Adams, listening to the breathing of the man he could not save, sat watching the moonlit desert where the grass waved in the wind. Félix, lying on his belly, had resumed his slumbers, and beside the sleeping savage lay the thing he worshipped more than his god, the big elephant rifle, across the stock of which his naked arm was flung.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FEAST OF THE VULTURES
Adams, who had fallen asleep, was awakened by a whoop from Félix.
It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Félix, were all that remained of Berselius’s savage train of followers. The rest were over there——
Over there to the west, where vultures and marabouts and kites were holding a clamorous meeting; over there, where the ground was black with birds.
The two wretches approaching the camping place rolled their eyes in terror, glancing over there. They had run for miles and hidden themselves in a donga. They had heard the tragedy from afar, the storming and trumpeting, and the shrieks of men being destroyed, torn to pieces, trampled to pulp; they had heard the thunder of the vanishing herd, and they had listened to the awful silence that followed, lying on their faces, clinging to the breast of their old, cold, cruel Mother Earth. With day, like homing pigeons, they had returned to the camp.
“Hi yi!” yelled Félix, and a response came like the cry of a seagull. They were shivering as dogs shiver when ill or frightened; their teeth were chattering, and they had a curious gray, dusky look; the very oil of their skins seemed to have dried up, and old chain scars on their necks and ankles showed white and leprous-looking in the bright morning sunshine.