Chapter Thirty Four.
Left to Die.
The glooming shadows of night crept on apace.
Renshaw, lying there in the wild rocky defile, felt the poison stealing insidiously through his veins in a kind of slow drowsy stupor. He knew that he was doomed; he realised that even if the wild Korannas did not speedily come up and put an end to his sufferings yet his hour had come. The poison was too deadly for antidote, and he had no antidote.
In his stupor he hardly heard the receding hoof-strokes of his companion—his companion for whose life he had given his own, and who now rode away leaving him alone in that remote and savage solitude to die.
He lay there as he had sunk down. The night grew pitchy black between those grim, frowning walls of cliff. The faint stir of a cool breeze played in fitful puffs about his pallid brow already cold and moist with the dews of approaching death. The stars flashed from the vault above in a narrow riband of gold between the loom of the great cliffs against the sky. The melancholy howl of some prowling beast rose now and again upon the night.
There was a patter, patter of stealthy feet among the stones—a gleam of scintillating green from ravening eyes. Nearer, nearer came the pit-pat of those soft footfalls. The wild creatures of the waste had scented their prey.
Man—the lord of the beasts of creation. Man—before whose erect form the four-footed carnivora of the desert fled in terror—what was he now—how was he represented here? A mere thing of flesh and blood, an abject thing—prostrate, helpless, dying. An easy prey. The positions were reversed.
The gleam of those hungry eyes—the baring of gaunt jaws, the lolling tongues—were as things unknown to the stricken adventurer. The shrill yelp, echoing from the great krantzes, calling upon more to come to the feast—the snapping snarl, as hungry rivals drew too near each other—all passed unnoticed. Nearer, nearer they came, a ravening circle. For they knew that the prey was sure.
What a contrast! This man, with the cool, dauntless brain—the hardened frame so splendidly proportioned, lay there in the pitchy blackness at the mercy of the skulking, cowardly scavengers of those grim mountain solitudes. And what had wrought this strange, this startling contrast? Only a mere tiny puncture, scarcely bigger than a pin prick.
A cold nose touched his cheek. The contact acted like a charm. He sat bolt upright and struck out violently. A soft furry coat gave way before his fist—there was a yelp, a snarl of terror, and a sound of pattering feet scurrying away into deeper darkness, but—only to return again.
As though the shock had revived him, Renshaw’s brain began to recover its dormant faculties. It awoke to the horror, the peril of the position. And with that awakening came back something of the old adventurous, dauntless resolution. He remembered that violent exercise—to keep the patient walking—was among the specifics in cases of venomous snake-bite, which in conjunction with other antidotes he had more than once seen employed with signal success. But in his own case the other antidotes were wanting.
Still the old dogged determination—the strength of a trained will—prevailed. He would make the effort, even if it were to gain some inaccessible ledge or crevice where he might die in peace. Even in the midst of his numbed and torpid stupor the loathing horror wherewith he had encountered the touch of the wild creature’s muzzle acted like a whip. To be devoured by those brutes like a diseased sheep—faugh!
Gaining his feet with an effort, he unscrewed the stopper of his flask and drank off the contents. With the poison working in his system the fiery spirit was as water to him. But its effect was invigorating, and setting his face toward the cliffs he staggered forth into the darkness.
Before the once more erect figure of their dread enemy, Man, the skulking jackals and hyenas slunk back in dismay. But only into the background. Stealthily, warily they watched his progress, following afar softly and noiselessly upon his footsteps. For their keen instinct satisfied them that this stricken representative of the dominant species would never leave their grisly rock-girt haunt alive. It was only a question of patience.
The instinct, too, of the latter led him on. His stupefied brain still realised two things. Under the shelter of the crags he would be in safer hiding from human enemies, and that haply a ledge among the same would afford him a secure refuge from the loathsome beasts now shadowing him, and ready to pounce upon him when he should be too weak to offer any resistance.
On—on, he pressed—ever upward. Steeper and steeper became the way. Suddenly he stopped short. Before him was a wall of rock.
He peered searchingly upward in the darkness. A cleft slanted obliquely up the cliffs face. His knowledge of the mountains and their formation told him that here might be the very thing he sought. His instinct still guiding him, he began to scale the cleft. He found it an easy matter. There were plenty of rough projections, affording hand and foot hold. The ghoul-like scavengers of the desert could not follow him here.
Under ordinary circumstances the climb would have been a difficult one, especially at night. But now, as in the case of the somnambulist, matter triumphed over mind. The mind being dormant and the centre of gravity undisturbed by mental misgivings, however unconscious, he ascended safely.
The climb came to an end. Here was the very thing. A ledge, at first barely four feet broad, and then widening out as it ran round the face of the cliff—and sloping—not outward as ordinarily, but inward. What he did not see in his now returning torpor, was a black, narrow cave running upward in continuation of the cleft by which he had ascended.
He crawled along the ledge. Here at any rate nothing could disturb his last hours. The cool night wind fanned his brow—the single strip of radiant stars seemed to dance in one dazzling ocean of light. His stupefaction reasserted itself. He sank down in dead unconsciousness. Was it slumber or death?
It was not death. Renshaw awoke at last; awoke to consciousness in a strange half-light. Above was a roof of overhanging rock—underneath him, too, was the same hard rock. A strip of sky, now a pale blue, was all he could see.
Raising himself upon his elbow, he looked forth. The sun was setting in a blood-red curtain of cloud beyond the distant mountain peaks, shedding a fiery glow upon the stupendous chain of iron cliffs which overhung the weird and desolate defile. It came home to Renshaw then, that he must have slept for nearly twenty-four hours.
He still felt terribly weak, and his dazed and dizzy brain was still beclouded as in a fog. The events of yesterday, of his lifetime, in fact, seemed but as a far-away and uncertain dream. At any rate he could die in peace here—in peace with all mankind. He felt no fear of death, he had faced it too often. The utter loneliness of his last hours seemed to hold no terrors for him either, and he even found himself drowsily thinking that such surroundings—the grim, beetling cliffs, the wild and rugged peaks, the utter desolation of this remote untrodden solitude—were meet witnesses to the last hours of one who had spent the bulk of his life in their midst. His mind went back to the present undertaking and its disastrous results—to the “Valley of the Eye,” to Sellon’s selfish treachery—and his own self-sacrifice. But for that same act of treachery, tardily repented of as it was, they would both have got out safe, for it was during the time thus lost that the horde of Bushmen and Korannas had stolen up to surprise them. Ah, well, what did it matter now? What did anything matter? The treasure—the precious stones which he had thrown into the balance against his own life—what did they count now? He had enough of them about him at that moment to place him in affluent circumstances, had it been willed that he should live. Yet of what account were they now? Mere dross.
Then there arose before him a vision of Sunningdale—the cool, leafy garden, the spreuws piping among the fig trees, the plashing murmur of the river, and Violet Avory, as he had last seen her—no not then so much as at the moment when she had extracted that promise. Well, he had kept his promise, at any rate. And then Violet’s image faded, and, strange to say, the face which bent over his rocky couch, even the hard bed of death, was not hers, but that of Marian—sweet, pitying, soothing. And then the poor, clouded brain grew dim again—dim and restful.
But there are times when a subtle instinct of peril will penetrate even a drugged understanding. Uneasily Renshaw raised himself on his elbow, and again looked forth. The sun had disappeared now; a red afterglow still lingered on the loftier peaks, but the abrupt scarps of the great mountains were assuming a purpler gloom. Looking up, he noted that the overhanging rock projected beyond the slope of the ledge, forming a kind of roof. Looking downward along the ledge he saw—
A huge leopard crouching flat upon its belly, its long tail gently waving, its green scintillating eyes fixed upon him. As they met his, a low rumbling purr issued from the beast’s throat, and with a stealthy, almost imperceptible glide, it crawled a little nearer.
With consummate presence of mind, he followed its example. Without changing his position he felt cautiously for his gun. Fool that he was! He had left it behind—surely at the spot where he had sunk down in his stupor. Then he felt for his revolver; but that too, he had somehow contrived to lose. He was unarmed.
The beast was barely twenty yards distant. The low, rumbling purr increased in volume. As he kept his eyes fixed on those of the huge cat, Renshaw felt a strange eerie fascination creeping over him. The thing was not real. It was a nightmare—an illusion come to haunt his last hours. He would break the spell.
Again he looked forth. The loom of the towering peaks was blacker now against the silvery sky—the grey shadows deeper within the desolate kloofs. He noted too that he was at an elevation of nearly thirty feet from the ground. In his weakened state there was no escape that way.
The hungry savage beast crawled nearer and nearer along the ledge. The feline purr changed to a hideous snarl, as with eyes glittering like green stars from its round, speckled head, it bared its fangs, and gathered its lithe muscular body for the fatal spring.
And the man lay powerless to avoid it; unarmed, helpless, unable to stir, to move a finger in his own defence.