“That range of enchanting beauty? Yes.”
“I hope you’ll go on thinking it beautiful. We’ve got to cross it before we die of starvation or fever. Our lunch that we brought from the steamer is going to last us a good while.”
“We will depart at once,” said the Marquis, lifting his huge bulk lightly enough from the ground and drawing himself up like a soldier on parade. “March!”
It was the wild pig, I think, that saved our lives—and at the same time nearly caused their loss.
We were three days from the beach, well up into the Kiloki Range, but almost broken down with hardship and short commons, when we chanced upon the brute in a gully, and shot it with our revolvers. We cut it up and set a leg to roast; the savory smell spread far into the forest; and, as we soon had reason to know, ours were not the only nostrils that perceived it.
When the leg was done, we stuffed. No food could be carried far in that climate, and the more we ate, the less we lost. We were both greasy with the richness of the meat; our hands were slippery, our faces shining, and, I think, our hearts felt stouter than they had done for the last forty-eight hours.
“Another one, my Flint; make hay while the iron is hot,” counseled the Marquis, filling his own mouth to speechlessness. He was sitting opposite me as he spoke, and I saw his face grow suddenly swelled; the eyes started out, the cheeks became puffy.... At first I thought he was choking; then I guessed he was trying to say something; then I knew that he had seen something and I turned round like a shot.
Behind us, looking, as savages in the bush always do, just as if they had grown there instead of arriving, were ten or a dozen ugly-looking heads standing quite still in the underbrush. The tips of a number of spears showed up in the tangled green beside them. They were an unpleasant crew; their foreheads sloped enormously, making them look scarcely human; their hair was trained in greasy curls that fell far back and increased the beast-like angle of the face. Their black and white eyes looked steadily at us out of their brown faces, and the look was that of savage man, near, yet ten thousand æons of evolution distant. Across the gulf, what thought could travel?
We got up on our feet at once, and I spoke to the men in half a dozen different languages—all the New Guinea tongues I knew anything of—hoping to find some means of communication. I was lucky enough to hit on one at last. When I got down to the Mambare tongue, one of the faces showed signs of intelligence; the others remained blank.