I asked if the D.C. had had the fatal letter. Public morality might demand that Archie should be nursed to life to be turned over to the hangman. But putting friendship before morals, it seemed to me that he might be allowed to die, if not quietly, at least in his bed.
Norah's hands were clenched and white, while Matao was spinning his rigmarole.
'Then Bwana Lavater is not back?' she asked at the end, 'what did you do with the letter?'
Joseph, the D.C.'s clerk, had promised he would give it to the D.C. as soon as he came back. Joseph was an Angoni, said Matao, and all Angoni are liars; but he had not left the office until he had seen the letter laid on Bwana La-va-ta's big table.
So the confession lay unread: there was hope, then, and Archie's life was still worth saving. I felt that I could not leave Norah, whose nerves had been strained to the fainting point, unaided to nurse him, and I sent my fundi back with orders to strike camp and bring on carriers and loads.
I looked round for a bit of level ground for my camp. Archie, with an eye to the comfort of his much-enduring carriers, had pitched his tent on the outskirts of the first village he had come to on his way up from the lake. The ground was a net-work of little obstructed paths, trodden between the raised beds which make an African village garden resemble a pauper cemetery of circular graves. The green of ground nuts, cassava, gourds and beans, straggled sparsely over the mounds. High, splintery, black stumps showed where the trees had been lopped, two or three feet from the ground, and burnt to enrich the soil with their potash. Only the biggest trunks, that had been too much trouble to cut, remained.
Meaning to ask in the village for a guide to show me a more shady and level spot, I penetrated the squalid cluster of dilapidated mud huts. The villagers, I found, were absent at work, no doubt in distant gardens. One old woman, the headman's eldest wife I guessed her to be, sat under the untidy overhang of her thatched roof. Her stomach was enormous; on her head she wore a tan-coloured wig made of puku skin. She bent forward and clapped her hands in salutation, but she was too shy to answer my question.
Beyond the village I found the twenty-foot road that the last D.C. had cut through the forest to connect Abercorn with the lake. Its earth surface was deeply scored by ruts which the occasional ox-wagons that carried freight to the Mimi had cut. Rain had poured down the channels, scouring them till the white roots showed. A path, trodden hard by bare feet, straggled from side to side of the road, and down its centre a bicycle had marked its track on the wet earth.
As I chose my site, what a chance, I reflected, for any one with a taste for allegory! Side by side, the pathetic makeshift of the savage and the masterful puerility of the European, on a background of bottomless lake, immemorial hill, interminable forest. Which in the history of the globe would prevail?
The first hour of my vigil by Archie's bed passed in silence. The African day is so much quieter than the night. Some insect humming, a bird calling.... From time to time I moistened Archie's dry lips or arranged his disordered bed.