It was curious how her personality projected itself across five thousand miles of land and sea into Equatorial Africa; so that Lucy and perhaps Roger should both have been thinking about her as they were preparing to leave their home in this secluded region. Lucy thought of Sibyl pleasantly as of one she no longer feared because she never desired to cross her path as a rival, or contest her superiority. Sibyl would offer her a temporary home in her home country where her children could be riotously happy, and where Roger—even—might be tempted to join her for a few months before resuming his strenuous life as a conqueror of the wilderness. Roger had held out this hope to alleviate the sadness of their approaching separation.
He was to accompany his wife and sister as far as Burungi; after which he must return to the Iraku Hills to take full advantage of the dry-season months for great projected developments of the planting and mining industries. From Burungi, now quite an important centre of traffic, whence well-made roads proceed coastwards, with rest-houses every twenty miles, Lucy and Maud and the precious children would be escorted to the coast port of their embarkation by the two German sergeants, whose service Brentham has taken over from the Stotts. Their journey might be broken by a few days' rest at Hangodi in the Nguru country. Maud would like to see the scene of the tragedy and of Lucy's induction into African life. Lucy would like to pay a visit of sentiment to John Baines's grave and to live over again in a sense of contrite reminiscence her brief experiences as a missionary's wife. She wants to put herself back in time to where the outlook seemed hopeless, and realize the wide horizon of happiness which now seems open before her.
So—an hour late, with all these last thoughts, musing reflections and leave-takings—Halima is howling with grief because she must remain behind—the caravan starts on its first day's march. Lucy from delicacy of constitution is unable to ride much, so she travels in a machila with her baby. Maud bestrides a Maskat donkey and hopes when she returns they will by that time have got horses safely through the tsetse belt, into interior transport ... "you have so little initiative on a donkey, it will never do anything unconventional." Ambrose being thought too young to ride a donkey is handed over to his special guardian and chum, a tall Manyamwezi porter who hoists him on to his broad shoulders. From this elevation of six feet he surveys the landscape as the safari swings along. Some German friend had given him the previous Christmas a tin trumpet, and with blasts of this and shouts of glee he hails the sight of game standing at gaze in the distance.
This would have annoyed any sportsman of the caravan had they been bent on killing for the pot or the trophy; but his father lets him do this unrebuked. He is not intending to transgress his own by-laws about game preservation, and the caravan in these bountiful days has its food supply ensured from station to station. Still Roger reflects musingly as he rides up hill and down hill through the breadth of the Happy Valley and up to the low ridge and water-partings which mark its limit and the commencement of the long descent through Irangi, that in one respect the glamour of the Happy Valley has already withered under the practical need for developing its resources. Though there has been no deliberate big-game slaughter in hecatombs as on the British side of the frontier, the Grant's gazelles, the hartebeests and tsesebes, the elands, zebra, and impala are never to be seen now grazing near the road. They are retreating every year farther into the unprofitable wastes away from the well-beaten tracks, noisy with the coming and going of carriers, soldiers, native traders, or ivory hunters. These last, under some degree of control, are even being encouraged to pursue the elephants into the recesses of the hills and forests of the north; not only to bring down as much ivory as possible, to sell, but because the elephant has met civilization too abruptly. He has contemptuously knocked down the laboriously erected telegraph posts, and has snapped and tangled-up the copper wire. This in its derelict condition is too sore a temptation to the native accustomed to regard copper wire as a decorative article of the highest value ... so many cubits of copper wire would buy a wife. So an edict has gone forth which Roger himself could not protest against, that between Burungi and Kondoa any one, native or European, may kill as many elephants as he pleases. The native herdsmen, again, whom they pass on the road lazily minding the cattle, sheep and goats, are no longer in the state of Paradisiac nudity that characterized them on that first journey of Roger and Lucy down the Happy Valley. No one has remonstrated with them on their nakedness: a hint from Dame Fashion has been enough. The white men and the white men's black followers have been clothed, so they too must wear old uniforms, old coats, old trousers, something in the way of frowsy coverings of their bronze bodies.
The vulgarization of Africa has begun. Never again will there be seen in this region a condition of unspoilt Nature as it first showed itself to the Brenthams. But as a set-off Roger draws Lucy's attention to the telegraph line in course of re-erection, after the rude elephantine protests. It is proceeding to a great German military post, but a branch will presently be carried to Iraku—almost as soon as she is back in Berkshire—and then he and she will be in close touch. It will be possible, at a cost of a few pounds, to telegraph to one another and receive the answer in a day—two days at most.
It is four years since the Brenthams saw Burungi, for Roger's journeys, meantime, have ranged farther and farther afield towards the mysterious—still mysterious—region between the Happy Valley and the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Even then, when Roger rode there to meet his wife and Maud on their journey inland—Maud's first introduction to Real Africa—the desolate Burungi of 1888 was no longer recognizable, with its wilderness of thorn bushes and baobabs on which gorged vultures were perching, its lurking lions and hyenas, as the evening darkened, its flitting, furtive, thievish Wagogo, the ruined station of the Stotts, and no other visible sign of habitation. Even four years ago, though the vultures were still there, it was to feed on the offal of a well-supplied market-place, the thorn bushes had been burnt for firewood or cut up for fences, and a corrugated iron hut on the Stotts' site, though villainously hot in sunshine, provided shelter and security for stores. Now there were brick houses and a number of grass huts on the Mission enclosure near the river. There were half-finished Government buildings in course of erection and many tents for the accommodation of a staff of military officials and constantly saluting white civilians. A number of clothed Wagogo, looking singularly mean in their garments—though without them they were lithe and graceful savages—were, under the raucous directions of a white engineer-sergeant, laying down a light Decauville railway.
All these activities had not for the time being made Burungi less ugly, and Roger hated the sight of the place. After a long conference with the two civil-spoken German sergeants, who a year previously had been truly thankful to exchange the military career for employment under his Company, he went through the agony of good-bye—an agony he would not protract by spending the night in this noisy, discomfortable place. He compressed his embraces of wife and children—the latter mystified and yowling with the dim realization of bereavement—his wringing of Maud's hands, his directions to telegraph at every opportunity till they got on board, and hang the cost—into two hours; after which, though only two more hours of daylight remained, he rode away, back to their camp of the previous night: knowing that further lingering might end in his deciding to accompany these two dear women and prattling babes all the way to the coast and perhaps all the way to England.
And it was essential to their future welfare that he should stay where he was and not claim a holiday till certain results had been achieved and certain proofs of easily exploited wealth had been obtained.
But it was a melancholy Roger who, six days afterwards, rode back into the lovely amphitheatre in the Iraku hills where he had made his home. His Maskat donkey showed signs of having being hard ridden; his carriers averred that Master, ordinarily so considerate of their fatigue, so jolly on the line of march, had spurred them on remorselessly, had seemed to pass wakeful nights and had eaten his camp meals with poor appetite. Roger himself felt a few more partings like this would make his earthly life unbearable. Oh that there were some truth in the silly hymn chorus that the Stotts delighted in making their pupils sing: "Here we meet to part no more, part no more, part no more!" He should have been firm with Lucy and bade her stay till he himself was ready to go. And yet when would he be ready to go, with Phantom Fortune always beckoning yet never disclosing the final hoard?
There was something in Lucy's face which restrained him from insisting that she should stay. Dr. Wiese had hinted at a growing anæmia which should be checked. Her dominating feeling was a fear that she might lose the precious children born to her here in the wilderness and be forgotten by those she had left behind. He must not take the thing too tragically. If Hildebrandt continued to get these satisfactory assays and could trace the gold-bearing reef a sufficient distance towards the western limit of the Concession; or if on the other hand he could find the matrix of the diamonds, and not merely these minute brilliants in the gravel of the mountain streams, their main doubts and difficulties would be relieved and he could depart for a holiday at home.