The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Berselius was sleeping peacefully. He could hear the even respirations through the tent cloth. The porters were sleeping in the sun as only niggers can sleep when they are tired; but Adams was feeling as if he could never sleep again, as he sat waiting and watching and listening to the faint whisper, whisper of the grass as the wind bent it gently in its passage.

A long time passed, and then the black sketch appeared again outlined on the sky. It grew in size, and as it grew Adams fingered the triggers of the gun, and his lips became as dry as sand, so that he had to lick them and keep on licking them, till his tongue became dry as his lips and his palate dry as his tongue.

Then he rose up, rifle in hand, for the Zappo Zap had come to speaking distance. Adams advanced to meet him. There was a dry, dull glaze about the creature’s lips and chin that told a horrible story, and at the sight of it the white man halted dead, pointed away to where the birds were again congregating, cried “Gr-r-r,” as a man cries to a dog that has misbehaved, and flung the rifle to his shoulder.

Félix broke away and ran. Ran, striking eastward, and bounding as a buck antelope bounds with a leopard at its heels, whilst the ear-shattering report of the great rifle rang across the land and a puff of white dust broke from the ground near the black bounding figure. Adams, cursing himself for having missed, grounded the gun-butt and stood watching the dot in the distance till it vanished from sight.

He had forgotten the fact that Félix was the guide and that without him the return would be a hazardous one; but had he remembered this, it would have made no difference. Better to die in the desert twenty times over than to return escorted by that.

It was now getting toward sundown. The great elephant country in which the camp lay lost had, during the daytime, three phases. Three spirits presided over this place; the spirit of morning, of noon, and of evening. In towns and cities, even in the open country of civilized lands, these three are clad in language and bound in chains of convention, reduced to slaves whose task is to call men to rise, to eat, or sleep. But here, in this vast place, one saw them naked—naked and free as when they caught the world’s first day, like a new-minted coin struck from darkness, and spun it behind them into night.

Under the presidency of these three spirits the land was ever changing; the country of the morning was not the country of the noon, nor was the country of the noon the country of the evening.

The morning was loud. I can express it in no other terms. Dawn came like a blast of trumpets, driving the flocks of the red flamingoes before it, tremendous, and shattering the night of stars at the first fanfare. A moment later, and, changing the image, imagination could hear the sea of light bursting against the far edge of the horizon, even as you watched the spindrift of it surging up to heaven and the waves of it breaking over ridge and tree and plain of waving grass.

Noon was the hour of silence. Under the pyramid of light the land lay speechless, without a shadow except the shadow of the flying bird, or a sound except the sigh of the grass, touched and bent by the wind, if it blew.

Evening brought with it a new country. There was no dusk here, no beauties of twilight, but the level light of sunset brought a beauty of its own. Distance stood over the land, casting trees farther away, and spreading the prairies of grass with her magic.