Next day Van Laer, escorted by the soldiers, left M’Bina to take up the station at Fort M’Bassa left vacant by the death of Chef de Poste Andreas Meeus.
Three days later at noon De Wiart, drawn from his house by shouts from the sentinels on duty saw, coming toward him in the blazing sunshine, a great man who stumbled and seemed half-blinded by the sunlight, and who was bearing in his arms another man who seemed dead.
Both were filthy, ragged, torn and bleeding. The man erect had, tied to his waistbelt by a piece of liana, a skull.
Fit emblem of the forest he had passed through and the land that lay behind it.
CHAPTER XXXV
PARIS
One hot day in June Schaunard was seated in the little office just behind his shop. He was examining an improved telescopic sight which had just been put upon the market by an opponent, criticizing it as one poet criticizes the poem of another poet—that is to say, ferociously.
To him, thus meditating, from the Rue de la Paix suddenly came a gush of sound which as suddenly ceased.