XIV
Hi woke up suddenly into terror, for the forest was filled with a crying as of creatures gone mad. A pack of things was giving tongue with voices madder than a fox’s bark.
“Wild dogs gone mad,” he thought. The noise of the yap seemed to strike between the skull and the coats of the brain, as the idea of the weasel strikes into the brain of the rabbit. Hi jumped to the horse, who was already trembling. He cast loose the tethering rope and swung himself on to the beast’s bare back, gripping the headstall, and in an instant the horse was away with him, in a panic which Rosas himself could not have controlled. Horse and man fled like the bird knocked from roost in the night. What did the bags and the saddle matter while that crying filled the darkness?
“Oh, golly, what are those things?” he thought. “Oh, golly, if they are after us.” All the night seemed full of flaming eyes, but these were only fireflies, not a pack: the crying seemed to die away. The horse floundered through mud in a cane-brake, which crashed under his trampling. Hi dug his head into the horse’s neck and shut his eyes: it was like running the gauntlet for what seemed a long time. After it, he went through tall grass, which drenched him with dew. Hi felt him weakening beneath him as he came out of the grass: then suddenly water appeared before him as a lake or broad river, where the wind roused reflections of stars. Hi saw a fish leap and splash, shaking up a glittering; in an instant the horse was swimming, with the gleams all round him.
Hi knew that a very little thing would drown the horse in his present condition; he slipped off his back, slid sideways, caught his tail and swam with him. After about fifty yards, the horse put his feet down, stumbled on to his knees, but recovered and came to the bank. Hi with some trouble scrambled up in front of him, got a purchase on the reins, and helped him on to dry land. They stood there gasping together for a while, being both out of breath as well as very cold.
“O Lord,” Hi thought, “what on earth were those things? I’ve never heard anything so awful. Thank God, we got away when we did. A very little more, and they would have been on us. I think I should go mad if they were coming after me. Listen.”
There was no sound of any pack in cry coming after them. They had come to a part of the wilderness which was silent, save for the rustle of the reeds and the splash of the leaping fish. “I suppose it’s going to rain again,” Hi muttered with chattering teeth; “that is why the fish are leaping. I wish I’d brought my coat and the saddle.”
But they were left behind with the bags in a place which Hi was little likely to find again. “Lord, I do feel wretched,” he said, shivering. “I’ll get away from this water. There may be alligators in it. I never thought of them before. Come up, old Bingo; we’ll find a place for you.”
They moved away through a thicket into a space which had been burnt the year before. From the cold and from the colour of the sky, Hi judged that it was about an hour from the dawn. The horse stopped from exhaustion. “You’re sicker than I am,” Hi said. “I’ll do my best to warm you.”
He pulled grass: the horse would not touch it, but it served to rub him: he was trembling, his coat was staring, and his head was down. “I’d give something for a bucket of warm beer for him,” Hi said. “It’s hateful having nothing: even the bread is gone. Well, I must hope for the sun to come soon to warm him.”
The cold was so painful that he had to move away, to dance and flog his arms. The dawn seemed to take hours to bring any colour to the sky, yet it came at last.
“Thank God, here it comes at last,” he said. “If only I could hear a bell with it: even a cow-bell.”
It came with no sound of bells, but with a clapping of wings from all the near-by trees, as the multitudes of the birds awoke. Their cries were not sweet like the cries of so many English birds: only one seemed to have a sweetness in his voice. This was a biggish bird with black wings and orange breast. He had a sweet droning note which said, “Woe,” then, after an interval, “Woe” again. All the other birds seemed to be saying, “Damn it”: or so Hi thought.
As the light grew, the clamour of the birds rose to a roaring, for many of them, after trying their wings, took flight, wheeled, and sped away in their companies, to seek for food. Some of those who cried “Woe” settled on a tree which was covered with great white waxy flowers, intolerably sweet. Wafts of the sweetness came to Hi on the gusts of the wind. He saw them tear at the flowers and eat the petals. Hi, going to the tree, tasted a petal, thinking that what fed the birds could not harm himself. It was like sweetened church candle or much what he had imagined manna to have been. He ate of this manna with the knowledge that he, too, had been fed in the wilderness. When he returned to his horse, he found him stretched out dead.
It was the first time that he had lost a friend by death: he sat down beside him and wept. He was not a lad given to weeping: he had not wept for years, but he was shaken by the last four days, and in an extreme of loneliness, which made him know what a friend the horse had been in hours of danger and beastliness. Now that he was gone, Hi was alone indeed. The horse lay dead on his off side: his near crupper was scored with a bullet-mark. “So he was hit after all,” Hi said, “I thought he was. And the poor old Bingo saved me twice last night, and now he is dead.”
He remembered the last lines of a well-known song:
Could I think we’d meet again,
It would lighten half my pain,
At the place where the old horse died.
“Golly,” he thought, “I’ll never be unkind to a horse as long as I live, after this.”
After the stunned half hour, he picked himself up, to look round at where he was. He stood in a space of grass, ringed by trees, up which the creepers climbed in a fire of flowers. To his right were the reeds and the water, with the sun climbing above them; to his left was the dimness of the forest.
“I’m facing north,” he said. “Almost due north. I’m facing the plain as I stand. I’ve got about a day’s go in me. I must get to the plain this day, or I shall never get to it at all.”
The thought of Carlotta depending on him and Rosa thinking that he was on his way to fetch help came back in force. Again and again he went over in his mind the events which had delayed him. “It is just as if I were walking on a road which moves away from where I want to get to,” he said. “If I were to try to avoid Anselmo, I might get there. I’ve been four days and a bit. Or is it five days and a bit? If I get there now, I may be too late.”
As he went on into the north, he began to hear voices which spoke in his ears, bidding him to do this or that. So many voices spoke, that he began to feel that he was attended by a flock of things like birds, which had human voices and flew invisibly beside him. The going lay over miles of dead reed and broken brush which had been laid in a tornado of the August before. The dead reed having been laid in its prime, had not decayed, but had hardened to something like bamboo: the young reed growing through the old had then matted it into a cloth too high to trample down and too tough to thrust through. Much of this reed grew (at that season) in some inches of water. At the end of two hours of it Hi came to a growth of trees which had been uprooted in a line. For three hundred yards the line stretched like a wall in a succession of the shields of black, intertangled roots standing upright over the hollows whence they had been plucked. It looked like a wall of black snakes barring his way. When he had scrambled up the wall, he saw beyond it the lake amid her reeds, cruised over by white hawks. The beauty of the water in that light, reflecting so much other beauty of forest, flower and bird, each like an angel, could not be told. To Hi, it did not come like beauty; but as a shock. It stretched away, seemingly for miles, right across his path, to left and to right. He could see the sun in heaven, in this clear space; this gave him his compass points. He had come fairly truly to the north: now the lake stretched half a mile breadth of water in front of him. There was neither ford nor boat.
“I must just edge along to the west,” he thought. “This must be the water that stopped me yesterday when I was further to the east.”
After letting his clothes dry in the sun, he turned westwards along the lake, not far from its shore, in a mood of anxiety tempered by hunger. After a couple of hours of going, a black bog, with seepings of oil in it which killed plants, turned him away from the lake: he had to turn to the south to get round it. When he had turned, he began to think that he never would get round it. It turned him more and more to the south, for more than an hour. When he sat down to rest, more than half way through the morning, he felt that he was perhaps further from Anselmo than he had ever been.
As usually happens in the first days of starvation, with young people, his hunger was checked by weariness and weakness from becoming tyrannous. While he rested, he saw a scuffling among birds in a sunlit path about a hundred yards away. Going thither, he found some thorny shrubs, which even at that early season were covered with yellow plums the size of sloes. Birds, butterflies and many other insects were gorging themselves with these plums; he, too gorged, thinking that no better plums had ever grown. Being schooled now to think of the next meal whenever he had food, he contrived a sort of basket or frail of the leaves of the spade-palm into which he packed a couple of pounds of plums, which he took with him.
He judged that the sun had southed when at last he was able to cross the bog and turn again to the north. The going proved to be much better beyond the swamp. He set out in good spirits, walked hard for half an hour to the west, but then was stopped by another southward trending of the lake: he had to trudge southward again.
It was after a couple of hours of this trudging, when he was most tired and dispirited at having met no living soul nor any sign of man, that he heard far off, somewhere to the south, a single rifle shot. He shouted, hoping that the shooter might reply: he had no reply to his hail, but the thought, that someone was there, who might help him in his need, and in no case could make him much worse than he was, made him turn in that direction, shouting at intervals as he went. Perhaps two minutes after he had set out towards the place of the shot, he judged that he smelt smoke. He had but one whiff of it and could not catch it again: he was, however, sure that it was woodsmoke. “There is some sort of a fire there,” he thought. “I shall find somebody.”
Half an hour later, while he was hallooing, in the certainty that he must be near where the shooter had been, he saw a footmark in some soft earth close to a red-heart. The red-heart had been split by age, wind or lightning: it was exuding a bright blue fungus from the split. This brought him to a halt with a start, for the footmark was his own. He had halted just beside that tree when the smell of the smoke had come to him. There could be no doubt of it; he had noticed tree and fungus too nicely to be mistaken. There was besides, the footmark, unmistakably his. He was too wise to have false hope about it: he had been walking in a circle: he was bushed.
“There it is,” he said, “I am bushed.”
As the words were spoken, there came into his mind the memory of Tencombe at teatime during the last summer holidays. There was his mother with the sun upon her hair and her alert, decisive way: there was old Bill standing near the mantelpiece, holding his tea-cup, while with one foot he rolled over the retriever pup. There at the table beside the rest of them was a little frail, pale-faced, red-bearded man, with a whispering voice, who had been bushed in East Africa.
His words came back into Hi’s mind. “If you lose your head when you’re bushed, you’re done.”
“I’ll bet that that is true,” Hi said. “If I lose my head, I shall be done.”
He sat still for some minutes, trying to keep control of himself by repeating the things in his favour. “I have had food to-day: and still have some plums: it isn’t raining: I can’t be far from a camp or at least a place where hunters come, because of that shot: whatever wrong tracks I’ve taken, I can’t be far from the edge of this forest: whatever happens I must not give up hope, because ‘hope brings healing.’ I shall get out of this mess if I believe I shall. I do believe I shall. I believe that if I climb one of these trees, I may be able to see out of this forest.”
The thought fell like light into his mind, that he might see out of the forest; but it was not easy to find a tree which would both yield a view and be possible to climb. After some search he came to one that seemed perfect. It had the look of a red-heart, but was so swathed with tough creeper, which gave good hand-and-foot hold, that the bark was almost hidden. Hi set himself to climb. He discovered, before he had gone far, that the creeper stalks were bristly, like ivy or nettle stalks at home, and that the climb was hard work. “I’m weaker than I was,” he thought. The dust, dead twigs and fragments of bark fell over his face and down his neck, but he persevered, even when he roused up a gang of black tree ants. He came out through the dimness of the roof into a sea of flowers of every colour in a blaze of light, beset by birds and butterflies. All that he could see was a sea of flowers, running up into crests of greenness, topped here and there by spikes, pinnacles and fountains of strange leaves. There seemed no end to it in any direction, nor any break, for even the water was hidden by the trees. It glittered and glowed: it hummed with life: it exulted with an ecstasy of life: it lived thus in the sun all day, and at night the moon and the stars gave it the shadow of a life and the peace which man never has. It was all marvellous, but it had nothing to do with man: men did not come there.
After he had clambered down, he turned away towards the west, taking sighting marks, from tree to tree, to stop any more going in a circle. His hands were tingling from the creeper bristles, as though he had been pulling nettles with them. His face was tingling in a somewhat different way. It smarted as it had smarted years before at school when somebody had kicked a wet Rugby football hard against his cheek. The smarting spread down his neck to his chest and along his backbone. He rubbed the smarting skin, but the rubbing did it no good: it made it slightly different and worse. In about an hour, he felt a puffiness about his eyes: his lips and fingers had a tight feeling. “I’m swelling,” he said. “I must have been on one of those poison trees. If this gets much worse, I shan’t be able to see: I shall be all puffed up.”
In another hour, his eyes had become so swollen that he could not see clearly; all his face had swollen till it no longer felt like flesh: it drummed within with a drumming which seemed to beat upon his brain. His hands were so puffed that he could not bend his fingers. When he came to a puddle in the wood, he peered down to look at himself in the water. He could not see all, but he made out a bladdery appearance which frightened him. “I’ve gone just like the bladders we used to suck to make elastic,” he thought. “If one of these blisters bursts, I shall be done.” He sat down, trying not to be frightened. “I’m going to be blind,” he thought. “It will probably pass off in a few hours, but I shall be blind while it lasts. I shall be blind to-night: all to-night and perhaps to-morrow: and I don’t know where I am, nor how I am to get out of here. I’ve been a pretty rotten messenger, so far. Oh, I wish that this beating in my brain would stop.”
It did not stop: it grew louder, with a rhythm which did not vary for an hour together: it beat like a heart-beat: after a while there was something almost pleasant in its recurrence. Then, suddenly, it changed to another rhythm, which was not like a heart-beat, but much more exciting. Hi was afraid to hope: he stood still, listening. “I know what it is,” he said at last, “it is a kind of a mine-stamp, or engine of some sort: not far away. There is probably a mine here. I’ve wandered into Meruel, where the mines are: this is one of them. And I am going towards it.”
Hope came back into him as soon as he was certain that the noise came from men. Even Reds would be better than the forest. He went on towards the beating noise, which presently died away so that he scarcely heard it. He went forward, praying that it might not cease. The light was fast going from the forest (from sunset, not from his blindness); he longed to be with his fellow men before the night set in. He shouted from time to time. Presently the multitudes of the homing birds drowned the beating with the noise of their wings.
When the wings were at last quiet, the noise of the beating reappeared above the lesser noises of night. It was beating now in a different rhythm, with a louder volume. “It is not an engine,” Hi said. “I know what it is now. It is one of these tom-toms or native drums, like the one at home, which father used to let us play. I was an ass not to recognise it before. It must be near at hand, too. I’ll shout again.”
No answer came to his shouting: the drummer, if it were a drummer, was intent upon his rhythm, which was taking his soul up great spirals of recurrence into the ellipses of escape: what were night, nature and a lost human being to him?
At last, amid much that was indistinct, Hi saw a light among the trees. A little fire was burning there, though often obscured by things moving in front of it. “It is a camp fire,” Hi thought. “And it must be an Indian camp, because white men would never permit this drumming.”
Some little fear was in his mind lest the Indians should be hostile. He had heard that the forest-Indians were sometimes made dangerous by white criminals who found refuge among them. Still, even cannibals would hesitate, he thought, before killing meat suffering from poisonweed. “I believe that they will give me a square deal,” he said. In bursts, amid the constant noise of the drumming, he heard the voices and the movements of the people of the poblacion.
He called several times more. Now he was heard, for the dogs of the camp began to bark.
In a few minutes he came into a compound, or cleared space surrounded on three sides by Indian huts of the kind familiar to him from his father’s tales. Fires were burning upon stones in all the huts: by their light he could make out men in white and things like white cloths inside the huts. Some little dogs were at the doors barking. There was a splashing noise not far away. Men were talking, women were crooning to their babies, the drummer went on drumming. Somebody was thudding at something: it sounded like the beating of a wad of wet linen with a mallet. Strange things like minute devils came out of the huts, mocked at him and sidled softly away: he could not imagine what they were. The linen-thudder began to intone a thudding song of a melancholy kind, such as a dog in despair or affected by the moon will sing. The air was full of the smell of food, burning gums and sweet oils.
“I am English. I am a friend,” Hi called. “Don’t shoot. I am English.” He called this several times before anyone paid any attention to him. Then an Indian man, dressed in white, came from one of the huts towards him. He was a chubby little smiling man, grey-haired, cheerful and kind. He spoke to Hi, in words of one syllable in a tongue which Hi had not heard. He stared at Hi’s face, raised his hands and said, “Mar, Mar,” which Hi took to be Indian for “You have a swollen face.” “Yes,” Hi answered, in English, “I have indeed: trés Mar.” The Indian surveyed Hi from head to foot, which seemed to convince him that Hi was pretty Mar over all.
A coarse voice, from one of the huts facing Hi, called out an order to the Indian, who ceased in his pantomime of sympathy as though he had been stung. He seemed to invite Hi forward to enter the hut from which the voice had called. Hi went forward, with the Indian at his side, towards the hut.
The hut, like the other huts of the poblacion, was, at a guess, thirty feet long by fifteen broad. The end, which faced Hi, was open to the night: at the sides the roofs came down almost to the ground, with a tiling of palm leaves stitched with bast. The end of the hut was lit by a fire arranged among stones, which Hi could not help noticing were hewn stones. Someone was moving about beyond the fire: he called to the Indian some order, that Hi was not to come any nearer till the Indian had reported. When this had been done, the guide led Hi into the hut.
Hi could see across the fire a biggish white man, dressed in a shirt and riding breeches, with a bandolier cartridge belt. This man at the moment was bent at the fire lighting a twig, with which he soon lit a clay lamp.
“There, that’s lit,” he said. “Now, let’s have a look at you?”
He held up the lamp and surveyed Hi with a strange expression, which Hi could not read. He was a strongly-made, rather tall, robust man, with yellowish dead coloured hair, like brass-work smeared with oil. He was clean-shaven, even in that wild place. His eyes were grey-blue in colour. His nose was small and straight save for a defiant tip. His mouth had about it a look of defiance, scorn, contempt and utter fearlessness. He was without doubt an Englishman of about twenty-five years of age who had at one time lived among people of refinement.
“So,” the man said. “And where the hell do you come from?” Hi told him his tale, that he was lost while making for Anselmo.
“Anselmo?” the man said. “Anselmo? I never heard of Anselmo. Where is that?”
“I don’t know,” Hi said. “In the plain: not twenty miles from Santa Barbara. Isn’t this near the plain?”
“This is the Melchior forest, chum,” the man said. “What the hell have you done to your face?”
“I got it poisoned by poison ivy.”
“That’s a proper new chum’s trick. You’ll be blind to-morrow. What do you propose to do?”
“Perhaps you could let me stay here till my eyes are better and then give me a guide to the plain.”
“I’ve got no guide.”
“Or put me on my way then. I can’t be far.”
“Did anyone tell you of me, or put you up to coming here?”
“No.”
“Did you come out alone into this forest?”
“Yes.”
“God.”
There was a pause at this point, while the man put down his lamp. Hi had become used to scurvy welcomes from the natives of Santa Barbara, but this man was a fellow-countryman with some traces of breeding in him. The man sat on the edge of his hammock, with his feet upon a low wooden stool. He swung himself to and fro while he seemed to consider.
“Got any oof?” he asked at last.
“None here. I have some in Santa Barbara.”
“And I suppose you’ve got some in the savings bank at home?”
“Yes.”
“God,” the man said. “My God, my Father, while I stray.”
“Very well,” Hi said. “If this is all the welcome you can give me, I can go on. I am sorry if I have intruded.”
“Have you got a pack of cards?” the man asked.
“No. I’ll wish you good-night,” Hi said.
“As you please about that.”
Hi turned away, flaming with rage and self-pity at being treated thus, in his misery, there in the wilderness, by this fellow-countryman. He did not know where he was to go, nor how, in that darkness and pain, but he was not going to stop with this fellow. He moved back into the space in front of the houses, with a sense of the comfort of them. Each house seemed full of sheltered and fed men and women, who had fire, rest for the night, and certainty for the morrow, as well as companionship. He had none of all these things: he was miles from any of them: he was beside full of sickness.
“Here, chum,” the man called, “where are you going?”
“Out of this.”
“I don’t want your carcase poisoning the bush, and putting the game off, which is what will happen if you try it,” the man said. He raised his voice suddenly with a call for his Indian, who appeared on the instant, without noise of any kind. He spoke rapidly to the Indian for a moment, giving him orders. “See,” the man said at last to Hi, “you can’t go with your eyes in that state. I’ve told Chug-chug here to put you into a hut by yourself. He’ll give you stuff for your blisters as well as some chow. Go along with him: he’ll look after you.”
“Thank you,” Hi said.
“You’d better go with him, hadn’t you?” the man asked.
“Right,” Hi said. The Indian motioned to him to follow him to one of the huts on the right of the enclosed space. When Hi had entered the hut, which was dark, the Indian disappeared, leaving him alone there. It was like the other huts, closed at the sides by the roofs coming down to the ground, and open to the air at the ends. Hi felt utterly alone there. The tom-tom was still beating and beating: all his blood seemed to have gone thin and bitter from the poison in his skin. In the next hut many people were talking together: some were singing. Then at the door of the hut the little tiny devils appeared again: they mocked at him and sidled softly away.
Presently the Indian reappeared with wood for a fire and some burning embers. With these, he made a fire upon a hearth of hewn stones: the fire burned up so as to light the place a little. Hi noticed a couple of tin travelling trunks, much battered with service, against one of the walls. The Indian motioned to Hi to sit in a white cotton hammock, with fringes of coloured bast, which had been slung from the posts. He sat as he was bid, with his feet upon a long footstool of some hard wood. The Indians brought him a mush or stew in a calabash, which he ate with thankfulness. It was hot and seasoned with peppers: it brought the essence of life right into his being. While he ate of this dish, an Indian examined his feet for jiggers. When he had finished his meal, the Indians smeared his face and hands with a soft wet mess, which (unknown to Hi) they had been chewing while he ate. It had a rancid smell to it, but it soothed the pain at once. An Indian brought him a cotton quilt for his hammock. Wrapping himself in this, he turned in for the night: full of anxiety for his friends, wild with disappointment at having failed them, sick in body, and “perplexed in the extreme.”
He could not sleep, all weary as he was, because of the discomforts of his body. He lay twisting in his hammock, while the tom-tom beat in the hut beside him, changing its rhythm once in the hour. No one seemed to want to sleep in that village. Men and women were moving about, talking, telling endless stories, or singing like melancholy dogs, for hours together. Sometimes he dozed away for a few minutes till the touch of the hammock upon his face or hands roused him again. Always, when he woke, the tom-tom was beating and someone was telling a story. Little dogs, with sharp noses, enormous pointed ears and mangy skins, came snapping into the hut from time to time, after beetles, it seemed. The sidelong devils did not come again: he thought of them often enough.
On this, the fifth day of his journey to fetch Don Manuel, the Whites of the Western Provinces mustered 437 men at San Jacinto. They moved out to Don Manuel’s advanced post beyond the river, having left word that the final rendezvous would be at San Pablo, only thirty miles from Santa Barbara city. They brought with them many spare horses: this was the only excellence in their force, their weapons being mainly machetes, revolvers, rook rifles and shot-guns of all sorts and bores with whatever cartridges they had. There was no hesitation in any of them at the thought of marching upon Santa Barbara. They were all religious men, who felt that their faith was threatened. The parish priest at San Luis, where Don Manuel was camped, blessed them at their setting out: certainly no man among them doubted that his going was in the service of God.