Maurice Stair paused there, and turned his face away.
“You must tell me all,” I said calmly and waited.
“They were ten to one—they killed him by the stream where he was lying—they left nothing by which we could identify him—but the natives took us without hesitation to the spot where the bones lay. We buried them and put up a rough cross.”
It seemed to me then as if my last hold to life was broken: as if the last rock to cling to in a cruel, storm-racked sea had crumbled suddenly away, and I went down for awhile under the waves of that sea; it washed over my head and submerged me.
For three months I lay at the door of death, craving entry into the place that held all I loved. But Africa had not done with me. She dragged me back from the dark, healed my sick body with her sunshine, and cooled my fevers with her sparkling air. She even after a time began to lull my mind with a peace it had never known before. In strange moments a kind of exquisitely bitter contentment possessed me at having paid with the last drop of my heart’s blood the price she exacts from the children of civilisation who come walking with careless feet in her wild secret places. Mocking and gay I had come to the cave of the witch, and now she clawed me to her and held me tight in her bosom with the hands of my dead. And not my dead only: the hands of all those men with whom I had laughed in the moonlight and afterwards waved to, in farewell—they held me too, though they were hands no longer but pale bones on the brown earth; they held me fast like the hands of dead brothers and I could never leave the land where they lay. With the strange prophetic knowledge that sometimes comes to one when the body is weakened by illness, but the spirit’s vision become wonderfully clear, I knew at last that I could never leave this cruel land that had robbed me of those I loved and given me instead a bitter peace and a strange contentment in her wild, barren beauty.
Chapter Fifteen.
Part Two—What Australian Gold Achieved.
“Life has always poppies in her hands.”