“Ah!” I heard him mutter (Billali had a habit of muttering to himself), “he is ugly—ugly as the other is beautiful—a very Baboon; it was a good name. But I like the man. Strange now, at my age, that I should like a man. What says the proverb—’Mistrust all men, and slay him whom thou mistrustest overmuch; and as for women, flee from them, for they are evil, and in the end will destroy thee.’ It is a good proverb, especially the last part of it: I think that it must have come down from the ancients. Nevertheless I like this Baboon, and I wonder where they taught him his tricks, and I trust that She will not bewitch him. Poor Baboon! he must be wearied after that fight. I will go lest I should awake him.”
I waited till he had turned and was nearly through the entrance, walking softly on tiptoe, then I called after him.
“My father,” I said, “is it thou?”
“Yes, my son, it is I; but let me not disturb thee. I did but come to see how thou didst fare, and to tell thee that those who would have slain thee, my Baboon, are by now far on their road to She. She said that you also were to come at once, but I fear you cannot yet.”
“Nay,” I said, “not till we have recovered a little; but have me borne out into the daylight, I pray thee, my father. I love not this place.”
“Ah, no,” he answered, “it hath a sad air. I remember when I was a boy I found the body of a fair woman lying where thou liest now—yes, on that very bench. She was so beautiful that I was wont to creep in hither with a lamp and gaze upon her. Had it not been for her cold hands, almost could I think that she slept and would one day awake, so fair and peaceful was she in her robes of white. White was she, too, and her hair was yellow, and fell down her almost to the feet. There are many such still in the tombs at the place where She is, for those who set them there had a way I know naught of whereby to save their beloved from the crumbling hand of Decay, even when Death had slain them. Ay, day by day I came hither, and gazed on her, till at last—laugh not at me, stranger, for I was but a silly lad—I learned to love that dead form, the shell which once had held a life that no more is. I would creep up to her and kiss her cold face, and wonder how many men had lived and died since she was, and who had loved her and embraced her in the days that long have passed away. And, my Baboon, I think I learned wisdom from that dead one, for of a truth it taught me of the littleness of Life, and the length of Death, and how all things that are under the sun go down one path, and are for ever forgotten. And so I mused, and it seemed to me that knowledge flowed into me from the dead, till one day my mother, a watchful woman, but hasty-minded, seeing I was changed, followed me, and saw the beautiful white one, and feared that I was bewitched, as, indeed, I was. So, half in dread and half in anger, she took the lamp, and standing the dead woman up against the wall yonder, set fire to her hair, and she burnt fiercely, even down to the feet, for those who are thus kept burn excellently well.
“See, my son, the smoke of her burning still hangs upon the roof.”
I looked up doubtfully, and there, sure enough, on the rock of the sepulchre, was spread an unctuous and sooty mark, three feet or more across. Doubtless in the course of years it had been rubbed off the sides of the little cave, but on the roof it remained, and there was no mistaking its appearance.
“She burned,” he went on in a meditative voice, “even to the feet, but the feet I came back and saved, cutting the charred bone from them, and I hid them under the stone bench yonder, wrapped in a piece of linen. Surely, I remember it as though it were but yesterday. Perchance they are there, if none have found them, even to this hour. Of a truth I have not entered the chamber from that time to this very day. Stay, I will look,” and, kneeling down, Billali groped with his long arm in the recess under the stone bench. Presently his face brightened, and with an exclamation he drew something forth which was caked in dust that he shook on to the floor. It was covered with the remains of a rotting rag, which he undid, and revealed to my astonished gaze a beautifully shaped and almost white woman’s foot, looking as fresh and firm as though it had been placed there yesterday.
“Thou seest, my son, the Baboon,” he said, in a sad voice, “I spake the truth to thee, for here is yet one foot remaining. Take it, my son, and gaze upon it.”
9.1 Holly and Billali
I took this cold fragment of mortality in my hand, and looked at it in the light of the lamp with feelings which I cannot describe, so compounded were they of astonishment, fear, and fascination. It was light, much lighter I should say than it had been in the living state, and the flesh to all appearance was still flesh, though about it there clung a faintly aromatic odour. For the rest it was not shrunk or shrivelled, or even black and unsightly, like the flesh of Egyptian mummies, but plump and fair, and, except where it had been slightly scorched, perfect as on the day of death—a very triumph of embalming.
Poor little foot! I set it down upon the stone bench where it had lain for so many thousand years, and wondered whose was the beauty that it had upborne through the pomp and pageantry of a forgotten civilisation—first as a merry child’s, then as a blushing maid’s, and lastly as that of a perfect woman. Through what halls of Life had its step echoed, and in the end, with what courage had it trodden down the dusty ways of Death! To whose side had it stolen in the hush of night when the black slave slept upon the marble floor, and who had listened for its coming? Shapely little foot! Well might it have been set upon the proud neck of a conqueror bent at last to woman’s beauty, and well might the lips of nobles and of kings have been pressed upon its jewelled whiteness.
I wrapped this relic of the past in the remnants of the old linen rag which, I believe, had been a portion of its owner’s grave-clothes, for it was partially burnt, and hid it away in my travelling bag—a strange resting-place, I thought. Then with Billali’s help I staggered out to see Leo. I found him dreadfully bruised, worse even than myself, perhaps owing to the excessive whiteness of his skin, and faint and weak with the loss of blood from the flesh wound in his side, but for all that very cheerful, and asking for some breakfast. Job and Ustane lifted him on to the bottom, or rather the sacking, of a litter, which was taken from its pole for that purpose, and with the aid of old Billali carried him out into the shade at the mouth of the cave, from which, by the way, every trace of the slaughter of the previous night had now been removed. There we all breakfasted, and indeed spent that day, and most of the two which followed.
On the third morning Job and myself were practically recovered. Leo also was so much better that I yielded to Billali’s often expressed entreaty, and agreed to set out at once upon our journey to Kôr, which we were told was the name of the place where the mysterious She lived, though I still feared for its effect upon Leo, and especially lest the motion should cause his wound, which was scarcely skinned over, to break open again. Indeed, had it not been for Billali’s evident anxiety to start, which led us to suspect that some difficulty or danger might threaten us if we did not comply with it, I would not have consented to go so soon.
X
SPECULATIONS
Within an hour of our final decision to start five litters were brought up to the door of the cave, each accompanied by four bearers and two spare hands, and with them a band of fifty armed Amahagger, who were to form the escort and carry the baggage. Three of these litters, of course, were for us, and one for Billali, who, I was immensely relieved to hear, proposed to accompany us, while the fifth I presumed was for the use of Ustane.
“Does the lady go with us, my father?” I asked of Billali, as he stood superintending things in general.
He shrugged his shoulders as he answered—
“If she wills. In this country the women do what they please. We worship them, and give them their way, because without them the world could not go on; they are the source of life.”
“Ah!” I said, the matter never having struck me quite in that light before.
“We worship them,” he continued, “up to a point, till at last they grow unbearable, which,” he ad
ded, “happens about every second generation.”
“And then what do you do?” I asked, with curiosity.
“Then,” he answered, with a faint smile, “we rise, and kill the old ones as an example to the young ones, and to show them that we are the strongest. My poor wife was killed in that way three years ago. It was very sad, but to tell thee the truth, my son, life has been happier since, for my age protects me from the maidens.”
“In short,” I replied, quoting the saying of a politician whose wisdom has not yet lightened the darkness of the Amahagger, “thou hast found thy position one of greater freedom and less responsibility.”
This phrase puzzled him a little at first from its vagueness, though I think my translation hit off the sense very well, but at last he understood, and appreciated it.
“Yes, yes, my Baboon,” he said, “I see it now, but all the ‘responsibilities’ are killed, at least some of them are, and that is why there are so few old women about just now. Well, they brought it on themselves. As for this girl,” he went on, in a graver tone, “I know not what to say. She is a brave girl, and she loves the Lion; thou sawest how she clung to him, and saved his life. Also, according to our custom, she is wed to him, and has a right to go where he goes, unless,” he added significantly, “She would say her no, for her word overrides all rights.”
“And if She bade her leave him, and the girl refused? What then?”
“If,” he said, with a shrug, “the hurricane bids the tree to bend, and it will not, what happens?”
Then, without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked to his litter, and in ten minutes from that time we were all well under way.
It took us an hour and more to cross the cup of the volcanic plain, and another half-hour or so to climb the edge on the farther side. Once there, however, the view was a very fine one. Before us lay a long steep slope of grassy plain, broken here and there by clumps of trees, mostly of the thorn tribe. At the bottom of this gentle slope, some nine or ten miles away, we could discern a dim sea of marsh, over which the foul vapours hung like smoke about a city. It was easy work for the bearers down the slopes, and by midday we had reached the borders of the dismal swamp. Here we halted to eat our midday meal, then, following a winding and devious track, we plunged into the morass. Presently the path, at any rate to our unaccustomed eyes, grew so faint as to be almost indistinguishable from those made by the aquatic beasts and birds, and it is to this day a mystery to me how our bearers found their way across the marshes. Ahead of the cavalcade marched two men with long poles, which they now and again plunged into the ground before them, the reason of this being that the nature of the soil frequently changed from causes with which I am not acquainted, so that places which might be safe enough to cross one month would certainly swallow the wayfarer the next. Never did I see a more dreary and depressing scene. Miles on miles of quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly: miles upon miles of it without a break, unless the fever fog can be called a break. The only life in this great morass was that of the aquatic birds, and the animals that fed on them, of both of which there were vast numbers. Geese, cranes, ducks, teal, coot, snipe, and plover swarmed all around us, many being of varieties which were quite new to me, and all so tame that one could almost have knocked them over with a stick. Among these birds I noticed especially a very beautiful variety of painted snipe, almost the size of a woodcock, and with a flight more resembling that bird’s than an English snipe’s. In the pools, too, lived a species of small alligator or enormous iguana, I do not know which, that fed, Billali told me, upon the waterfowl, also large quantities of a hideous black water-snake, of which the bite is dangerous, though not, I gathered, so deadly as that of a cobra or a puff adder. The bullfrogs were also very large, with voices proportionate to their size; and as for the mosquitoes—the “musqueteers,” as Job called them—they were, if possible, even worse than they had been on the river, and tormented us greatly. Undoubtedly, however, the worst feature of the swamp was the awful smell of rotting vegetation that hung about it, which at times was positively overpowering, and the malarious exhalations that accompanied it, which we were of course obliged to breathe.
On we went through it all, till at last the sun sank in sullen splendour just as we reached a spot of rising ground about two acres in extent—an oasis of dry land in the midst of the miry wilderness—where Billali announced that we were to camp. The camping, however, turned out to be a very simple process, and consisted, in fact, in sitting down on the ground round a scanty fire built of sere reeds and some wood that had been brought with us. However, we made the best we could of it, and smoked and ate with such appetite as the smell of damp, stifling heat would allow, for it was very hot on this low land, and yet, oddly enough, chilly at times. But, however hot it was, we were glad enough to keep near the fire, because we found that the mosquitoes did not like the smoke. Presently we rolled ourselves up in our blankets and tried to go to sleep, but so far as I was concerned the bullfrogs, and the extraordinary roaring and alarming sound produced by hundreds of snipe hovering high in the air, made sleep an impossibility, to say nothing of our other discomforts. I turned and looked at Leo, who was next me; he was dozing, but his face had a flushed appearance that I did not like, and by the flickering firelight I saw Ustane, who was lying on the other side of him, raise herself from time to time upon her elbow, and glance at him anxiously enough.
However, I could do nothing to help him, for we had already taken a good dose of quinine, the only preventive we possessed; so I lay and watched the stars come out by thousands, till all the immense arch of heaven was strewn with glittering points, and every point a world! Here was a glorious sight by which man might well measure his own insignificance! Soon I gave up thinking about it, for the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as He strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works. Such things are not for us to know. Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak. Too much wisdom perchance would blind our imperfect sight, and too much strength would make us drunk, and over-weight our feeble reason till it fell and we were drowned in the depths of our own vanity. For what is the first result of man’s increased knowledge interpreted from Nature’s book by the persistent effort of his purblind observation? Is it not but too often to make him question the existence of his Maker, or, indeed, of any intelligent purpose beyond his own? Truth is veiled, because we could no more look upon her glory than we can upon the sun. It would destroy us. Full knowledge is not for man as man is here, for his capacities, which he is apt to think so great, are indeed but small. The vessel is soon filled, and were one-thousandth part of the unutterable and silent Wisdom that directs the rolling of those shining spheres, and the Force which makes them roll, pressed into it, it would be shattered into fragments. Perhaps in some other place and time it may be otherwise. Who can tell? Here the lot of man born of the flesh is but to endure midst toil and tribulation; to catch at the bubbles blown by Fate, which he calls pleasures, thankful if before they burst they rest a moment in his hand, and when the tragedy is played out, and his hour comes to perish, to pass humbly whither he knows not.
Above me as I lay shone the eternal stars, and there at my feet the impish marsh-born balls of fire rolled this way and that, vapour-tossed and earth-desiring, and I thought that in the two I saw a type and image of what man is, and of what man may perchance become, if the living Power who ordained him and them should so ordain this also.
Many such speculations passed through my mind that night. They come to torment us all at times. I say to torment, for, alas! thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought. What is the purpose of our feeble crying in the silences of space? Can our dim intelligence read the secrets of that star-strewn sky? Does any answer come out of it? Never any at all—no
thing but echoes and fantastic visions! And yet we believe that beyond the horizon of the grave there is an answer, and that Faith supplies it. Without Faith we should suffer moral death, and by the help of Faith we yet may climb to Heaven.
Wearied, but still sleepless, I fell to considering our undertaking, and how wild it was. Yet how strangely the story seemed to fit in with what had been written centuries ago upon the sherd! Who was this extraordinary woman, Queen over a people apparently as extraordinary as herself, and reigning amidst the vestiges of a lost civilisation? And what was the meaning of this story of the Fire which gave unending life? Could it be possible that any fluid or essence should exist which might so fortify these fleshy walls that they could from age to age resist the mines and batterings of decay? It was possible, though not probable. The indefinite continuation of life would not, as poor Vincey said, be so marvellous a thing as the production of life and its temporary endurance. And if it were true, what then? The person who found it might no doubt rule the world. He could accumulate all the wealth in the world, and all the power, and all the wisdom that is power. He might give a lifetime to the study of each art or science. Well, if that were so, and if this She were practically immortal, which I did not for one moment believe, how was it that, with all these things at her feet, she preferred to remain in a cave amongst a society of cannibals? Surely this settled the question. The story was monstrous, and only worthy of the superstitious days in which it was written. At any rate, I was very certain that I would not attempt to attain unending life. I had known far too many worries and disappointments and secret bitternesses during my forty odd years of existence to wish that this state of affairs should be continued indefinitely. And yet I suppose that, comparatively speaking, my life has been a happy one.