XXIV
In response to his shout Kali was the first to come rushing; after him came the two guardsmen who were to relieve the previous watch, and a few moments later all the Wahimas and Samburus assembled at the scene of the crime, shouting and yelling. A commotion, full of cries and terror, ensued. The people were concerned not so much about the slain and the murderers as about the water which soaked into the parched jungle soil. Some negroes threw themselves upon the ground and, clawing out with their fingers lumps of earth, sucked out the remnants of moisture. Others shouted that evil spirits had murdered the guards and slashed the bags. But Stas and Kali knew what it all meant. M'Kunje and M'Pua were missing from those men howling above that grass patch. In that which had happened there was something more than the murder of two guards and the theft of water. The remaining slashed bags were evidence that it was an act of revenge and at the same time a sentence of death for the whole caravan. The priests of the wicked Mzimu revenged themselves upon the good one. The fetish-men revenged themselves upon the young king who exposed their frauds and did not permit them to deceive the ignorant Wahimas. Now the wings of death stretched over the entire caravan like a hawk over a flock of doves.
Kali recollected too late that, having his mind troubled and engrossed with something else, he forgot to have the fetish-men bound, as from the time of their flight he had ordered them to be each evening. It was apparent that both sentinels, watching the water, through inbred negro carelessness, lay down and fell asleep. This facilitated the work of the rogues and permitted them to escape unpunished.
Before the confusion subsided somewhat and the people recovered from their consternation, considerable time elapsed; nevertheless, the assassins could not be far away, as the ground under the cut bags was moist and the blood which flowed from both of the slain did not yet coagulate. Stas issued an order to pursue the runaways not only for the purpose of punishing them, but also to recover the last two bags of water. Kali, mounting a horse and taking with him about thirteen guardsmen, started in pursuit. Stas at first wanted to take part in it, but it occurred to him that he could not leave Nell alone among the excited and enraged negroes; so he remained. He only directed Kali to take Saba along with him.
He himself remained, for he feared a downright mutiny, particularly among the Samburus. But in this he was mistaken. The negroes as a rule break out easily, and sometimes for trivial causes, but when crushed by a great calamity and particularly when the inexorable hand of death weighs upon them, they submit passively; not only those whom Islam teaches that a struggle with destiny is vain, but all others. Then neither terror nor the moments of torture can arouse them from their torpor. It happened thus at this time. The Wahimas, as well as the Samburus, when the first excitement passed away and the idea that they must die definitely found lodgment in their minds, lay down quietly on the ground waiting for death; in view of which not a mutiny was to be feared, but rather that on the morrow they would not want to rise and start upon their further journey. Stas, when he observed this, was seized by a great pity for them.
Kali returned before daybreak and at once placed before Stas two bags torn to pieces, in which there was not a drop of water.
"Great Master," he said, "madi apana!"
Stas rubbed his perspiring forehead with his hand; after which he said:
"And M'Kunje and M'Pua?"
"M'Kunje and M'Pua are dead," Kali replied.
"Did you order them to be killed?"
"A lion or 'wobo' killed them."
And he began to relate what happened. The bodies of the two murderers were found quite far from the camp at the place where they met death. Both lay close to each other, both had skulls crushed from behind, lacerated shoulders, and gnawed spines. Kali assumed that when the "wobo" or lion appeared before them in the moonlight they fell on their faces before it and began to entreat it that it should spare their lives. But the terrible beast killed both, and afterwards, having appeased its hunger, scented water and tore the bags to pieces.
"God punished them," Stas said, "and the Wahimas should be convinced that the wicked Mzimu is incapable of rescuing any one."
And Kali added:
"God punished them, but we have no water."
"Far ahead of us in the east I saw mountains. There must be water there."
"Kali sees them also, but it is many, many days to them."
A moment of silence followed.
"Master," spoke out Kali, "let the 'Good Mzimu'—let the 'bibi' beg the Great Spirit for rain or for a river."
Stas left him, making no reply. But before the tent he saw Nell's little figure; the shouts and yells had awakened her some time before.
"What has happened, Stas?" she asked, running up to him.
And he placed his hand on her little head and solemnly said:
"Nell, pray to God for water; otherwise we all shall perish."
So the little maiden upraised her pale little face and, fastening her eyes on the moon's silvery shield, began to implore for succor Him who in heaven causes the stars to revolve and on earth tempers the wind for the shorn lamb.
After a sleepless, noisy, and anxious night the sun rolled upon the horizon suddenly, as it always does under the equator, and a bright day followed. On the grass there was not a drop of dew; on the sky not a cloudlet. Stas ordered the guards to assemble the men and delivered a short speech to them. He declared to them that it was impossible to return to the river now, for they of course well knew that they were separated from it by five days' and nights' journey. But on the other hand no one knew whether there was not water in the opposite direction. Perhaps even not far away they would find some stream, some rivulet or slough. Trees, indeed, could not be seen, but it often happens upon open plains where the strong gale carries away the seeds, trees do not grow even at the water-side. Yesterday they saw some big antelopes and a few ostriches running towards the east, which was a sign that yonder there must be some watering place, and in view of this whoever is not a fool and whoever has in his bosom a heart, not of a hare but of a lion or buffalo, will prefer to move forward, though in thirst and pain, rather than to lie down and wait there for vultures or hyenas.
And saying this, he pointed with his hand at the vultures, a few of which coursed already in an ill-omened circle above the caravan. After these words the Wahimas, whom Stas commanded to rise, stood up almost as one man, for, accustomed to the dreadful power of kings, they did not dare to resist. But many of the Samburus, in view of the fact that their king Faru remained at the lake, did not want to rise, and these said among themselves: "Why should we go to meet death when she herself will come to us?" In this manner the caravan proceeded, reduced almost one-half, and it started from the outset in torture. For twenty-four hours the people had not had a drop of water or any other fluid in their mouths. Even in a cooler climate this, at labor, would have been an unendurable suffering; and how much more so in this blazing African furnace in which even those who drink copiously perspire the water so quickly that almost at the same moment they can wipe it off their skin with their hands. It was also to be foreseen that many of the men would drop on the way from exhaustion and sunstroke. Stas protected Nell as best he could from the sun and did not permit her to lean for even a moment out of the palanquin, whose little roof he covered with a piece of white percale in order to make it double. With the rest of the water, which he still had in the rubber bottle, he prepared a strong tea for her and handed it to her when cooled off, without any sugar, for sweets increase thirst. The little girl urged him with tears to drink also; so he placed to his lips the bottle in which there remained scarcely a few thimblefuls of water, and, moving his throat, pretended that he drank it. At the moment when he felt the moisture on his lips it seemed to him that his breast and stomach were aflame and that if he did not quench that flame he would drop dead. Before his eyes red spots began to flit, and in his jaws he felt a terrible pain, as if some one stuck a thousand pins in them. His hands shook so that he almost spilt these last drops. Nevertheless, he caught only two or three in his mouth with his tongue; the rest he saved for Nell.
A day of torture and toil again passed, after which, fortunately, a cooler night came. But the following morning the intense heat became terrible. There was not a breath of air. The sun, like an evil spirit, ravaged with living flame the parched earth. The borders of the horizon whitened. As far as the eyes reached not even euphorbias could be seen. Nothing—only a burnt, desolate plain, covered with tufts of blackened grass and heather. From time to time there resounded in the immeasurable distance light thunder, but this in fair skies proclaims not storms but a drought.
About noon, when the heat became the greatest, it was necessary to halt. The caravan broke ranks in gloomy silence. It appeared that one horse fell and about thirteen of the guards remained on the road. During the rest nobody thought of eating. The people had sunken eyes and cracked lips and on them dried clots of blood. Nell panted like a bird, so Stas surrendered to her the rubber bottle, and exclaiming: "I drank! I drank!" he ran to the other side of the camp, for he feared that if he remained he would snatch that water from her or would demand that she should share it with him. This perhaps was his most heroic act during the course of the journey. He himself, however, began to suffer horribly. Before his eyes there flew continually the red patches. He felt a tightening of his jaws so strongly that he opened and closed them with difficulty. His throat was dry, burning; there was no saliva in his mouth; the tongue was as though wooden. And of course this was but the beginning of the torture for him and for the caravan.
The thunder announcing the drought resounded incessantly on the horizon's border. About three o'clock, when the sun passed to the western side of the heavens, Stas ordered the caravan to rise and started at its head towards the east. But now hardly seventy men followed him, and every little while some one of them lay down beside his pack to rise nevermore. The heat decreased a few degrees but was still terrible. The still air was permeated as though with the gas of burning charcoal. The people had nothing to breathe and the animals began to suffer no less. In an hour after the start again one of the horses fell. Saba panted and his flanks heaved; from his blackened tongue not a drop of froth fell. The King, accustomed to the dry African jungle, apparently suffered the least, but he began to be vicious. His little eyes glittered with a kind of strange light. To Stas, and particularly to Nell, who from time to time talked to him, he answered still with a gurgle, but when Kali carelessly came near him he grunted menacingly and waved his trunk so that he would have killed the boy if he had not jumped aside in time.
Kali's eyes were bloodshot, the veins in his neck were inflated, and his lips cracked the same as the other negroes. About five o'clock he approached Stas and, in a hollow voice which with difficulty issued out of his throat, said:
"Great master, Kali can go no further. Let the night come here."
Stas overcame the pain in his jaws and answered with an effort:
"Very well. We will stop. The night will bring relief."
"It will bring death," the young negro whispered.
The men threw the loads off their heads, but as the fever in their thickened blood already reached the highest degree, on this occasion they did not immediately lie down on the ground. Their hearts and the arteries in their temples, hands, and limbs pulsated as if in a moment they would burst. The skin of their bodies, drying up and shrinking, began to itch; in their bones they were sensible of an excessive disquiet and in their entrails and throats a fire. Some walked uneasily among the packets; others could be seen farther away in ruddy rays of the setting sun as they strolled one after another among the dried tufts as though seeking something, and this continued until their strength was entirely exhausted. Then they fell in turn on the ground and lay in convulsions. Kali sat, squatting near Stas and Nell, catching the air with open mouth, and began to repeat entreatingly between one breath and the other:
"Bwana kubwa, water."
Stas gazed at him with a glassy stare and remained silent.
"Bwana kubwa, water!"
And after a while:
"Kali is dying."
At this, Mea, who for an unknown reason endured thirst the easiest and suffered the least of all, approached, sat close to him, and, embracing his neck with her arms, said in her quiet, melodious voice.
"Mea wants to die together with Kali."
A long silence followed.
In the meantime the sun set and night covered the region. The sky became dark-blue. On its southern side the Cross glistened. Above the plain a myriad of stars twinkled. The moon came out from under the earth and began to satiate the darkness with light, and on the west with the waning and pale twilight extended the zodiacal luminosity. The air was transformed into a great luminous gulf. The ever-increasing luster submerged the region. The palanquin, which remained forgotten on the King's back, and the tents glistened, just as whitewashed houses glisten in a bright night. The world sank into silence and sleep encompassed the earth.
And in the presence of this stillness and this quiet of nature the people howled from pain and waited for death. On the silvery background of the darkness the gigantic black form of the elephant was strongly outlined. The moon's beams illuminated besides the tents, Stas' and Nell's dresses and, amid tufts of heather, the dark, shriveled bodies of the negroes and, scattered here and there, piles of packages. Before the children sat, propped on his fore legs, Saba, and, raising his head towards the moon's shield, he howled mournfully.
In Stas' soul oscillated only the remnants of thought, changed into a gloomy and despairing feeling that this time there was no help and that all those prodigious toils and efforts, those sufferings, those acts of will and courage, which he had performed during the terrible journey—from Medinet to Khartûm, from Khartûm to Fashoda, and from Fashoda to the unknown lake—would avail naught, and that an inexorable end of the struggle and of life was approaching. And this appeared to him all the more horrible because this end came during the time of the final journey, at the termination of which lay the ocean. Ah! He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would not hear from his lips that he had acted like a brave boy and like a true Pole! The end, the end! In a few days the sun would shine only upon the lifeless bodies and afterwards would dry them up into a semblance of those mummies which slumber in an eternal sleep in the museums in Egypt.
From torture and fever his mind began to get confused. Ante-mortem visions and delusions of hearing crowded upon him. He heard distinctly the voices of the Sudânese and Bedouins yelling "Yalla! Yalla!" at the speeding camels. He saw Idris and Gebhr. The Mahdi smiled at him with his thick lips, asking: "Do you want to drink at the spring of truth?"—Afterwards the lion gazed at him from the rock; later Linde gave him a gallipot of quinine and said: "Hurry, hurry, for the little one will die." And in the end he beheld only the pale, very dear little face and two little hands stretched out towards him.
Suddenly he trembled and consciousness returned to him for a moment, for hard by murmured the quiet whisper of Nell, resembling a moan:
"Stas—water!"
And she, like Kali previously, looked to him only for help.
But as twelve hours before he had given her the last drop, he now started up suddenly, and exclaimed in a voice in which vibrated an outburst of pain, despair, and affliction:
"Oh, Nell, I only pretended that I was drinking! For three days I have had nothing in my mouth!"
And clasping his head with both hands he ran away in order not to look at her sufferings. He rushed blindly among tufts of grass and heather until he fell upon one of the tufts. He was unarmed. A leopard, lion, or even a big hyena would find in him an easy prey. But only Saba came running to him. Having smelt at him on all sides, he again began to howl, as if summoning aid for him.
Nobody, however, hurried with aid. Only from above, the moon, quiet and indifferent, looked on him. For a long time the boy lay like dead. He was revived only by a cooler breath of wind, which unexpectedly blew from the east. Stas sat up and after a while attempted to rise to return to Nell.
The cooler wind blew a second time. Saba ceased howling and, turning towards the east, began to dilate his nostrils. Suddenly he barked once or twice a short, broken bass and dashed ahead. For some time he could not be heard, but soon his barking again resounded. Stas rose and, staggering on his numb legs, began to look after him. Long journeys, long stays in the jungle, the necessity of holding all his senses in continual restraint, and continual dangers had taught the boy to pay careful heed to everything which was taking place about him. So, notwithstanding the tortures he felt at that moment, notwithstanding his half-conscious mind, through instinct and habit he watched the behavior of the dog. And Saba, after the lapse of a certain time, again appeared near him, but was somewhat strangely agitated and uneasy. A few times he raised his eyes at Stas, ran around, again rushed ahead, scenting and barking in the heather; again he came back and finally, seizing the boy's clothes, began to pull him in a direction opposite to the camp.
Stas completely recovered his senses.
"What is this?" he thought. "Either the dog's mind, from thirst, is disordered or he has scented water. But no! If water was near he would have run to it to drink and would have wet jaws. If it was far away, he would not have scented it—water has no smell. He is not pulling me to antelopes, for he did not want to eat during the evening. Nor to beasts of prey. Well, what is it?"
And suddenly his heart began to beat in his bosom yet more strongly.
"Perhaps the wind brought him the odor of men?—Perhaps—in the distance there is some negro village?—Perhaps one of the kites has flown as far—Oh, merciful Christ! Oh, Christ!—"
And under the influence of a gleam of hope he regained his strength and began to run towards the camp, notwithstanding the obstinacy of the dog, who incessantly barred his way. In the camp Nell's form loomed white before him and her weak voice reached him: after a while he stumbled over Kali lying on the ground, but he paid no heed to anything. Reaching the pack in which the sky-rockets were, he tore it open and drew out one of them. With trembling hands he tied it to a bamboo stick, planted it in a crack in the ground, struck a match and lit the string of the tube hanging at the bottom.
After a while a red snake flew upwards with a sputter and a sizzle. Stas seized a bamboo pole with both hands in order not to fall and fixed his eyes on the distance. His pulse and his temples beat like sledge hammers; his lips moved in fervent prayer. His last breath, and in it his whole soul, he sent to God.
One minute passed, another, a third, and a fourth. Nothing! Nothing! The boy's hand dropped, his head bowed to the ground, and immense grief flooded his tortured breast.
"In vain! In vain!" he whispered. "I will go and sit beside Nell and we will die together."
At this moment far, far away on the silvery background of the moonlit night, a fiery ribbon suddenly soared upward and scattered into golden stars, which fell slowly, like great tears, upon the earth.
"Succor!" Stas shouted.
And immediately these people, who were half-dead a short time before, dashed pell-mell in a race across tufts of shrubs and grass. After the first sky-rocket, a second and third appeared. After that the breeze brought a report as though of tapping, in which it was easy to divine distant shots. Stas ordered all the Remingtons to be fired, and from that time the colloquy of rifles was not interrupted at all and became more and more distinct. The boy, sitting on a horse, which also as though by a miracle recovered its strength, and keeping Nell before him, dashed across the plain towards the saving sounds. Beside him rushed Saba and after him trumpeted the gigantic King. The two camps were separated by a space of a few miles, but as from both sides they drew to each other simultaneously, the whole trip did not last long. Soon the rifle shots could not only be heard but seen. Yet one last sky-rocket flew out in the air not farther than a few hundred paces. After that numerous lights glistened. The slight elevation of the ground hid them for a while, but when Stas passed it he found himself almost in front of a row of negroes holding in their hands burning torches.
At the head of the row were two Europeans, in English helmets and with rifles in their hands.
With one glance of the eye Stas recognized them as being Captain Glenn and Doctor Clary.