The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

Next morning Eva wakened to a sound that was peculiar in its blending of the strange and the familiar. The sky hung grey above them, but the air was full of innumerable bird-song, so clear and thrilling in its slenderness that she could almost have imagined that she was waking to a morning in the first ecstasy of spring in her own home on the edge of the Forest of Wyre. She had never heard anything like that at Luguru. In the garden at the mission she had grown accustomed to the harsh note of the pied shrikes, a numerous and truculent tribe which makes its living on the smaller birds. This first and ravishing impression was a small thing: but somehow it coloured all that day. A wonderful day. The sun rose swiftly on those highlands, and in a little while her limbs lost their chill and stiffness. As soon as she had rubbed her eyes and put on her shoes they ate a little breakfast together. M‘Crae allowed her a little water . . . so very little, she thought, and then they set off walking in the cool morning.

No man who has not travelled in the early morning of the African highlands could tell you of the beauty of that day. Their way led them over a wide country of waving grasses where trees were few: a high plateau, so washed with golden light, so bathed in golden air, so kindly and so free that it would have been difficult for any soul to have felt unhappy there. To the west and to the south of them stretched these endless yellow plains. In the north they could still see the bosky forms of the Luguru hills, where all their troubles lay: but even these seemed now too beautiful to have sheltered any violence or pain. Once or twice in the midst of this atmosphere of freedom and of relief from the intangible threats of Luguru Eva remembered James. She recognised, I suppose, that he was in some danger: she was grieved, no doubt, by the obstinacy which had made him stay behind, and realised that it was very courageous of him and very like him to have seen the business through: but her own relief and bewilderment were so intense that she was never vexed with the dreadful imaginations which came to the mind of M‘Crae, and made him remote and preoccupied all through that golden morning.

Little by little his sombre mood was beguiled by her childish pleasure in new things, her young and healthy life. I suppose that a man can know no greater happiness than walking alone in the open air at the side of the woman he loves. In these hours the whole living world ministers to his passion, revealing countless and incredible beauties to eyes that are already drunk with joy. So it was with M‘Crae. In the loveliness of Eva’s gait, of her eyes, of her voice, he was lost. The way was scattered with familiar beauties which came to him invested with a strange poignancy when they were shared by Eva’s eyes. Thus, in the heat of the day, they rested beneath a solitary acacia on the gravelly crown of these plains and round the dusty flowers of brushwood at their feet many butterflies hovered. M‘Crae knew them all well enough, but Eva had never seen many of them before and must find a likeness for each of their silken patterns. One that she loved was blotched with peacock eyes of violet, and another wore wings of figured satin in modest browns and greys, like the sober gowns of mid-Victorian ladies: and at the sight of another Eva must hold her breath, for it floated down on great curved wings of black that were barred with the blue of a kingfisher.

All through the heat of the day they lay there listening to the sleepy calling of the hornbills until they fell asleep themselves. In the first cool of the evening they set out again, leaving the country of tall grasses as golden as ever behind them, and entering a zone of Park Steppe scattered with trees from which the nests of the bottle-bird were hanging in hundreds. Eva was beginning to be very thirsty: but M‘Crae would not let her drink. Soon, he imagined, they must come to one of the greater tributaries of the Wami: there they would quench their thirst and camp for the night upon the farther side. At the time of sunset they came indeed to a sodden valley upon which the Park Steppe looked down. It promised good and plenteous water, for the bottom was hidden with tapestries of acacia slowly stirring, and a single group of taller trees with silvery trunks and great, expanded crowns stood brooding over the sources of some spring. On a slope of sand M‘Crae noticed the spoor of many buck that had wandered to this oasis for water, and when he saw them his mind was clouded with a faint doubt: for the hoof-prints had set hard in moist sand and had been left there, for all he knew, as long ago as the last rains. When they came to the bottom of the valley they found that the bed of the stream was dry. M‘Crae searched along its course to see if any water had been caught in the pools of rock: but whatever had lain there had long since evaporated. Somewhere indeed there must be water. So much they knew by the high crowns of that company of smooth-trunked trees and by the luxuriance of the thorned acacia. But the water was too deep for them. M‘Crae spent a futile hour digging with his hand in the sandy bottom of the stream: but though the sand grew cool, no water trickled through.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Eva. “We have plenty of water left.”

M‘Crae shook his head.

That night they made their camp on a hill-side placed a mile or so above the bed of the river, at a safe distance from those sinister beauties which are known to hunters as “fever trees.” Eva was very happy, even though the spear-grass had worked its way into her feet. She was healthily and pleasantly fatigued. Never in all her life had she spent a more wonderful day. She felt, too, that she was beginning to know M‘Crae better and was glad of it. Time had helped her to reason herself out of a great deal of ridiculous shyness. Again they lay together under the stars, talking of trivial and intimate things. They did not speak of James or of Godovius. Their talk was as light and an inconsequent as that of two happy lovers. Indeed they were already lovers, though neither of them had ever given the other a word of love.

Eva fell asleep early, resigning herself without question to the arm of M‘Crae: but M‘Crae lay awake long into the night. He was thinking of water . . . always of water. Their disappointment at the river bed had made him very anxious. He had made certain of finding permanent water at this level, and the bed of the stream was sufficiently deep and wide to justify his belief. But now there was no doubt in his mind but that he had set their course too far westward for the season of the year. He had been aiming, as Godovius had told him, for M’papwa; but if he were to keep in touch with water it seemed that he must make for the line considerably farther east. The prospect which lay before him, according to his present plans, was a whole system of dry river beds which would mock their thirst at every valley and in the midst of which they must surely perish. It meant a whole revision of his plans, and, what was more, a waste of valuable time. For, even though he had undertaken to place Eva in safety on the Central Railway, the mind of M‘Crae was never very remote from Luguru. He had given Godovius his word that he would return. In some small particular Godovius had shown himself to be a white man: at the last moment his regard for Eva had been sufficiently strong to place her in the protection of his only rival. M‘Crae had gravely given him credit for that: and if he owed a debt of honour to Godovius, he felt himself even more deeply indebted to James, a man of his own race, cursed with the courage and perversity of a martyr, and the only brother of the woman he loved. Yes, as soon as it were possible he must make his way back to Luguru . . . even if he were to be too late. There was so little time to spare. Once more, about midnight, the sky clouded over. On the horizon’s brim he watched the flickering light of bush fires slowly burning fifty miles away.

IV

A cloudless and splendid dawn ushered in the first of the bad days. They set off early: for M‘Crae was anxious to make as much progress as possible before the extreme heat of the sun developed. He had decided, in his deliberations of the night, to follow the course of the dry river valley towards the east, so that, at the worst, they might keep in touch with the possibility of water. They marched all day. From time to time M‘Crae would leave Eva to rest while he reached out towards the valley of the river to see if any sign of water were there. Time after time he returned with a solemn face which told her that he had failed, and every time she was ready to meet him with a smile. It wasn’t easy to smile, for though she dared not let him know, she was suffering a great deal. The little doles of water which he allowed her to take were never enough to quench her thirst. Always, in the back of her mind, whatever she might be saying or doing, thirst was the dominant idea. In all her life she had never been far away from the sweet moisture of brookland air: but the country through which they now struggled might never have known any moisture but that of the dew for all they could see of it. It was an endless, arid plain, so vast and so terribly homogeneous that their progress began to seem like a sort of nightmare in which they were compelled to trudge for ever without more achievement than prisoners treading a wheel. Always the same level skylines hemmed them in, offering, as one might think, an infinite possibility of escape, but giving none. The dry bed of the river was the same, neither wider nor narrower, and always parched with sun. The trees were the same scattered bushes of mimosa and acacia: the butterflies the same; the same hornbills called to them from melancholy distances. Once, in the appalling fatigue of the early evening, when a little coolness descended to mock their labours, Eva realised of a sudden that she was sitting under a withered candelabra cactus, a gloomy skeleton that raised withered arms into the dry air, and a haunting conviction assailed her that this was the self-same tree under which she had sat in their first halt, long ago in the dawn of the same day. The idea was almost too horrible to be true; and, when she saw M‘Crae approaching, the same lean, dusty figure, his lips parched with drought, the atmosphere of a monstrous dream returned to her. Again he smiled, again he helped her to her feet. He was so kind, she thought, that she could have cried for that alone.