The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

I

Through the garden of the moon-flowers down those oblique paths which climbed the Sabæan terraces into the blackness of deep kloofs in which the track could only be felt. She was too overwhelmed by one fear to take count of any others. In her return she quite forgot the anxiety and fatigue which had marked her coming . . . she had almost forgotten James and the reason of her adventure. At length, not knowing why she did so, she stopped. Careless of what might be beneath her, she sat down, pressing her hands to her beating temples, alone in the middle of Africa. The sense of her solitariness came over her suddenly. She felt like a child who wakes from a strange dream in the middle of the night. She had to convince herself that it was silly to have been frightened. “I lost my head,” she said to herself. “It was ridiculous of me. It doesn’t do to lose one’s head out here. It’s a wonder I kept to the road.” She wished there had been a stream of water near: one of those little brooks which made her own land musical: for then she would have bathed her face and pulled herself together. She felt that if there were any more terrors to be faced she couldn’t cope with them in her present dishevelled condition. But in all that forest there was no murmur of water short of the M’ssente River, that tawny, sinister flood which was many miles away, and which in any case she dared not have approached for fear of crocodiles; so she contented herself with putting up her fallen hair and wiping her face with her handkerchief. She only hoped that while she had been sitting down the siaphu ants had not got into her petticoats. She rose to her feet, a little unsteady but now immensely fortified. “I think I can manage anything now,” she thought.

So she went on her way. The forest was very still, for whatever winds may have been wandering under the stars were screened from her by the interwoven tops of the trees. That there were winds abroad she guessed, for sometimes, in the air above her, she would hear the sound of a great sighing as the forest stirred in its sleep. There was one other sound which troubled her. At first she couldn’t be certain about it; she thought that her disturbed fancy was playing her tricks; but at length she became convinced that some animal was moving through the undergrowth parallel with her path. She stopped to listen, and all was still. She moved on again and the faint rustling in the leaves returned. She did this several times. Without doubt she was being followed. A new pang of terror assailed her. Godovius . . . supposing that he had actually followed her. Even though his presence might be in some sense a protection, she would rather have had anything than that. She argued swiftly with herself. If it were Godovius, she thought, he would not need to slink through the forest beside the track; he wouldn’t be afraid of coming into the open. Obviously it couldn’t be Godovius. Nor, for that matter, could it be an African, for, as he had told her, the Waluguru are frightened of the dark. She decided that it must be an animal. She thought of the leopard which Godovius had shot; she remembered hunters’ tales of the wounded buffalo which will follow a man for fifty miles, brooding upon a feud which must end with the death of one of the two. If it were something of that kind she hoped that the end would come soon. “I can’t do anything!” she thought. “I must just go on as if nothing were going to happen. But it will happen . . .”

It happened suddenly. A greater rustling disturbed a patch of tall grasses in a patch of swampy ground a little ahead of her, and in the path the figure of a man appeared.

One cannot tamper with the portrait. Although it was never my luck to meet Hare, there must be very few among the older settlers and hunters and adventurers of equatorial Africa who have not known him: a sinewy, grave and eminently characteristic figure that was always to be found stalking through the gloom of the unknown countries that have opened before the successive waves of occupation from the south. The men who went to Rhodesia in 1890 trod in his footsteps. With the Jameson raiders he lay in Pretoria jail. When the Uganda Railway was struggling upwards through the thorn-bush about Tsavo he was shooting lions in the rolling country above the Athi Plains which is now Nairobi hill. Everybody in central Africa knew him, not merely the English, but the Belgians, the Germans, the Portuguese, all of them, from the Zambesi to the Lorian Swamp. Everybody knew the face of Hare, everybody knew his fame as a shikari. And that was all; for his soul was as lonely as the solitudes into which he had so often been the first to penetrate. You may carry the simile a little further: it was of the same simplicity and patience and courage, if a country may be said to possess these attributes of a soul, and there are some people who think it can. In this solitude I have known of only one adventurer: and that was Eva Burwarton. Perhaps there had been one other many years before. I don’t know. At least Hare, that figure of tragedy, was fortunate in this. And it was thus they met. You are not to imagine the figure of which the East African settler will tell you over his sundowner in the New Stanley. What Eva Burwarton saw upon this strange occasion was a thin brown man, a scarecrow in the dark wood path, and liker to a scarecrow because of his arms. The sleeve of one was empty: the other swung helplessly at his side in spite of the strips of drab cotton which he had torn from his shirt to keep it steady. All his clothes were torn: his beard red with the dust of Africa: his lips and eyelids black with the same dust caked and encrusted: the skin of face and brow of the colour of red ochre. The blackened dust on lips and eyelids relieved the brightness of his teeth and eyes. He was a figure at the same time savage and bizarre, and as he staggered into the path he addressed her, as well as his parched tongue would let him, in a ridiculous attempt at German. He spoke as though he were drunk or raving. No wonder that she shuddered.

“Ich. . . . Ich. . .” he said. “O . . . nicht . . . frightened sei. Wasser. Will nicht leiden. Helf mir. Verstehn?”

She hadn’t tumbled to it that he was English, as anyone might have done who knew German. Brilliantly she stumbled into Swahili.

“Wataka maji. . . . Water. Oh, his arm’s broken. . . . Do lie down . . . you’ll fall.”

And he fell in the path at her feet. A minute later he smiled up at her. “You’re English?” he said. “My apologies. I’m sorry to have frightened you.” He still spoke thickly.

“You were speaking German to me? But you are English yourself . . .”