“I have left my memory on that road.”
Adams, frightened at the man’s agitation, tried to soothe him, but Berselius, in the grip of this awful desire to pierce back beyond that mist and find himself, would not be soothed. Nothing would satisfy him but to strike camp and return along the road they had come by. Some instinct told him that the sight of the things he had seen would wake up memory, and that bit by bit, as he went, the mist would retreat before him, and perhaps vanish at last. Some instinct told him this, but reason, who is ever a doubter, tortured him with doubts.
The only course was to go back and see. Adams, who doubted if his patient was physically fit for a march, at last gave in; the man’s agony of mind was more dangerous to him than the exhaustion of physical exercise could prove. He gave orders to the porters to strike camp, and then turned to himself, and helped them. They only carried what was barely needful, and was even less than needful, to take them to Fort M’Bassa, ten days, journey in Berselius’s condition. Four water bottles that had been left intact they filled with water; they took the tent, and the pole that Félix had spliced. Cassava cakes and tinned meat and a few pounds of chocolate made up the provisions. There were no guns to carry, no trophies of the chase. Of all the army of porters only two were left. Berselius was broken down, Félix had fled, they had no guide, and the crowning horror of the thing was that they had struck off in pursuit of the herd at right angles to the straight path they had taken from the forest, and Adams did not know in the least the point where they had struck off. The porters were absolutely no use as guides, and unless God sent a guide from heaven or chance interposed to lead them in the right way, they were lost; for they had no guns or ammunition with which to get food.
Truly the omen of the elephant lying down had not spoken in vain.
When all was loaded up, and Adams was loaded even like the porters, they turned their backs on the tree and the pools, and leaving them there to burn in the sun forever struck straight west in the direction from which they had come.
Berselius had come in pursuit of a terrible thing and a merciless thing; he was returning in search of a more terrible and a more merciless thing—Memory.
It was four hours after sun-up when they left the camp; and two hours’ march brought them to that ridge which Berselius had indicated from the camp as being near the skyline.
When they reached the ridge, and not before, Berselius halted and stared over the country in front of him, his face filled with triumph and hope.
He seized Adams’s hand and pointed away to the west. The ridge gave a big view of the country.
“I can remember all that,” said he, “keenly, right up to the skyline.”