But Adams had no time to attend to them. Having glanced in their direction, he turned to Berselius, bent over him, and started back in surprise.
Berselius’s eyes were open; he was breathing regularly and slowly, and he looked like a man who, just awakened from sleep, was yet too lazy to move.
Adams touched him upon the shoulder, and Berselius, raising his right hand, drew it over his face as if to chase away sleep. Then his head dropped, and he lay looking up at the sky. Then he yawned twice, deeply, and turning his head on his left shoulder looked about him lazily, his eyes resting here and there: on the two porters who were sitting, with knees drawn up, eating some food which Félix had given them; on the broken camp furniture and the heaps of raffle left by the catastrophe of the night before; on the skyline where the grass waved against the morning blue.
Adams heaved a sigh of relief. The man had only been stunned. None of the vital centres of the brain had been injured. Some injury there must be, but the main springs of life were intact. There was no paralysis, for now the sick man was raising his left hand, and, moving about as a person moves in bed to get a more comfortable position, he raised both knees and then, turning over on his right side, straightened them out again. Now, by the movements of a sick person you can tell pretty nearly the condition of his brain.
All the movements of this sick man were normal; they indicated great tiredness, nothing more. The shock and the loss of blood might account for that. Adams the night before had made a pillow from his own coat for the stricken one’s head; he was bending now to rearrange it, but he desisted. Berselius was asleep.
Adams remained on his knees for a moment contemplating his patient with deep satisfaction. Then he rose to his feet. Some shelter must be improvised to protect the sleeping man from the sun, but in the raffle around there did not seem enough tent cloth to make even an umbrella.
Calling Félix and the two porters to follow him, he started off, searching amidst the débris here and there, setting the porters to work to collect the remains of the stores and to bring them back to the tree, hunting in vain for what he wanted, till Félix, just as they reached the northern limit of destruction, pointed to where the birds were still busy, clamorous and gorging.
“What is it?” asked Adams.
“Tent,” replied Félix.
To the left of where the birds were, and close to them, lay a mound of something showing dark amidst the grass. It was a tent, or a large part of one of the tents; tangled, perhaps, in a tusk, it had been brought here and cast, just as a storm might have brought and cast it. Even at this distance the air was tainted with the odour of the birds and their prey, but the thing had to be fetched, and Adams was not the man to exhibit qualms before a savage.