The Finn lay on the ground, with head shrouded from the insects with his coat, and would not compete. So we foreigners in our turn cooeed, after the Australian fashion, and the Echoes, fickle ladies that they were, awarded the palm to the newer, stranger, imported sound. They cooeed back that the cooee won by an easy thousand yards.
The [Signal] Fire.
Water-mists hung in filmy layers above the lake, and thickened as the hours drew on. Patience and more fuel to the beacon were the only things that would help us, and we applied them both assiduously. And when we were not working, we sat where the smoke of the fire could drift solidly over us, and those gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease, and have never seen the mosquito at his worst, do not understand the luxury of it. There are not many insects whose proud boast it is that they can make the monarch man find stinging wood-reek fascinating.
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“Illi robur et aes triplex Circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci Commisit pelago ratem Primus,” |
wrote Horace in the days gone by; but unknown lands, had he known it, can contain far more horrid torments than the unknown sea.
But at last our vigil and beckoning came to an end. Through the gray lake-mists there loomed out a hazy dot of a deeper gray. It grew and blackened, and resolved itself into a canoe, spiritlessly sent along by a single paddler. We watched its approach with warming hearts. And lo! the solitary paddler was a woman, old, bent, and toothless. All her men-kind were away, it seemed, fishing up a farther arm of the lake. It was a year since she had been in a boat, because of her rheumatism. Moreover she had been in bed, and so our beacon had been lost on her, and being rather deaf, our shouts had fallen but dimly upon her notice. She hoped, with fluttering courtesy, that we would forgive her dilatoriness. Poor old crone! we shook hands with her all round, and soon let her know where the indebtedness was placed.
But the canoe was small, perilously small, and leaky, and it obviously would not hold the party of us. So the packs were piled in on to the wet floor-boards, and we foreigners paddled off to an appointed place where there was a larger craft, and we took the old lady, enthroned on a brown canvas sack, as an honoured passenger. The carriers tossed the remaining embers of the fire into the lake, carefully extinguishing with water every remaining spark, and then they went round by the beaches to meet us; and we ran the other canoe down into the lake, and made the trans-shipment, and paddled off in triumph. The old woman watched all passively. She was past the age of doing much for herself, or giving directions. She had a strong face, but the days of initiative had passed from her, and it must have been by a marvellous and unaccustomed exercise of will that she roused from her bed, and brought that first canoe across through the dank lake-mists to succour us. We recognised this, and I think we were duly thankful.