I can never understand why I was not killed instantly; but not a lion reached me, and at close range I fired shot after shot in the bright moonlight, and lion after lion fell, till but two were left; and as morning dawned these slunk away, leaving me alone with my dead.
Then I came back to the scherm, my mad fit of rage over, and nothing but grief, and a sorrow too deep for words to express, left in my heart. The huge lion lay right across the poor boy's body, still gripping his crushed shoulder in its mighty jaws; but now I saw that in spite of his terrible injuries Inyati was not dead, though he was dying even as I came back to him. Strong as I was, no strength of mine could have freed him from the grip of those terrible jaws, and as I struggled to do so, his beseeching glance stopped me. I knelt down beside him.
"Finished, master! finished," he whispered, "yet we have made a good fight and you, master, will win. Straight north now! Bury the little gun with me, master. It may serve me who knows? And take thou the blue stone, and this my armlet, it may help . . . master, master, I go. . . ."
And with his eyes fixed upon me, he died; that brave heart, that had served me so well.
I was stupefied with the blow that had fallen upon me, and lay for an hour or more as one stunned.
Once or twice the craven thought came upon me to use a bullet to end it all, and once I actually lifted my revolver to my head; but dead Inyati's last whisper seemed again to sound in my ear had I made a "good fight," to end it like a coward?
And so I lay in the shade of a tree, and sleep, the blessed healer, came to me and saved my reason. For when I awoke, although my heart was heavy, my brain was clear, and I knew what lay before me, and no longer shirked the task.
The lion's head I hewed from its body, for I could not tear its huge jaws asunder to release Inyati, and there I buried victim and victor together.
And so, I was alone, in the heart of the desert, with return an impossibility.
I struck north, as Inyati had told me, due north; in spite of the fact that in that direction the dunes were of the worst; and for a day, and half a night, I wayfared, striving in sheer physical suffering to drown the sorrow of losing Inyati. God knows what I went through, or the poor horses that I drove ruthlessly forward; moreover, the fever that was already burning in my veins may have rendered me delirious? Certain it is that this part, and many a day afterwards, is but a confused dream to me. A dream of suffering, of incessant wandering from pan to pan; here a few mouthfuls of stagnant water, and there a few t'samma still keeping myself and the horses alive. For days the wandering must have been purely mechanical: but one day I came to myself just as the sun was setting. I felt weak and exhausted but perfectly sane. I was parched, and my water-skin was gone, probably thrown away in a fit of frenzy or despair I could not remember.