The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

II

Insidiously the occasion which she had looked for came. An ordinary attack of malaria, one of her brother’s usual ten-daily diversions, flamed suddenly into a condition which she could not understand. The babble of a night of delirium died away, and in the morning, with cheeks still flushed and all the signs of fever with which she was familiar, Eva found him becoming drowsy and yet more drowsy. Usually in this stage of the disease she knew him to be exacting and restlessly active. This time when she came to give him food she had difficulty in rousing him. He lay huddled on his side with his legs drawn up and his face turned away from the light. Even when she had wakened him he fell asleep again. The warm milk which she had brought him went cold under a yellowish scum at his bedside. All that afternoon she did not once hear him praying.

She became anxious. Perhaps Godovius would come. She wished that he would; for she knew that he could help her: all the Waluguru bore witness how great a medicine-man he was. But Godovius did not come. “Just because I want him,” she thought.

For a few moments in the afternoon James brightened up. He complained to her of the pain in his head, which he had clasped in his hands all day; but even as he spoke to her his mind wandered, wandered back into the Book of Kings and the story of the Shunammite’s son. “And he said unto his father, My head, my head. And he said to a lad: Carry him to his mother,” he muttered. Then he was quiet for a little. Eva sat by his side, watching. Now at last he seemed to be sleeping gently. She expected that this was what he needed, but in the early evening, when next she wanted to feed him, he would not wake. She spoke to him, and gently shook him. A terror seized her lest he should have died. No . . . he was still breathing. For so much she might be thankful.

Something must be done. In this extremity her mind naturally turned to Godovius. At James’s desk she scribbled a note to him, and ran out into the compound at the back of the house to the hut of galvanised iron in which the boys slept. She called them both by name, but no answer came. The mouth of their den was covered with an old piece of sacking, which she pulled aside, releasing an air that stank of wood-smoke, and oil and black flesh. Almost sickened, she peered inside. Only one of the boys was sleeping there. He lay curled up in the corner, so that she could not see which of them it was, his head and shoulders covered with a dirty red blanket. She had to shake him before she could rouse him. He stared at her out of the darkness with dazed eyes. Then he smiled, and she saw by his filed cannibal teeth that it was Onyango, the M’kamba . . . just the one whom she didn’t want. Hamisi, the Luguru, would have known the way to Godovius’s house.

“Where is Hamisi?” she asked.

Onyango still rubbed his eyes. He did not know. She told him that Hamisi must be found. He shook his head and smiled. Hamisi, he said, could not be found. It was useless to try and find him.

Eva was irritated by his foolish, smiling face. Why had Hamisi gone away, just when he was wanted most? she asked.

Onyango mumbled something which surpassed her knowledge of Swahili . . . something about the new moon. What in the world had the new moon to do with it? . . .

Very well, then, she decided—Onyango must take Godovius’s letter.

“You know the house of Sakharani?” she said. “Carry this barua to Sakharani himself . . . quickly . . . very quickly.” She gave him the letter. Onyango shrank back into his corner. He wouldn’t take the letter, he said. If he took the letter on this night the Waluguru would kill him. She didn’t seem to understand, and he made the motion of a violent spear-thrust, then clutched at his breast. Eva tried to laugh him out of it, to make him ashamed at being afraid; but it was no good. Why should the Waluguru kill him? she asked.

It was the night of the new moon, he said.

She saw that it was useless to waste time over him. While they had been disputing the sun had set. It was a beautiful and very peaceful evening. The crowns of the croton-trees were awakening that soft zodiacal glow. She was very angry and worried, for she realised that she would have to go herself.

“Very well, then, you must stay with the bwana,” she said: and Onyango, who still wanted to be ingratiating and was ready to do anything but face the new moon and the Waluguru, slunk into the house. She took a last look at James. There was no difference in his condition except that now he was obviously alive, breathing stertorously through his mouth, lying there with his eyes half opened. She wondered for a moment if she dared leave him. “Tell the bwana when he wakes,” she said to Onyango, “where I have gone. Say that I will come back again.” She feared to stay there any longer, for in a little while it would be dark. She comforted herself with the thought that the road through the forest to Njumba ja Mweze must be fairly well defined, since Godovius used it so often. She couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that the adventure was rather frightening, but the thing had to be done, and there was an end of it.

So she took the forest road. In the open Park Steppe there were already signs of night: most of all a silence in which no voices of birds were heard, and other dry rustlings, which would have been submerged beneath the noises of day, heralded the awakening of another kind of life. In the branches of thorn-trees on every side the cicalas set up vibrations: as rapid and intense as those of an electric spark: a very natural sound, for it seemed to be an expression of that highly charged silence. In a wide slade of grasses a herd of kongoni were grazing. When they caught the scent of Eva they reached their heads above the grasses and after following her for a little with their eyes one of them took fright, and with one accord they flashed into the bordering bush, a flying streak of brown. An aged wildebeeste bull, vanquished in some old duel and banished from his own herd, stood sentinel to the kongoni, and when the others disappeared he held his ground, standing with his enormous shoulders firmly planted on his fore feet. Eva was rather frightened of him, for she knew nothing of the nature or habits of big game. As she passed across the opening of that glade he slowly turned, so that his great shoulders and lowered head were always facing her. Some unimaginable breeze must have been moving from her towards him, for he suddenly threw up his head, snorting, and stamped the ground. Then she picked up her skirts and ran, with his mighty breathing still in her ears. She saw that this night journey of hers was going to be no joke. In the night so many savage beasts were abroad. She remembered that less than a week before Godovius had shot a leopard on the edge of the forest. He had told her how the creature had been lying along the low branch of a tree, and how it had sprung into the midst of a herd of goats which a Waluguru boy was driving along the track. Godovius had been near and his second shot had killed it. He had offered her the skin. Now, for the very first time, she realised the savagery of that land. In the mission there had always dwelt a sense of homeliness and protection. She realised, too, the conditions in which James had been working. Poor James. . . . She couldn’t help feeling that she herself was better qualified to deal with that sort of thing than her brother. She pulled all her courage together.

She had come to the edge of the forest. Black and immense it lay before her. If she made haste she might still borrow a little courage from the light. The sky above the tree-tops was now deepening to a dusky blue. As yet no stars appeared; but over the crown of that sudden hill a slender crescent of the new moon was soaring. A lovely slip of a thing she seemed sailing in that liquid sky. A memory of Eva’s childhood reminded her that if she had been carrying money in her pocket she should have turned it for luck and wished. . . . What would she have wished?

It gave her a new assurance to find that under the leaves the path was well defined. She reckoned that she had at the most no more than three miles to go. At the end of three miles she would see the lights of Godovius’s house and not be frightened any longer. She made up her mind to travel as fast as she could, looking neither to left nor right, for fear of eyes which might be watching her from the thickets. She comforted herself with the thought that it was here that the Waluguru lived; that they had lived here for centuries and were as unprotected as herself; that there were actually women and children living there in the heart of the forest. In the silence she heard the soft cooing of a dove, and a minute later a couple of small grey birds fluttered up from the path. “As harmless as doves,” she thought. “You beautiful little creatures . . .” And she smiled.

As she penetrated farther into the forest the light failed her, and it was very still. The little fluttering doves were the last creatures that she saw for a long time. Of the people of the forest there was no sign, and she would have thought that there were no beasts abroad either but for an occasional distant sound of crashing branches made by some body bigger and more powerful than that of a man. By the time that the light of day had wholly faded from the sky she had come to a zone of the forest in which the trees were more thinly scattered: between their high branches stars appeared, in front of her a blurred outline, which she took to be that of Kilima ja Mweze, above which the crescent moon now whitely shone. A little later she found that the track was ascending. It had reached the slopes of the conical hill on which she knew that Godovius’s house was placed. Here under a brighter starlight she could see that the whole hill-side was cut into terraces, like the stages of a wedding cake, along the face of which the track climbed obliquely. It reassured her to find that she was now within a definite sphere of human influence, that the most savage part of her pilgrimage was past: but the road made stiff climbing: the mantle of forest had concealed the lower slopes of the hill so completely that she had never realised how abruptly it rose from the swamp.

Suddenly, in the half light, she saw upon the terrace above her a building of stone. She stopped for a moment to regain her breath, for this must surely be one of the outbuildings of the House of the Moon. When she came abreast of it she was puzzled to find that it was nothing but a circular wall of rough stones piled one upon the other. All around it the forest trees had been cut down; and this seemed to her a great waste of labour, for the building could obviously be no more than a stone kraal for the protection of cattle. Now it was empty. The track which she was following passed close to the only breach in the circle of stone. She peered inside, and saw that the wall was double. In the centre of the circular space within rose a strange tower, shaped like a conical lime-kiln of the kind which she had known at home but more slender, and fashioned of the same rough stone as the double walls outside. As she looked within her presence disturbed another flight of doves, fluttering pale in the moonlight. She wondered whatever could be the meaning of this building, for the doves would not nest there if it were used by men and cattle; but her curiosity was overborne by her disappointment at finding that her journey was not yet over. From that clearing she passed once more into denser forest, under the shadow of which she climbed perhaps a dozen more of those steep terraces. Once more the forest trees gave way to an open space. A wave of sweet but over-heavy perfume came to meet her. Pale in the moonlight she saw the ghost of a long white house.