Then a new idea was added to the plagues. He had tasted nothing save the coffee, canned beef, and native bread which had been given him for dinner on the previous evening. The corporal had manifested his conception of humour by refusing him beer and water on the march; was he going to torment him by starvation as well as by thirst? And if torture were reserved for him by that grinning black brute, then he knew what would be the end that awaited him.
Within an hour they came to a river about forty yards broad, a swollen rushing torrent. There was no village as he had expected. The corporal halted. Birnier slid down the bank and thrust his muzzle into the flood. There was torture in the restraint not to drink too much. He clambered up the slope to find the corporal grinning at him. He turned his back and lay down. There was no shade; only short [pg 95] scrub and grass. Small sand flies buzzed and stung. He heard the gurgle of the corporal’s military water-bottle. But this time the sting was extracted; his belly was moist.
Birnier stretched out, shielding from the glare the little that he could with his hands. Faint echoes of “à toi” strolled across his field of consciousness. He observed the apparently stoical indifference of Mungongo squatted a few feet from him, a soldier sprawling between them; but he cursed because investigations had taught him that that “stoical” should usually be read as “bovinity,” as he had termed it; and he smiled dismally at the ancient story that so well illustrated the point, of the peasant who expressed his occupation through the long winter hours as “sometimes we sits and thinks but mostly we just sits.”
Mungongo “just sits,” he repeated, and envied him. Yet in that heat and hunger, waiting for his savage captor to wreak some new fancy upon him, so saturated with philosophic interest in life was Birnier, that he wandered off into a meditation upon the mechanical fatuity of human conduct; illustrating his reflections by his own actions when stirred by emotion. “The loaded gun may be as wise as Solomon was reputed to be,” he remarked beneath his hands, “but all the same when some one pulls the trigger the damn thing goes off,” and sat up to confront the muzzle of the corporal’s rifle, who was ordering him to get up. Birnier rose. But to the savage’s amazement, he smiled.
The corporal backed away.
“Ah, my friend,” remarked Birnier blandly in [pg 96] English. “You’ve lost, for I have found that which was lost!”
The corporal scowled and bade him to follow. Birnier obeyed but he felt that he was obliging the man. The carriers had arrived and the green tent was pitched, invitingly cool against the grey flood of the river. He followed the corporal gladly, but at ten feet from his tent, beside a thorn bush four feet tall which spread in a fan shape, he was bidden to sit. For the moment, newly arrived from his philosophic dreams, he did not comprehend.
“But that is my tent!” he said in Kiswahili.
“Sit down!” commanded the corporal, grinning. “The white seller of slaves sits in the place of the slave, but his owner dwells in the place of the blessed.”
“O God!” remarked Birnier as he bumped his head against black reality.