His track led uphill into the forest. “Now best foot foremost,” he said to himself. “Never mind the heat or anything else. You’ve got to save Carlotta and every minute is precious.”
Very soon the trees closed over the road, so that he walked in the cool twilight of a tunnel. He saw nothing remarkable for the first couple of miles. Then he came upon a hare sitting upon its hind legs, seeming to be praying, while a big snake sat opposite, swaying a little, making up its mind to strike. Hi flung some stones at the snake, which ducked its head and turned towards him with an ugly raising of the crest. With a few more stones he drove it away. He then walked to the hare and stroked it and spoke to it. Its fur was sick and staring. Presently it fell over on one side, recovered and went shambling away.
“What an ass my father is,” Hi thought. “He knew that I might meet things like this, yet said that I should never need a revolver. I shall need one twenty times a day. If I came on one of these snakes asleep, I should never see it until I trod on it. I had better have a stick.”
Unfortunately there was no stick nearer than forty feet from the ground. He was in a place which grew nothing but feathery thorn and gigantic timber in a solitude which might have been thousands of miles from men. Giving up the stick, he went on for half an hour without seeing a soul. The only living things he saw, apart from the flies, were deer, moving like shadows among the trees, and very bright things, which he supposed to be parrots against the sky, when the sky showed. After he had walked for an hour he saw a gleam of water below him; soon he came to a wooden bridge at which some tracks converged. There had been a ford or drinking place for cattle above the bridge. This was now a collection of pockets of red mud full of little snakes: beyond the bridge were houses; a farm, somewhat old and untidy, built of wood in need of paint, with stabling beside and behind it. Nearer to the river were two very ramshackle sheds or cottages of wood, which had once been tarred but were now rust-coloured. Dirty bedding hung from the windows of these sheds. Over the door of one of them was a tiling shingle on which someone had drawn in tar, with his forefinger, the word
CAMAS
(with the final S reversed). To the left of these, well away from the river, and on the other side of the road, was a trim, white, prosperous looking house, with a tiled stable. A cornfield of red earth strewn with the shocks of young maize, stretched uphill behind this house. A fair-haired, blue-eyed white man was hoeing among these maize shocks, although it was the heat of the day. He was a South German, who spoke a little English. He said that it was fine vetter and that Hi might tank Gott for such fine vetter. As for a horse, his brother had gone with the horse to the fiesta, but the old frau in the house opposite might lend her colt.
He was a friendly, helpful young man. He took Hi across the tracks to the old untidy farm where everybody seemed to be asleep. Here, after they had both knocked and called for some minutes, a negress appeared, rubbing her eyes with her skirt. This girl took them through a darkness, which stank, into a hot shuttered room, where she called several times by whistling like a kite. When something between a snarl and a gurgle answered to her call, she opened the southward shutters so that Hi could see.
He found himself near the door of a bare room, the floor of which was trodden earth. A table, with fragments of fruit upon it, stood against one wall. Against the end wall, opposite the window, was a tall-backed red chair or throne, in which an enormously fat old woman, swathed in folds of black, sat blinking as she roused from sleep. She was mopping her brow with the handkerchief which had kept the flies from her face while she slept. Hi had the feeling that she lived and slept in the chair. She had a book of hours upon her lap; its marker, hanging from a red ribbon, dangled from her knee. She soon checked her gurglings: she woke up with great completeness. A pair of sharp and very cold grey eyes shone out of her vast pale face with that narrowed glimmer which made Hi think of the snake.
“You want a horse?” she said, in fair English, in a guttural voice that was half a cough.
“Yes, please, Señora.”