again to stand under the open sky by the fire to listen.
After a long time Naomi said, "Yes, it's drums all right. It must mean some kind of trouble."
They slept no more that night and toward morning as the sky beyond the burnished, black surface of the lake began to turn the color of a flamingo's breast, the sound seemed to die away a little, bit by bit, as if it were a long piece of cane being broken off, a morsel at a time. At daylight it died altogether, leaving only a hot, empty stillness, and far away, near the place where Philip had seen the black virgins, the glow which they had mistaken for the rising dawn turned to the gray smoke of a burning village. The gray column spread fan-wise against the horizon until all the bush for miles lay covered by a thick blanket of gray rising above an angry red line. On the surface of the lake the fragile, black silhouette of a canoe jumped for a moment like a water-spider against the horizon, and disappeared.
The sun, dimmed and red, flooded the basin of the lake and the marshes with dull, yellow light, and revealed the village below them—their own village, Megambo—standing silent and deserted. There was no echo of loud, carefree banter, no crowing of cocks, no sound of women screaming at one another over the morning fires. It was silent like a village stricken with a plague wherein all were dead.
As the day advanced it seemed to Philip that they, too, were dead. In that empty world, he could not bring himself to go off alone into a menacing silence where the sound of a rifle-shot might rouse all the forest into life. It was as if thousands of eyes watched them from out of the shadows. He went as far as the
