She stood at the foot of the tower. To her right creeper-grown mounds showed where the chancel lay. She penetrated a clump of trees, dark like citrus, but she found them an outpost of the forest and no domesticated variety. Now she could see a gaping, jagged rift, following the bonding of the brickwork that explained the quick destruction of the station. An earthquake had associated itself with the more patient forces of the forest in the work of obliteration. She wondered that the tower still stood.
Beyond the grass-covered mounds, into which the monastery walls had decayed, she found a grove of mangoes ... the late sort whose fruit, it seemed odd to reflect, might not be ripe till she was dead. In what once had been the courtyard some oranges had reverted to stock. Even so they were fruitless, their season past. Her biggest haul was a handful of small, hard peaches from what had been an orchard. It was doubtful if the trees had ever flourished in the great heat of lake level.
There were no other European trees except the cypresses that edged the terrace on which the monastery had stood, their dark spires pointing men to heaven. But Norah was reminded of Archie's farm and the avenue of young cypresses that led to the new house. She remembered searching the forestry catalogue with Archie, and the Latin name of the Italian cypress—cypressus funebris—crossed her mind with significance now sinister.
Another clump of cypresses led her from the main ruins to an enclosure whose containing wall the destroying forces had spared. As she clambered through a gap she saw the reason of their tolerance. It was the mission cemetery, and here the pride of man was already humbled.
A crudely-hewn stone proclaimed that Alibaba's words had been literal, and that at least one of the White Fathers had died at his post. She wondered how long the news had taken to reach the French village he had left so long ago, and whether there had been any relatives to remember an old man who had endured exile, danger, and death for his faith.
Round him, in their almost obliterated graves, lay his adopted people.
The Christian practices are only able to reduce, by a few years and by the faint memory which mound and stone briefly preserve, the eternity of oblivion that waits. Norah wondered if the old native form of burial—an unmarked hole in the uncharted bush—was not at once less pretentious and, when you bargain with infinity, as effective.
With her miserable handful of peaches, she left the desolation of the mission for the solitude of the shore.
She must face the problem of catching fish without tackle or net. Changalilo's spear, she thought, might have served, had it not formed the sole defence of the party in the hills. Her mind flew to Dick where he felt his way through the forest. Why had she let him go without her? Suppose, without a gun, he ran into lion or buffalo!
She pulled off the cording of the loads and set to work. After more than two hours' labour, a net of sorts was finished. Clasping it, she scrambled on to the breakwater of rocks that the Mimi had turned as she entered the bay.