"We'll find out about the drugs first. No. If we go working hard in the sun we shall get fever again." He wrinkled his brows. He was anxious. "I hope those drugs are all right," he said. "I don't mind the guns; but our drugs are portable life."
Roger glanced uneasily at Lionel. He had got to know him pretty well during the last few months. He had come to know that though he was sometimes irritable, he was very seldom given to despondent speech. Now he was talking anxiously, from the selfish standpoint of "I." Roger thought of the precious bottles of atoxyl, worth a good deal more than a guinea an ounce. Lionel's remark was true. They were portable life. And if the atoxyl were gone, their mission was at an end. No. It was worse than that. If the atoxyl were gone, Lionel was in danger. For suppose the trypanosomes recurred in him, as they might, in this hot climate? Suppose Lionel developed sleeping sickness and died, as the people in the village were dying, before they could win to civilisation? He did not find any answer to the problem. Hoping to distract Lionel, he began gallantly to talk of the Phoenicians, about whom he was sufficiently ignorant to escape attention.
In the camp things were as they had been, except that they were drier. They turned over the boxes, looking eagerly for blue stencil.
"Here's the microscope," said Roger. "Or I think it is." He prized the case open with the jemmy on the end of the peg-maul. "Yes. The microscope's all right. Some of our test-tube things are smashed. Some of the media. There are plenty of those, though, down in the mud. That's one thing to the good. What's in the case there?"
"Anti-scorbutics here."
"And in the long box?"
"Grub of different kinds."
"Here you are, then. Here's a drugs case."
"Saved!"
"Shall I open it?"