"O, what did they want to come for," he groaned, "if they had to go away again?"
"Faith!..." said the astute Irishman. "Did ye ask either of them to share your little wooden hut?..."
But The Kid paid no attention. As Carew stood a moment beside him, filling a pipe, with a cold, expressionless face, the youngster glanced up with a momentary gleam, and remarked, "Eh, sir? But women are the devil, aren't they?"
Carew said nothing; but with a low chuckle Moore ejaculated, "Come, give the divil a chance; we find him very accommodating sometimes in auld Erin."
Stanley got up and stretched himself. "Days and weeks of desolation now," he moaned; "and we were so happy and content before. Moore, old chap"—giving that harmless individual a smack on the back that nearly knocked him over—"yours was the wise choice when we spoke of gifts from heaven. I said, 'Give me millionairesses,' and you, with the wisdom of the ages, said, 'Give me whisky.' I'll take a little now and hope for the best."
And still Carew said nothing. The pipe was filled and he slowly lit it. Then unexpectedly he tapped it with light significance. "This is the best friend of all," he said, and went away into his hut.
Stanley glanced after him a moment with a curious expression. "Gad!..." he murmured. "Was our bronze image a bit hit too? He looks fierce enough and stern enough to be resenting a dent."
In the meantime the travellers reached the Charter Flats, and decided to camp there for the night. They had travelled for some time along the sandy tracts, enjoying the sense of space all around and the wide horizons, and both Mr. Pym and the girls were loth to hurry away. It is customary to dread these wide sandy tracts, and either hurry across them or avoid them; but to these city-dwellers their vast calm held a deep allurement; for though only scrub and sand stretched from horizon to horizon, with occasional little strips of stunted trees, the clear southern atmosphere lent a lovely effect of light and shade and colour. Many large patches here and there were blackened with veldt fires, but these in the distance formed delicate shadings that enhanced the charm of a strip of yellow sand or young green grass or purple-shadowed wilderness. It was like a world that contained only a colour scheme; no dwellings, no humans, no landmarks, no hills and valleys, no roads: just delicate shadings and haze as far as the eye could see, with no clear line between earth and heaven. They might have been looking over the edge of the world into a delicately tinted space, so boundless it seemed, so unfathomable, so remote. They pitched their camp on a little rising ground, near a slow meandering stream that crept lazily across the miniature desert. And when the dusk came down the effect was more unusual still, for the flats are on high ground, and the heavens seem to stoop down all round, hanging a dark curtain, decorated with brilliant stars, on every side. Across all the world no sign of human life, no sound; only vast emptiness everywhere—above, around, below; and for companions, worlds and suns and solar systems.
It is a scene in which a man may seem to get very close to his God; not a remote, incomprehensible Deity, dwelling vaguely beyond the stars, but a Presence that is in the breathing silence and the velvety deeps at hand. And a man may meet himself there also; not the aping, grinning, chattering mask of a personality custom more or less compels him to wear in the crowd, but the hidden, mysterious being, conscious of a soul beyond his ken, that in such quiet hours desires eternally some goal, some good, afar off. The indestructible, incomprehensible, infinite hunger, that lies as a germ in every human heart and is man's best attribute, in that it raises him for ever incontestably above the beasts that perish, and stands serene and steadfast as the Rock of Ages, the one barrier past which the materialists and the scientists cannot go: the divine spark within the human, which no theory can account for and no learning of sage or cynic obliterate.
The travellers sat round a glowing fire, for the night air was keen and cold; and much that is inevitably disturbing in the friction of daily being and daily doing seemed to fall away from them and cease to exist for that one wonderful night. And the next day, when the small black attendant brought their early tea and opened wide the tent-flap to a brilliant morning, yet another picture awaited them. This time it was a world decked with enormous diamonds. Tall, sparse grasses leant over and whispered to each other outside the tent, and every ear and every seed was hung with a lovely brilliant dewdrop. Out beyond was that same vague, remote, fathomless horizon, painted now with wonderful rose tints, where the rising sun caught the lingering mists and merged the dark streaks of blackened veldt into the general scheme with a softness of shading beyond all description. Meryl lay still, gazing with her soul in her eyes, but after a time Diana sat up.