Merrylegs got no answer. "Only dead men here," he said. "Young men, no catch him, run."
"Come on round the huts then," said Roger. "We'll see how many have run." They went to the hut from which the smoke rose.
An old, old hideous woman was crouched there over a little fire. She was trembling violently, and mumbling with her gums. She cowered away from Roger with a wailing cry, very like the cry of a rabbit caught by a weasel. "Tiri," she said, "tiri," expecting death. Merrylegs asked her questions; Roger tried her. It was useless. She did not understand them. She mumbled something, shaking her poor old head, whimpering between the words. Roger gave her a doll, which she hugged and whimpered over. She was like a child of a few months old in the body of a baboon. They tried another hut.
From the number of food pots stored there, Roger guessed that this hut had once belonged to a chief. Two women lay there, one in the last stages of the sickness, very ill, and scarcely stirring, the other as yet only apathetic. She blinked at them as they entered the hut, without interest, and without alarm, just like an animal. She might once have been a comely woman, but the drowsiness of the sickness had already brought out the animal in her face. Her ornaments of very thin soft gold shewed that she was the wife of an important person; she may perhaps have been the chief's favourite. She did not understand Merrylegs' dialect, nor he hers. Possibly, as sometimes happens in the disease, she had no complete control over her tongue. Roger thought that she might be thirsty. He poured water for her. She did not drink. It occurred to Roger then that she might be welcoming the disease, giving way to it without a struggle, after losing husband and child. He could see that she had had a child, and there was no child there. "Poor woman," he said to himself. "Poor wretch." They went out into the open again.
At the further end of the village Roger found evidence which helped him to make a theory of what had happened. Just outside the palisade were the bones of a few bodies, which, as he supposed, were those who had died, after the first breaking out of the epidemic. If the epidemic had begun two months before, as seemed likely, these men and women must have been dead for about a fortnight. The sickness and mortality had steadily increased since then. The able, uninfected inhabitants, had at last migrated together. They had gone off with their arms and cattle to some healthier place, leaving the infected to die. He could make no other explanation. Many of the huts were deserted. In others, still living sleepers lay among corpses. Three young men, a boy, and an old man were the liveliest of the remaining inhabitants. Roger had only to look at their tongues to see that they, too, were sealed for death. The tongue moved from the root with a helpless tremor. Their lymphatic glands were swollen. They themselves were under no delusions about their state. The cloud was on them. They would not speak unless they were spoken to with some sharpness. They were gloomily waiting until the ailment should blot everything away from them. Merrylegs tried to understand them; but gave it up. "Very poor men," he said. "Know nothing." They were some relic (or outpost) of a strange tribe, speaking an unknown tongue. Perhaps they were the descendants of some little wandering band, separated from its parent tribe, by war, pestilence, or mischance. They had had their laws, their arts, their customs. They had even thriven. The game of life had gone pleasantly there. Life there had been little more than a sitting in the sun, between going to the river for a drink and to the patch for a mealie. The beauties had sleeked themselves with oil, and the strong ones had made themselves fat with butter. They had lived "naturally," like plants or animals, sharing the wild things' immunity from ailments. They were completely adjusted. Now some little change had altered their relations to nature. Something had brought the trypanosome. Now they died like the animals, deserted by their kind.
The first shock of the sight of this harvest of death came upon Roger dully, through the shield of his fever. He did not realise the full horror of it. Nor was he conscious of the passage of time. He stayed in the village for a full hour before he returned to the boat. In that hour he made rough notes of the twenty-nine cases still present there. Sixteen of them, he hoped, might yield to treatment. The others were practically dead already from wasting. The preparation of the notes, brief as they were, was a great drain upon his strength. The fever was gaining on him. He found himself staring vacantly between the writing of two words. His brain was a perpetual surging tumult. His eyes seemed to burn in their sockets. He remembered Lionel with a great start. "Lionel," he repeated. "I must tell Lionel. We shall stop here."
Outside the infected village he looked for tracks. A track led towards the ruin. Another led away across the plain. Both were as narrow as a horse's girth, and beaten as hard as earthenware. The old tracks of cattle crossed them. Merrylegs, looking about upon the ground, cried out that the tribe had gone over the plain with their cattle ten or eleven days before. He pointed to marks on the ground. Roger took his word for it.
He climbed into the stern-sheets of the boat, feeling as though hot metal were being injected into his joints. "How are you now, Lionel?" he asked. "You're looking pretty bad. This is a plague spot. They've got the sickness here. They're dying of it."
"Couldn't you have come and told me before this?" said Lionel. "I've been lying here not knowing whether you were dead or alive."
"I'd a lot of huts to examine," he answered. "What do you think? We had better stop here, eh? We had better make this our station. The first thing I shall do will be to get you into a bed."