It was the close of the day. Over the baked veldt of Equatorial Africa a safari marched. The men, in single file, were reduced to the unimportance of moving black dots by the tremendous sweep of the dry country stretching away to a horizon infinitely remote, beyond which lay single mountains, like ships becalmed hull-down at sea. The immensities filled the world--the simple immensities of sky and land. Only by an effort, a wrench of the mind, would a bystander on the advantage, say, of one of the little rocky, outcropping hills have been able to narrow his vision to details.
And yet details were interesting. The vast shallow cup to the horizon became a plain sparsely grown with flat-topped thorn trees. It was not a forest, yet neither was it open country. The eye penetrated the thin screen of tree trunks to the distance of half a mile or more, but was brought to a stop at last. Underfoot was hard-baked earth, covered by irregular patches of shale that tinkled when stepped on. Well-defined paths, innumerable, trodden deep and hard, cut into the iron soil. They nearly all ran in a northwesterly direction. The few traversing paths took a long slant. These paths, so exactly like those crossing a village green, had in all probability never been trodden by human foot. They had been made by the game animals, the swarming multitudinous game of Central Africa.
The safari was using one of the game trails. It was a compact little safari, comprising not over thirty men all told. The single white man walked fifty yards or so ahead of the main body. He was evidently tired, for his shoulders drooped, and his shuffling, slow-swinging gait would anywhere have been recognized by children of the wilderness as that which gets the greatest result from the least effort. Dressed in the brown cork helmet, the brown flannel shirt with spine-pad, the khaki trousers, and the light boots of the African traveller little was to be made of either his face or figure. The former was fully bearded, the latter powerful across the shoulders. His belt was heavy with little leather pockets; a pair of prismatic field-glasses, suspended from a strap around his neck, swung across his chest; in the crook of his left arm he carried a light rifle.
Immediately at his heels followed a native. This man's face was in conformation that of the typical negro; but there the resemblance ceased. Behind the features glowed a proud, fierce spirit that transformed them. His head was high but his eyes roved from right to left restlessly, never still save when they paused for a flickering instant to examine some gazelle, some distant herd of zebra or wildebeeste standing in the vista of the flat-topped trees. His nostrils slowly expanded and contracted with his breathing, as do those of a spirited horse. In contrast to the gait of the white man he stepped vigorously and proudly as though the long day had not touched his strength. He wore a battered old felt hat, a tattered flannel shirt, a ragged pair of shorts, and the blue puttees issued by the British to their native troops. The straps of two canteens crossed on his breast; a full cartridge belt encircled his waist; he carried lightly and easily one of those twelve-pound double cordite rifles that constitute the only African life insurance.
Fifty yards in the rear marched the carriers. They were a straight, strong lot, dressed according to their fancy or opportunity in the cast-off garments of the coast; comical in the ensemble, perhaps, but worthy of respect in that all day each had carried a seventy-pound load under a tropical sun, and that they were coming in strong.
And finally, bringing up the rear, marched a small, lively, wizened little fellow, dressed as nearly as possible like the white man, and carrying as the badge of his office a bulging cotton umbrella and the kiboko--the slender, limber, stinging rhinoceros-hide whip.
It was the end of a long march. This could be guessed by the hour, by the wearied slouch of the white man, above all by the conduct of the safari. The men were walking one on the heels of the other. Their burdens, carried on their heads, held them erect. They stepped out freely. But against the wooden chop boxes, the bags of cornmeal potio, the bundles of canvas that made up some of the loads, the long safari sticks went tap, tap, tap, in rhythm. This tapping was a steady undertone to the volume of noise that arose from thirty throats. Every man was singing or shouting at the full strength of his lungs. A little file of Wakamba sung in unison one of the weird wavering minor chants peculiar to savage peoples everywhere; some Kavirondos simply howled in staccato barks like beasts. Between the extremes were many variations; but every man contributed to the uproar, and tapped his load rhythmically with his long stick. By this the experienced traveller would have known that the men were very tired, tired to the point of exhaustion; for the more wearied the Central African native, or the steeper the hill he, laden, must surmount, the louder he sings or yells.
"Maji hapana m'bale, bwana," observed the gun bearer to the white man. "Water is not far, master."
The white man merely nodded. These two had been together many years, and explanations were not necessary between them. He, as well as Simba, had noticed the gradual convergence of the game trails, the presence of small grass birds that flushed under their feet, the sing-sing buck behind the aloes, the increasing numbers of game animals that stared or fled at the sight and sound of the safari.
Nothing more was said. The way led to the top of one of those low transverse swells that conceal the middle distance without actually breaking the surface of the veldt. In the corresponding depression beyond now could be discerned a wandering slender line of green.
"Maji huko!" murmured Simba. "There is the water."
Suddenly he stooped low, uttering a peculiar hissing sound. The white man, too, dropped to the ground, throwing his rifle forward.
"Nyama, bwana!" he whispered fiercely, "karibu sana!"
He pointed cautiously over the white man's shoulder. The safari, at the sight of the two dropping to a crouch, had stopped as though petrified, and stood waiting in silence.
"We have no meat," Simba reminded his master in Swahili.
The white man eased himself back to a sitting posture, resting his elbows on his knees, as all sensible good rifle shots do when they have the chance. Simba, his eyes glowing fiercely, staring with almost hypnotic intensity over his master's shoulder, quivered like an eager dog.
"Hah!" he grunted as the loud spat of the bullet followed the rifle's crack. "Na kamata--he has it!" he added as the wildebeeste plunged into full view.
The hunter manipulated the bolt to throw in a new cartridge, but did not shift his position. In less remote countries the sportsman, unlimited in ammunition but restricted in chances, would probably have pumped in four or five shots until the quarry was down. The traveller and Simba watched closely, with expert eyes, to determine whether a precious second cartridge should be expended.
"Where?" asked the white man briefly.
"Low in the shoulder," replied Simba.
The wildebeeste plunged wildly here and there, kicking, bucking, menacing the unseen danger with his horns. For several seconds longer the two watched, then rose leisurely to their feet. Simba motioned to the waiting safari, who, correctly interpreting the situation, broke into a trot. Both Simba and his master knew that had the animal not received a mortal wound it would before this have whirled to look back. The fact that it still ran proved its extremity. Sure enough, within the hundred yards it suddenly plunged forward on its nose, rolled over, and lay still.
The fierce countenance of the gun bearer lit up in triumph. He shifted the heavy rifle and reached out to touch the lighter weapon resting again in the crook of his master's arm.
"Nyama Yangu! Nyama Yangu!" he murmured. That was Simba's name for the light rifle that did most of the shooting. The words meant simply "my meat." Simba had a name for everything from the sheath knife of his office to the white man himself. Indeed Culbertson in the Central countries was Culbertson to none. Should you inquire for news of him by that name news you could not obtain; but of Bwana Kingozi you might learn from many tribes and peoples.
But now the safari, topping the hill, swept down with a rapid fire of safari sticks against the loads and a chorus whose single word was "n'yama!"
Simba was already at the carcass, Kisu M'kubwa, his thin-bladed knife, in his hand. The men eased their loads to the ground, and stood about with eagerly gleaming eyes, as would well-trained dogs in like circumstances. Simba briefly indicated the three nearest to act as his assistants. The wildebeeste was rapidly skinned and as rapidly dismembered, the meat laid aside. Only once did the white man speak or manifest the slightest interest.
"Sarrara indani yangu--the tenderloin is mine."
The wizened little headman with the umbrella and the kiboko, who answered to the name of Cazi Moto, stepped forward and took charge of the indicated delicacy. Soon all was ready for a resumption of the march. Nothing was left of the wildebeeste save the head and the veriest offal. The stomach and intestines, even, had been emptied of their contents and packed away in the hide.
Already the carrion birds had gathered in incredible numbers. The sky was full of them circling; an encompassing ring of them sat a scant fifty yards distant, their wings held half out from their bodies, as though they felt overheated. And in the low bushes could be discerned the lurking, furtive, shadowy jackals.
The men were laughing, their weariness forgotten. Maulo, the camp humourist, declaimed loudly at the top of his lungs, mocking the marabouts, the buzzards, the vultures great and small, the kites and the eagles.
"Go to the lion," he cried, "he kills much, and leaves. Little meat will you get here. We keep what we get!"
And the men broke into meaningless but hearty laughter, as though at brilliant wit.
But Bwana Kingozi's low voice cut across the merriment.
"Bandika!" he commanded.
And immediately Cazi Moto and Simba took up the cry.
"Bandika! bandika! bandika!" they vociferated over and over. Cazi Moto moved here and there, lively as a cricket, his eyes alert for any indication of slackness, his kiboko held threateningly.
But there was no need for the latter. The men willingly enough swung aloft their loads, now augmented by the meat, and the little caravan moved on.
Scarcely had Cazi Moto, bringing up the rear, quitted the scene when the carrion birds swooped. They fell from the open sky like plummets, their wings half folded. When within ten feet of the ground they checked their fall with pinion and tail, and the sound of them was like the roar of a cataract. Those seated on the ground moved forward in a series of ungainly hops, trying for more haste by futile urgings of their wings. Where the wildebeeste had fallen was a writhing, flopping, struggling brown mass. In an incredibly brief number of seconds it was all over. The birds withdrew. Some sat disgruntled and humpbacked in the low trees; some merely hopped away a few yards to indulge in gloomy thoughts. A few of the more ambitious rose heavily and laboriously with strenuous beating of pinions, finally to soar grandly away into the infinities of the African sky. Of the wildebeeste remained only a trampled bloody space and bones picked clean. The jackals crept forward at last. So brief a time did all this occupy that Maulo, looking back, saw them.
"Ho, little dogs!" he cried with one of his great empty laughs; "your stomachs will go hollow but you can fill your noses!"
They tramped on steadily toward the low narrow line of green trees, and the sun sank toward the hills.
The game trails converged at a point where the steep, eroded bank had been broken down into an approach to a pool. The dust was deep here, and arose in a cloud as a little band of zebra scrambled away. The borders of this pool were a fascinating palimpsest: the tracks of many sorts of beast had been impressed there in the mud. Both Kingozi and Simba examined them with an approach to interest, though to an observer the examination would have seemed but the most casual of glances. They saw the indications of zebra, wildebeeste, hartebeeste, gazelles of various sorts, the deep, round, well-like prints of the rhinoceros, and all the other usual inhabitants of the veldt. But over these their eyes passed lightly. Only three things could here interest these seasoned African travellers. Simba espied one of them, and pointed it out, just at the edge of the narrow border of softer mud.
"There is the lion," said he. "A big one. He was here this morning. But no buffalo, bwana; and no elephant."
The water in the pool was muddy and foul. Thousands of animals drank from it daily; and after drinking had stood or wallowed in it. The flavour would be rich of the barnyard, which even a strong infusion of tea could not disguise. Kingozi had often been forced to worse; but here he hoped for better.
The safari had dumped down the loads at the top of the bank, and were resting in utter relaxation. The march was over, and they waited.
Bwana Kingozi threw off the carefully calculated listless slouch that had conserved his strength for an unknown goal. His work was not yet done.
"Simba," he directed, "go that way, down the river[1] and look for another pool--of good water. Take the big rifle."
[1: Every watercourse with any water at all, even in occasional pools, is m'to--a river--in Africa.]
"And I to go in the other direction?" asked Cazi Moto.
Bwana Kingozi considered, glancing at the setting sun, and again up the dry stream-bed where, as far as the eye could reach, were no more indications of water.
"No," he decided. "It is late. Soon the lions will be hunting. I will go."
The men sprawled in abandon. After an interval a shrill whistle sounded from the direction in which Bwana Kingozi had disappeared. The men stretched and began to rise to their feet slowly. The short rest had stiffened them and brought home the weariness to their bones. They grumbled and muttered, and only the omnipresence of Cazi Moto and the threat of his restless whip roused them to activity. Down the stream they limped sullenly.
Kingozi stood waiting near the edge of the bank. The thicket here was very dense.
"Water there," he briefly indicated. "The big tent here; the opening in that direction. Cook fire over there. Loads here."
The men who had been standing, the burdens still on their heads, moved forward. The tent porter--who, by the way, was the strongest and most reliable of the men, so that always, even on a straggling march, the tent would arrive first--threw it down at the place selected and at once began to undo the cords. The bearers of the kitchen, who were also reliable travellers, set about the cook camp.
A big Monumwezi unstrapped a canvas chair, unfolded it, and placed it near his master. The other loads were arranged here, in a certain long-ordained order; the meat piled there. Several men then went to the assistance of Mali-ya-bwana, the tent bearer; and the others methodically took up various tasks. Some began with their pangas to hew a way to the water through the dense thicket that had kept it sweet; others sought firewood; still others began to pitch the tiny drill tents--each to accommodate six men--in a wide circle of which the pile of loads was the centre. As the men fell into the ordered and habitual routine their sullenness and weariness vanished.
Kingozi dropped into the canvas chair, fumbled for a pipe, filled and lighted it. With a sigh of relief he laid aside his cork helmet. The day had not only been a hard one, but an anxious one, for this country was new to every member of the little expedition, native guides had been impossible to procure, and the chances of water had been those of an arid region.
The removal of the helmet for the first tune revealed the man's features. A fine brow, upstanding thick and wavy hair, and the clearest of gray eyes suddenly took twenty years from the age at first made probable by the heavy beard. With the helmet pulled low this was late middle age; now bareheaded it was only bearded youth. Nevertheless at the corners of the eyes were certain wrinkles, and in the eyes themselves a direct competent steadiness that was something apart from the usual acquisition of youth, something the result of experience not given to most.
He smoked quietly, his eye wandering from one point to another of the new-born camp's activities. One after another the men came to report the completion of their tasks.
"Pita ya maji tayiari," said Sanguiki coming from the new-made water trail.
"I zuru," approved Kingozi.
"Hema tayiari," reported Simba, reaching his hand for the light rifle.
Kingozi glanced toward the tent and nodded. A licking little fire flickered in the cook camp. The tiny porter's tents had completed their circle, and in front of each new smoke was beginning to rise. Cazi Moto glided up and handed him the kiboko, the rhinoceros-hide whip, the symbol of authority. Everything was in order.
The white man rose a little stiffly and walked over to the pile of meat. For a moment he examined it contemplatively, aroused himself with an apparent effort, and began to separate it into four piles. He did not handle the meat himself, but silently indicated each portion with his kiboko, and Simba or Cazi Moto swiftly laid it aside.
"This for the gun-bearer camp," commanded Kingozi, touching with his foot the heavy "backstraps" and the liver--the next choicest bits after tenderloin. He raised his voice.
"Kavirondo!" he called.
Several tall, well-formed black savages of this tribe arose from one of the little fires and approached. The white man indicated one of the piles of meat.
"Wakamba!" he summoned; then "Monumwezi"; and finally "Baganda!"
Thus the four tribes represented in his caravan were supplied. The men returned to their fires, and began the preparation of their evening meal.
Kingozi turned to his own tent with a sigh of relief. Within it a cot had been erected, blankets spread. An officer's tin box stood open at one end. On the floor was a portable canvas bath. While the white man was divesting himself of his accoutrements, Cazi Moto entered bearing a galvanized pail full of hot water which he poured into the tub. He disappeared only to return with a pail of cold water to temper the first.
"Bath is ready, bwana," said he, and retired, carefully tying the tent flaps behind him.
Fifteen minutes later Kingozi emerged. He wore now a suit of pajamas tucked into canvas "mosquito boots," with very thin soles. He looked scrubbed and clean, the sheen of water still glistening on his thick wavy hair.
The canvas camp chair had been placed before two chop boxes piled one atop the other to form a crude table on which were laid eating utensils. As soon as Cazi Moto saw that his master was ready, he brought the meal. It consisted simply of a platter of curry composed of rice and the fresh meat that had been so recently killed that it had not time to get tough. This was supplemented by bread and tea in a tall enamelware vessel known as a balauri. From the simplicity of this meal one experienced would have deduced--even had he not done so from a dozen other equally significant nothings--that this was no sporting excursion, but an expedition grimly in earnest about something.
The sun had set, and almost immediately the darkness descended, as though the light had been turned off at a switch. The earth shrunk to a pool of blackness, and the heavens expanded to a glory of tropical stars. All visible nature contracted to the light thrown by the flickering fires before the tiny white tents. The tatterdemalion crew had, after the curious habit of Africans, cast aside its garments, and sat forth in a bronze and savage nakedness. All day long under the blistering sun your safari man will wear all that he hath, even unto the heavy overcoat discarded by the latest arrival from England's winter; but when the chill of evening descends, then he strips happily. The men were fed now, and were content. A busy chatter, the crooning of songs, laughter, an occasional shout testified to this. A general relaxation took the camp.
The white man finished his meal and lighted his pipe. Even yet his day's work was not quite done, and he was unwilling to yield himself to rest until all tasks were cleared away.
"Cazi Moto!" he called.
Instantly, it seemed, the headman stood at his elbow.
"To-morrow," said Kingozi deliberately, and paused in decision so long that Cazi Moto ventured a "Yes, bwana."
"To-morrow we rest here. It will be your cazi (duty) to find news of the next water, or to find the water. See if there are people in this country. Take one man with you. Let the men rest and eat."
"Yes, bwana."
"Are there sick?"
"Two men."
"Let them come."
Cazi Moto raised his voice.
"N'gonjwa!" he summoned them.
Kingozi looked at them in silence for a moment.
"What is the matter with you?" he asked of the first, a hulking, stupid-looking Kavirondo with the muscles of a Hercules.
The man replied, addressing Cazi Moto, as is etiquette; and although Kingozi understood perfectly, he awaited his headman's repetition of the speech as though the Kavirondo had spoken a strange language.
"Fever, eh?" commented Kingozi aloud to himself, for the first time speaking his own tongue. "We'll soon see. Cazi Moto," he instructed in Swahili, "the medicine."
He thrust a clinical thermometer beneath the Kavirondo's tongue, glancing at a wrist watch as he did so.
"Cazi Moto," he said calmly after three minutes, "this man is a liar. He is not sick; he merely wants to get out of carrying a load."
The Kavirondo, his eyes rolling, shot forth a torrent of language.
"He says," Cazi Moto summarized all this, "that he was very sick, but that this medicine"--indicating the thermometer--"cured him."
"He lies again," said Kingozi. "This is not medicine, but magic that tells me when a man has uttered lies. This man must beware or he will get kiboko."
The Kavirondo scuttled away, and Kingozi gave his attention to the second patient. This man had an infected leg that required some minor surgery. When the job was over and Kingozi had washed his hands, he relighted his pipe and sat back in his chair with a sigh of content. The immediate foreground sank below his consciousness. He stared across the flickering fires at the velvet blackness; listened across the intimate, idle noise of the camp to the voice of the veldt.
For with the fall of darkness and the larger silence of darkness, the veldt awoke. Animals that had dozed through the hot hours and grazed through the cooler hours in somnolent content now quivered alert. There were runnings here and there, the stamp of hoofs, sharp snortings as taut nerves stretched. Zebras uttered the absurd small-dog barks peculiar to them; ostriches boomed; jackals yapped; unknown birds uttered hasty wild calls. Numerous hyenas, near and far away, moaned like lost souls. Kingozi listened as to the voice of an old acquaintance telling familiar things; the men chattered on, their whole attention within the globe of light from their fires.
But suddenly the noise stopped as though it had been cut by a knife. Total silence fell on the little encampment. The men, their various actions suspended, listened intently. From far away, apparently, a low, vibrating rumble stole out of the night's immensity. It rose and seemed to draw near, growing hollow and great, until the very ground seemed to tremble as though a heavy train were passing, or the lower notes of a great organ had been played in a little church. And then it died down, and receded to the great distance again, and was ended by three low, grunting coughs.
The veldt was silent. The zebra barkings were still; the night birds had hushed; the hyenas and jackals and all the other night creatures down--it almost seemed--to the very insects had ceased their calls and cries and chirpings. One might imagine every living creature rigid, alert, listening, as were these men about the little fires.
The tension relaxed. The men dropped more fuel on the fires, coaxing the flame brighter. A whispering comment rose from group to group.
"Simba! simba! simba!" they hissed one to the other.
A lion had roared!
In the first gray dusk Simba and Cazi Moto slipped away on the errands appointed for them--to find people and to find water, if possible. The cook camp, too, was afoot, dark figures passing and repassing before a fire. But the rest of the men slept heavily, seizing the unwonted chance.
When the first rays of the sun struck the fly of the small green master's-tent Kingozi appeared, demanding water wherewith to wash. At the sound of his voice men stirred sleepily, sat up, poked the remains of their tiny fires. As though through an open tap the freshness of night-time drained away. The hot, searching, stifling African day took possession of the world.
After breakfast Kingozi looked about him for shelter. A gorgeous, red-flowering vine had smothered one of the flat-topped thorn trees in its luxuriance. The growths of successive years had overlaid each other. Kingozi called two men with pangas who speedily cut out the centre, leaving a little round green room in the heart of the shadow. Thither Kingozi caused to be conveyed his chop-box table, his canvas chair, and his tin box; and there he spent the entire morning writing in a blank book and carefully drawing from field notes in a pocketbook a sketch map of the country he had traversed. At noon he ate a light meal of bread, plain rice with sugar, and a balauri of tea. Then for a time he slept beneath the mosquito bar in his tent.
At this hour of fiercest sun the whole world slept with him. From the baked earth rose heat waves almost as tangible as gauze veils. Objects at a greater distance than a hundred yards took on strange distortions. The thorn trees shot up to great heights; animals stood on stilts; the tops of the hills were flattened, and from their summits often reached out into space long streamers. Sometimes these latter joined across wide intervals, creating an illusion of natural bridges or lofty flat-topped cliffs with holes clear through them to the open sky beyond. All these things shimmered and flickered and wavered in the mirage of noon. Only the sun itself stared clear and unchanging.
At about two o'clock Kingozi awoke and raised his voice. Mali-ya-bwana, next in command after Cazi Moto and Simba, answered.
"Get the big gun," he was told, "and the water bottles."
Mali-ya-bwana was not a professed gun bearer, but he could load, and Kingozi believed him staunch. Therefore, often, in absence of Simba, the big Baganda had been pressed into this service.
The blasting heat was fiercest at this hour. The air was saturated by it just as water may hold a chemical in solution. Every little while a wave would beat against the cheek as though a furnace door had been opened. Nevertheless Kingozi knew that this was also the hour when the sun's power begins to decline; when the vertical rays begin to give place. For it is not heat that kills, but the actinic power of rays unfiltered by a long slant through the earth's atmosphere.
The two men tramped methodically along, paying little attention to their surroundings. Game dozed everywhere beneath the scanty shade, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in herds. Motionless they stood; and often, were it not for the switch of a tail, they would have remained unobserved. Even the sentinel hartebeestes, posted atop high ant hills on the outskirts of the herds, seemed half asleep. Nevertheless they were awake enough for the job, as was evidenced when the two human figures came too near. Then a snort brought every creature to its feet, staring.
The objective of the men seemed to be a rise of land which the lessening mirage now permitted to appear as a small kopje, a solitary hill with rocky outcrops. Toward this they plodded methodically: Kingozi slouching ahead, Mali-ya-bwana close at his heels, very proud of his temporary promotion from the ranks. Suddenly he snapped his fingers. At the signal Kingozi stopped and looked back inquiringly over his shoulder.
Mali-ya-bwana was pointing cautiously to a low red clay ant hill immediately in their path and about thirty yards ahead. To the casual glance it looked no different from any of the hundreds of others of like size and colour everywhere to be seen. Kingozi's attention, however, now narrowed to a smaller circle than the casual. It did not need Mali-ya-bwana's whispered "faru" (rhinoceros) to identify the mound.
Cautiously the two men began to back away. When they had receded some twenty yards, however, the huge beast leaped to its feet. The rapidity of its movements was extraordinary. There intervened none of the slow and clumsy upheaval one would naturally expect from an animal of so massive a body and such short, thick legs. One moment it slumbered, the next it was afoot, warned by some slight sound or jar of the earth or--as some maintain--by a telepathic sense of danger. Certainly, as far as they knew, neither Kingozi nor Mali-ya-bwana had disturbed a pebble or broken a twig.
The rhinoceros faced them, snorting loudly. The sound was exactly that of steam roaring from a locomotive's safety valve. Strangely enough, in spite of the massive structure and the loose, thick skin of the beast, it conveyed an impression of taut, nervous muscles. Though it faced directly toward them, the men knew that they were as yet unseen. The rhinoceros' eyesight is very short, or very circumscribed, or both; and only objects in motion and comparatively close enter its range of vision. Kingozi and his man held themselves rigidly immovable, waiting for what would happen. The rhinoceros, too, held himself rigidly immovable, his nostrils dilating between snorts, his ears turning; for his senses of smell and hearing made up in their keenness for the defects of his eyes.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, he stuck his tail perpendicular and plunged forward at a clumsy-looking but exceedingly swift gallop.
An inexperienced man would have considered himself the object of a deliberate "charge"; but an old African traveller, such as Kingozi, knew this for a blind rush in the direction toward which the animal happened to be headed. The rhinoceros, alarmed by the first intimation of danger, unable to get further news from its keener senses, had been seized by a panic. Were nothing to deflect him from the straight line, he would continue ahead on it until the panic had run out.
But the two men were exactly in that line!
Kingozi hitched his light rifle forward imperceptibly. Although this was at present only a blind rush, should the rhinoceros catch sight of them he would fight; and within twenty-five yards or so his eyesight would be quite good enough. As the beast did not slow up in the first ten yards, but rather settled into its stride, Kingozi took rapid aim and fired.
His intention was neither to kill nor to cripple his antagonist. If that had been the case, he would have used the heavy double rifle that Mali-ya-bwana held ready near his elbow. The bullet inflicted a slight flesh wound in the outer surface of the beast's left shoulder. Kingozi instantly passed the light rifle back with his right hand, at the same motion seizing the double rifle with his left.
But at the spat of the bullet the rhino veered toward the direction from which it seemed to his stupid brain the hurt had come. Tail erect, he thundered away down the slope.
For a hundred yards he careered full speed, then slowed to a trot, finally stopped, whirled, and faced to a new direction. The sound of his blowing came clearly across the intervening distance.
A low bush grew near. The rhino attacked this savagely, horning it, trampling it down. The dust arose in clouds. Then the huge brute trotted slowly away, still snorting angrily, pausing to butt violently the larger trees, or to tear into shreds some bush or ant hill that loomed dangerously in the primeval fogs of his brain.
"Sorry, old chap," commented Kingozi in his own language, "but you're none the worse. Only I'm afraid your naturally sweet temper is spoiled for to-day, at least."
He turned to exchange guns with Mali-ya-bwana.
"N'dio, bwana," assented the latter to a speech of which he understood not one word. Mali-ya-bwana was secretly a little proud of himself for having stuck like a gun bearer, instead of shinning up a thorn tree like a porter.
Kingozi slipped a cartridge into the rifle, and the two resumed their walk toward the kopje.
By the time the two men had gained the top of the hill the worst heat of the day had passed. Kingozi seated himself on a flat rock and at once began to take sights through a prismatic compass, entering the observations in a pocketbook. Mali-ya-bwana, bolt upright, stared out over the thinly wooded plain below. He reported the result of his scouting in a low voice, to which the white man paid no attention whatever.
"Twiga[2] bwana," he said, and then, as his eye caught the flash of many sing-sing horns, "kuru, mingi." Thus he named over the different animals--the topi, the red hartebeeste, the eland, zebra, some warthogs, and many others. The beasts were anticipating the cool of the afternoon, and were grazing slowly out from beneath the trees, scattering abroad over the landscape.
[2: Giraffe.]
From even this slight elevation the outlook extended. Isolated mountain ranges showed loftier; the tops of unguessed hills peeped above the curve of the earth; the clear line of the horizon had receded to the outer confines of terrestrial space, but even then not far enough to touch the cup of the sky. Elsewhere the heavens meet the horizon: in Africa they lie beyond it, so that when the round, fleecy clouds of the Little Rains sail down the wind there is always a fleet of them beyond the earth disappearing into the immensities of the infinite. There is space in African skies beyond the experience of those who have dwelt only in other lands. They dwarf the earth; and the plains and mountains, lying in weeks' journeys spread before the eye, dwarf all living things, so that at the last the man of imagination here becomes a humble creature.
For an hour the two remained on top the kopje. The details of the unknown country ahead, toward which Kingozi gave his attention, were simple. From the green line of the watercourse, near which the camp showed white and tiny, the veldt swept away for miles almost unbroken. Here and there were tiny parklike openings of clear grass; here and there more kopjes standing isolated and alone, like fortresses. Far down over the edge of the world showed dim and blue the tops of a short range of mountains. Vainly did Kingozi sweep his glasses over the landscape in hope of another line of green. No watercourse was visible. On the other hand, the scattered growth of thorn trees showed no signs of thickening to the dense spiky jungle that is one of the terrors of African travel. There might be a watercourse hidden in the folds of the earth; there might be a rainwater "tank," or a spring, on any of the kopjes. Simba and Cazi Moto were both experienced, and capable of a long round trip. The problem of days' journeys was not pressing at this moment. Kingozi noted the compass bearings of all the kopjes; took back sights in the direction from which he had come; closed his compass; and began idly to sweep the country with his glasses. In an unwonted mood of expansion he turned to Mali-ya-bwana.
"We go there," he told the porter, indicating the blue mountain-tops.
"It is far," Mali-ya-bwana replied.
Kingozi continued to look through his glasses. Suddenly he stopped them on an open plain three or four miles back in the direction from which he had come the day before. Mali-ya-bwana followed his gaze.
"A safari, bwana," he observed, unmoved. "A very large safari," he amended, after a moment.
Through his prismatic glasses Kingozi could see every detail plainly. After his fashion of talking aloud, he reported what he saw, partly to the black man at his side, but mostly to himself.
"Askaris,"[3] he said, "six of them. The man rides in a machele[4]--he is either a German or a Portuguese; only those people use macheles--unless he is sick! Many porters--four are no more white men. More askaris!" He smiled a little contemptuously under his beard. "This is a great safari, Mali-ya-bwana. Four tin boxes and twelve askaris to guard them; and eighty or more porters; and sixteen men just to carry the machele! This must be a Bwana M' Kubwa."
[3: Native troops, armed with Snider muskets.]
[4: A hammock slung on a long pole, and carried by four men at each end.]
"That is what Kavirondos might think," replied Mali-ya-bwana calmly.
Kingozi looked up at him with a new curiosity.
"But not yourself?"
"A man who is a Bwana M'kubwa does not have to be carried. He does not need askaris to guard him in this country. And where can he get potio for so many?"
"Hullo!" cried Kingozi, surprised. "This is not porter's talk; this is headman's talk!"
"In my own country I am headman of many people," replied Mali-ya-bwana with a flash of pride.
"Yet you carry my tent load."
But Mali-ya-bwana made no reply, fixing his fierce eyes on the distant crawling safari.
damn