I tried to picture the place—the tall trees, the ghostly undergrowth, the sodden marshes, the hot, dripping climate, the wicked and cunning little eyes which would watch us from the tree tops and the bushes as we went on our errand of mercy. I tried to visualize native villages and long, meandering rivers infested with crocodiles and hippopotami. I feebly attempted to imagine what a herd of wild elephants looked like. Did the porcupine erect its quills when angry and the lion slink away at the sight and smell of you? What were the prevalent diseases in this new land of hope and glory? Would the natives welcome us, or pursue and torture and devour us? How much cheap jewelry and beads should we require to bribe them to help us? Did they bother about such things now, or had they moved with the times and installed picture palaces and gramophones in their chief villages?
Even when I retired to bed that night I still went on speculating. My poor, civilized brain was troubled with vague, terrorizing dreams, manufactured no doubt from all I had ever read and heard of the grotesque, the hideous and the cruel. I was pursued by cannibals, bitten by mosquitoes, mauled by tigers, nibbled by swarms of ants, and trampled on by wild elephants. But I never saw a single gorilla! Monkeys I saw galore—little black-faced chattering creatures, hanging by their tails from branches high overhead; also a horrid dog-faced baboon pursuing Gran'pa (bearded and old and withered again!) down a narrow pathway which led to the sea. But not a single gorilla! It was very astonishing. Was it an omen, I wondered?
I got up in the morning feeling that I knew Africa through and through. But when I looked out of the bedroom window the illusion was dispelled immediately. I saw the garden in all its spring glory—the daffodils and tulips, the plum blossoms, the green carpet of the lawn sprinkled with white daisies, and then—Gran'pa, walking and talking very earnestly in the sunshine with a little, ferocious-looking man in a coat with a fur collar.
I watched them curiously, until they disappeared round the bend of the path, and then I commenced dressing.
When I arrived downstairs Gran'pa and his companion were in the dining-room chattering away like a couple of sparrows.
"Ah, George!" cried Gran'pa. "I quite forgot to tell you about Mr. Stringer. He's come down from Scotland by the night train. I wrote and asked him to make straight for Airesdale Avenue the moment he arrived, and have breakfast with us. I wanted you to see him before you went to town this morning. We're spending the day at the Zoo, and then going on to Bristol this evening to see Boswell's Menagerie there."
I extended my hand towards Mr. Stringer, wondering what on earth it was all about, and, as his fingers closed on mine and our eyes met, a peculiar thrill seemed to travel up my arm and backbone, culminating in a sudden tremor in the base of my skull. When he dropped my hand, however, he still kept his eyes fixed on me for a second or two. Never in all my life had I felt such a burning, penetrating gaze. It reached out like a ray of light, half-dazzled me, and probed into every nook and corner of my brain.
Suddenly, that unearthly sensation of being a frozen microbe under a microscope was gone again, and I felt the blood come pumping back into my ears—thud! . . . thud! . . .
"You noticed it, George?" cried Gran'pa.
"I . . . er . . . certainly . . . noticed something," I stammered.