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)."

From the soldiers, from the gun-bearers, from the porters it came. There were no longer soldiers, or gun-bearers, or porters; every distinction was forgotten; they were all savages, voicing the eternal cry of the jungle, "Nyama, nyama! (Meat, meat!)."

In the last rays of the sunset the two gigantic forms lay stretched forever in death. They lay as they had composed themselves after that long stiff stretch which every animal takes before settling itself for eternal sleep; and Adams stood looking at the great grinning masks tipped with the murderous horns, whilst Berselius, with his gun b.u.t.t resting on his boot, stood watching with a brooding eye as the porters and gun-bearers swarmed like ants around the slain animals and proceeded, under his direction, to cut them up. Then the meat was brought into camp. The tails and the best parts of the carca.s.ses, including the kidneys, were reserved for the white men, and the rations from the rest of the meat were served out; but a dozen porters who had been last in the line, and who were accountable for letting the boy drop behind, got nothing.

It was pitiable to see their faces. But they deserved their punishment, notwithstanding the fact that in the middle of the meat distribution the missing boy limped into camp. He had a thorn half an inch long in his foot, which Adams extracted. Then the camp went to bed.

Adams in his tent under the mosquito net slept soundly and heard and knew nothing of the incidents of the night. Berselius was also sleeping soundly when, at about one o'clock in the morning, Felix aroused him.

One of the porters had been caught stealing some of the meat left over from the distribution of the night before.

The extraordinary thing was that he had fed well, not being one of the proscribed. He had stolen from pure greed.

He was an undersized man, a weakling, and likely to break down and give trouble anyway. His crime was great.

Berselius sent Felix to his tent for a Mauser pistol. Then the body was flung into the forest where the roaring, rasping cry of a leopard was splitting the dark.

CHAPTER X

M'Ba.s.sA

Seven days' march took them one hundred and twenty miles east of Yandjali and into the heart of the great rubber district of M'Bonga.

Twenty miles a day ought to have been covered on an average, but they had delayed here and there to shoot, and the extra porters, whose duty it was to carry the trophies, were already in requisition.

It had been forest most of the way, but forest broken by open s.p.a.ces; they had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m'binas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild papaws of the adjoining woods.

But in the last two days of the march the forest had thickened and taken a more sombre note; nothing they had come upon heretofore had been quite so wild as this, so luxuriant and tropical. It was the haunt of the rubber vine, that mysterious plant which requires a gla.s.s-house atmosphere and a soil especially rich. The great rubber forest of M'Bonga, thousands of square miles in extent, is really composed of two forests joined by an isthmus of woods. Dimly, it is shaped like an hourgla.s.s; south of the constriction where the two forests join lies the elephant country for which Berselius was making, and Felix had led them so craftily and well, that they struck into the rubber district only fifty miles from the constriction.

In the forest, thirty miles from the elephant ground, lies the Belgian fort M'Ba.s.sa. They were making for this place now, which was to be the base from which they would start on the great hunt.

The fort of M'Ba.s.sa is not used to-day as a fort, only as a collecting-place for rubber. In the early days it was a very necessary entrenchment for the Belgians, as a tribe almost as warlike as the Zappo Zaps terrorized the districts; but the people of this tribe have long been brought under the blue flag with the white star. They are now "soldiers,"

and their savagery, like a keen tool, has been turned to good account by the Government.

In the great forest of M'Bonga the rubber vines are not equally distributed. Large areas occur in which they are not found; only in the most desolate places do they grow. You cannot tame and prune and bring the rubber vine into subjection; it will have nothing to do with the vineyard and the field; it chooses to grow alone.

Everything else comes to its harvest with a joyous face, but the rubber vine, like a dark green snake, fearful of death, has to be hunted for.

Even in the areas of the forest which it frequents, it is only to be found in patches, so the harvesters cannot go in a body, as men do to the harvesting of the corn, or the cotton, or the grape; they have to break up into small parties and these again subdivide, leaving a single individual here and there where the vines are thickest. He, entirely alone, at the mercy of the evil spirits that are in his imagination and the beasts that are in the forest, makes a rude shelter out of boughs and leaves, and sets to work making incisions in the vine and draining them drop by drop of their viscous sap.

Sometimes he sings over this monotonous work, and in the long rains between the intervals of the shower-bath roarings you can hear the ululations of these folk through the drip of the leaves, and at night the spark-like glimmer of their fires dots the reeking gloom.

These are the conditions of the rubber collector's task, and it is not a task that ever can be finished; year in, year out, it never ceases.

These woods through which Felix led them were to the woods near Yandjali what the music of Beethoven is to the music of Mozart.

Immense and gloomy symphonies. The trees were huge, and groaned beneath the weight of lianas cable-thick. At times they had to burst their way through the veils of leaves and vines, the porters losing themselves and calling one to the other, and the head of the expedition halting till the stragglers were collected; at times the ground they trod on was like grease from the cast-down fruit of the plantains that grew here enormous, and sodden, and dismal, showering their fruit in such quant.i.ties that the bush-pigs, devour as they might, could never dispose of it all.

On some of the trees, like huge withered leaves, hung bats, and from some of the trees the beard-moss hung yards long, and of a spectral gray; the very weeds trodden underfoot were sappy, and the smell of their squirting juice mixed itself with the smell of decay.

It was not even ground, either; the whole forest would dip down into an unseen valley; you felt yourself going down hill, down, down, and then you knew you were at the bottom of a sub-arboreal valley by the deeper stagnation of the air. Open s.p.a.ces, when they came, showed little sky, and they were less open s.p.a.ces than rooms in the surrounding prison.

Felix was not leading them through the uttermost depths of this place; he was following the vague indications of a road by which the rubber from M'Ba.s.sa was carted to the river.

They were travelling along a highway, in fact, and the dimmest indication of a track where other men have been before is a thing which robs the wilderness of much of its terror.

The loneliness of the forest beyond track or way, in those vast depths where the rubber collectors have to go alone, I leave you to imagine.

At last, at noon, on the third day of their journey to this place they struck rising ground where the trees fell away till no trees were left, and the blue sky of heaven lay above their heads, and before them on the highest point of the rise, Fort M'Ba.s.sa burning in the sun.

CHAPTER XI

ANDREAS MEEUS

The Parthenon in all its glory could not have looked more beautiful to the returning Greek than this half-ruined fort in the eyes of Adams.