“I shall only be a few hours away,” said he, “five at most.”
“Where are you going?” asked Berselius.
“Oh, just down into the woods,” replied Adams. Then he left the room before his companion could ask any more questions and sought out the corporal.
He beckoned the savage to follow him, and struck down the slope in the direction of the Silent Pools. When they reached the forest edge he pointed before them and said, “Matabayo.”
The man understood and led the way, which was not difficult, for the feet of the rubber collectors had beaten a permanent path. There was plenty of light, too, for the moon was already in the sky, only waiting for the sun to sink before blazing out.
When they were half-way on their journey heavy dusk fell on them suddenly, and deepened almost to dark; then, nearly as suddenly, all the forest around them glowed green to the light of the moon.
The Silent Pools and the woods, when they reached them, lay in mist and moonlight, making a picture unforgettable for ever.
It recalled to Adams that picture of Doré’s, illustrating the scene from the “Idylls of the King,” where Arthur labouring up the pass “all in a misty moonlight,” had trodden on the skeleton of the once king, from whose head the crown rolled like a rivulet of light down to the tarn—the misty tarn, where imagination pictured Death waiting to receive it and hide it in his robe.
The skeleton of no king lay here, only the poor bones still unburied of the creatures that a far-off king had murdered. The rain had washed them about, and Adams had to search and search before he found what he had come to find.
At last he saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish business the white man had come to find the thing.