CHAPTER VII
That Tanganyika was destined to be alike villain and setting of the drama which followed, first sight of the lake gave Norah no warning.
The lovers had waited on the farm for Dick's supplies to come till Norah would stay no longer. Leaving a letter for Archie, and replenishing Dick's stores from the reserves on the farm, that the Congo expedition had already diminished, they started on the three weeks' ulendo through the bush, Dick on a bicycle, Norah in her machila.1[[1]]
[[1]] A hammock slung on one pole or two and carried between two or four natives, relieved at intervals.
Lying uncomfortably on her back, she saw little of the country she was carried through. Her landscape was limited by ranks of trees on either side. Overhead she could stare at the African sky already banked with rain-clouds. Or she could lie on her side and watch the sandy path for hurrying streams of pre-occupied ants or for occasional spoor, the only manifestation of the shy life of the forest. Sometimes her eye would be caught by a bundle of scarlet flowered mistletoe, the alpine outline of a great ant heap, a tree curiously deformed, or the melancholy traces of an almost obliterated garden; till oppressed by the nearness and insignificance of these sights, she would shut her eyes and imagine the evening with Dick, when the camp fire would gild from below the interlacing boughs.
But now the ulendo was nearly done. For an hour the road had sloped precipitously from plateau level lakewards 3000 feet below. The tip and tilt of the machila was vertiginous. Broad leafed, dark trees obscured the sky: rampant undergrowth and luxurious herbage hid the ground. A native laboured up towards them; he was old and one-eyed. Her carriers called to him for news of the steamer, but he only stared. They were strangers in a strange land. The air felt warmer and clammier. Languid flies settled heavily on Norah's face and hands. She expected momentarily to see the lake below her feet, but the dark trees shut her in.
The machila-bearers stopped singing the mournful 'Mai illova,' 'Deep in the Ground,' that was their favourite carrying song, and started a brisk marching tune into which the name 'Tanganyika' came again and again. The swing of the hammock was barely tolerable. She caught the word 'malala' in the song—the sleeping sickness, for whose sake men shun the lake. They met a second native blind in one eye—was all this mutilation man's work or the lake's? A single mulombwa tree with bare boughs and canary yellow flowers stood out by the roadside, thirty feet high and as straight as a spear.
Suddenly the steeply tilted machila stopped with a jerk and shot her on to her feet.
Had that travel-stained hammock been Elijah's fiery chariot it could not have translated her more suddenly into a new universe. From the close forest that had so long confined her body and her mind, she was caught up into a blue firmament, a world of misty blue glass over which distant shadows played. As she gazed the blue mirror resolved into sky, mountains, water. Under heaven, the hills; under the hills, the lake with its horizon flung far above her head, above the tree tops.
This vision of a new world seemed to hint at the new life she was entering. A life of beauty and—inevitably—romance, free from the sordidness of daily struggle, cleared of the orts of a disastrous past. The child understood life as little as she understood the lake. Her inherited instinct was to play for the highest stakes and risk all, without weighing the cost, on a single throw. But this sudden revelation of beauty almost frightened her into taking thought. That such loveliness existed seemed a spur to its pursuit. Was she treading a path that led to it? Almost against her will she strained her eyes into the future.