"How the devil am I to rest when you won't keep the gang quiet?"
"You just close your eyes, Lionel," said Roger. "Close them. Keep them closed." He sluiced a rag in the shallow water. "Here's a new compress for you."
He ordered the men to pull in to the watering-place, while he looked about in what he called the toy box for presents for the village chief. He took some copper wire, a few brass cartridge shells, some green beads, some bars of brightly coloured sealing wax, a doll or two, of the kind which say, "Mamma," when stricken on the solar plexus, a doll's mirror, a knife, an empty green bottle, and a tin trumpet. He tilted a white-lined green umbrella over Lionel's head. He slipped over the side as the boat grounded. Merrylegs followed him, carrying the presents. They slopped through shallow water, and climbed the bank.
Merrylegs, clapping his hands loudly, called to the villagers in the Mwiri dialect that a king, a white man, a most glorious person, was advancing to them. Roger asked him if he had heard of this village at their stopping-place the day before. No, he said, he had never heard of this village. It was a poor place, very far away; he had never heard of it. He called again, batting with his hands. No answer came. Roger, looking anxiously about, saw no sign of life. No sign shewed on the city wall. A new vulture, lighting by the dying cow, eyed him gravely, without enthusiasm. One of those already there flapped his wings again as though yawning. "Merrylegs," said Roger, "we must go into the village." He shifted round his revolver holster, so that the weapon lay to hand. They skirted the zareba till they came to the low hole, two feet square, which led through the thorns into the town. The mud of the road was pounded hard by the continual passing of the natives. Fragments of a crudely decorated pottery were trodden in here and there. Lying down flat, Merrylegs could see that the stakes which served as door to the entrance, were not in place inside the stockade. The visitor was free to enter. "Think all gone away," said Merrylegs. "Slave man he catch."
Roger did not now believe in the theory of slave man.
"It is nonsense," he said. "Nonsense. There must be death here." He stood by the gate, breathing heavily, not quite knowing, from time to time, what he was doing, at other times knowing clearly, but not caring. Little things, the crawling of a tick, the cluck of a hen, the noise of his own breath, seemed important to his fever-clogged brain. "I'll go in," he said, at last.
"Not go in," said Merrylegs promptly. "Perhaps inside. Perhaps make him much beer. All drunk him." He called again in Mwiri, but no answer came. A hen, perhaps expecting food, came clucking through the hole, cocking her eyes at the strangers. Roger, finding a bit of biscuit in his pocket, dropped it before her. She worried it away from his presence, and gulped it down gluttonously before the other hens could see.
Roger knelt down. Peering up the tunnel he tried to make out what lay within. He could not see. The entrance passage had been built with a bend in the middle for the greater safety of the tribe. For all that he could know, a warrior might lie beyond the bend, ready to thrust a spear into him. He did not think of this till a long time afterwards. He began to shuffle along the passage on all fours. Nothing lay beyond the bend. He clambered to his feet inside the village. "Come on in, Merrylegs," he called. Merrylegs came. They looked about them.
The village formed an irregular circle about two hundred yards across. Inside the thorn hedge it was strongly palisaded with wooden spikes, nine feet high, bound together with wattle, and plastered with a mud-dab. The huts stood well away from the palisade. They formed a rough avenue, shaped rather like a sickle. There were thirty-five huts still standing. The frames of two or three others stood, waiting completion. One or two more had fallen into disrepair. Several inhabitants were in sight, both men and women.
They were sitting on the ground, propped against the palisades or the walls of their huts, in attitudes which recalled the attitude of the negro, seen long before in the photograph in the Irish hotel. One of the men, rising unsteadily to his feet, walked towards them for some half-dozen paces, paused, seemed to forget, and sank down again, with a nodding head. A child, rising up from a log, crawled towards a hen. The hen, suspecting him, moved off. The child watched it strut away from him as though trying to remember what he had planned to do to it. He stood stupidly, half asleep. Slowly he laid himself down upon the ground, with the movement of an old man careful of the aches of his joints. It seemed to Roger that the child had never really been awake. It was the slow deliberate movement of the child which convinced him, through his fever, that he was in the presence of the enemy. "These people have sleeping sickness," he said. The words seemed to echo along his brain, "sleeping sickness, sickness, sickness." This was what he had come out to see. Here was his work cut out for him. This was sleeping sickness. Here was a village down with it. It was shocking to him. Had he been in health it would have staggered him. These sleepers were never going to awake. All these poor wasting wretches were dying. He had never seen death at work on a large scale before. He checked a half-formed impulse to bolt by stepping forward into the enclosure, into the reek of death. The place was full of death. He drove Merrylegs before him. Merrylegs knew the disease. Merrylegs had no wish to see more of it. He was for bolting. "Go on, Merrylegs," said Roger. "Sing out to them."