“I heard something . . . like a river. Did you hear it?” she said.
“I heard something,” said M‘Crae, “but I think I must have imagined it. It was like the noise that the blood makes in the vessels near your ears at night, when you are getting better from fever. I expect it’s partly the quinine.”
“But I heard it too. . . . It can’t be that,” she said.
“Don’t think about it,” said M‘Crae. “We had better make a start. Now there is no reason why you shouldn’t let me carry you. We will see how it works. I shall take you like they carry a wounded man. You must put your arms round my neck.” Again they kissed.
He had lifted her precious weight, when she cried: “Listen. . . . I hear it again. It can’t be imagination,” and they listened together.
“My God!” said M‘Crae. “My God! It’s a train!”
He left her, and she watched him running into the bush, as though this were actually the last train that was ever going to grind along the length of the Central Railway, and he must stop it or die.
CHAPTER XIV
I
How many hours Eva lay alone under the thorn-tree I do not know. For a great part of the time she slept or fell into an uneasy dream that hung midway between sleep and waking. Now that her hope of water had been renewed her thirst became a torment even greater than before. Once again, in the middle of the hot noon, she thought that she heard a train moving on the line; but by this time the wind which had brought the noise to their ears had dropped, and it sounded very far away. In the intervals of waking, and even in her dreams, her mind seemed marvellously clear. She found that she wanted to talk of the ideas which whirled about it. She even wanted to laugh, although she could not imagine why. And then, in her weakness, she would topple from this pinnacle of exaltation, feeling her actual and appalling loneliness, thinking miserably of James and of any catastrophe which might have befallen him. At other times she would surprise herself, or rather one of the innumerable selves of which her personality was compact, engrossed in the contemplation of some minute part of the multitude of silent life which surrounded her. At one time, moving rapidly in the red dust at her feet, she saw an expedition of black ants, many thousands of them, extended in a winding caravan. She saw the porters stumbling under their loads, the shining bellies of their attendant askaris, and the solitary scouts which they had thrown out on either side. She could not guess where they had come from or where they were going, but the way which they had chosen, and from which no obstacle could dissuade them, happened to lie over the ragged edge of her skirt. She dared not move, for she feared that if she disturbed them they would swarm upon her with innumerable stings; so she lay very still and watched their column move past until the head of it wheeled away beneath a fallen bough; and the thought invaded her brain, now so perilously clear, that she and M‘Crae, in their long adventure, had been no less tiny and obscure in comparison with their surrounding wilderness than this strangely preoccupied host. In all her life she had never been given to such speculations; but that was how it appeared to her now. “We are just ants,” she thought. “God cannot see us any bigger than that.” A strange business. . . . Very strange. It was hard to believe.