Dick agreed brightly that by sticking to the lake their water supply was assured. It did not strike him that in his relief his words were not very profound. The business of striking camp proceeded.
'You'll have my tent, Norah,' said Archie, and gave Matao directions to have a shelter built for him.
Dick's exhilaration vanished. He opened his mouth to speak, but a menace in Archie's eye dissuaded him. He kicked at a partly consumed log and hummed gloomily. Archie's withdrawal to pack his kit at last gave him the opportunity to murmur something to Norah about 'rubbing things in.'
'Do you expect me to sleep with you under my husband's eyes?' she asked. 'Aren't you a trifle exigeant? Besides,' she added bitterly, 'you told me just now to make up to him.'
His retort was prevented by footsteps behind him. He turned and saw that he was being offered a couple of cartridges.
'Two rounds of 7.9 stuff I brought by accident.' Archie explained. 'Found them in my kit. They'll fit your Mauser.'
When the loads were ready, the string of carriers, with Changalilo at their head, straggled down the hill. The three Europeans, after a visible hesitation, followed. If their mutual company was unendurable, to descend singly at intervals would be grotesque. So these two men and their woman, the prey of all the forces that civilisation works to repress, hatred, love, fear, shame, pity, danger, were constrained by their sense of—was it humour or reticence?—to observe the usages of daily intercourse.
They passed the foot of the blow-hole chimney where Norah had sighted Changalilo the night before, and the view that was revealed gave them a momentary relief from the pain of thought.
All the week the clouds that herald the rains had packed closer and closer on the horizon, till now they lay like a litter of discoloured wool.
Across the lake the mountain tops which had been hidden in haze, stood out in the sun-bathed clarity of a primitive painting. Their crags and ravines, diminutive in the distance, looked as if human fingers had pinched and dinted them into the powder-green relief of a plaster map. Black against this green lay the foothills in the shadow of the cloud bank. The foreground was blocked by the near headland, heavily green with the green of English elms in August. Every tree that grew there was distinct, and the grass at their feet. At the water's edge gleamed pillars of white rock.