From talk on the farm, she knew that tiger fish lie under white cliffs. These rocks were white—great round boulders worn smooth like marble in the years that had elapsed since they crumbled from the cliffs above and piled haphazard one on another. She had noticed divers and egrets sitting motionless on the edge. Where were fishing birds there must be fish. As she clambered along the slippery surface she surprised an otter, sitting in the sun with head alert and paws spread like a Landseer lion. Her precarious approach disturbed him, as it disturbed the divers, and finally the egrets, who, with more trust in woman than their plumage justified, had endured her approach to the last yard. Now they flapped with slow-beating wings in circles round the bay, so white they almost hurt the eye.
Clinging with one hand to a gaunt and stunted thorn that grew out of no apparent soil, she dragged the water with her makeshift net.
But whether bird, beast and crocodile had already decimated these waters, or whether her tackle was inadequate, at the end of an hour she had caught nothing. Neither tiger fish with rat-trap teeth that cut through wire casts, nor iron-grey ngombe, whose narrow head and jaws fight the fisherman like a true salmon of the lake, nor yellow, blue-blotched coupi, nor pande, the gigantic perch of Tanganyika, rewarded the efforts of her aching arms.
The sun scorched pitilessly off the rocks, and, as pitilessly, thought seared her brain. When Dick came back that night without accomplishment, they would have one day left to eat. It seemed incredible that in time of peace and in the twentieth century, enjoying full health and strength, with money in her pocket, without an enemy in the world, death should lurk so near. But her appetite—for she had given Dick the lion's share of the day's rations—confirmed her reasoning.
The sun was low above the mountains when she desisted from her unavailing task and returned to camp. She noticed with relief that the store of wood was not spent and she set to work to kindle a blaze.
How much longer would Dick be? Surely he would be back before dark! What news would he bring? Her eyes searched the hillside in vain. She took her field-glasses to the shore and looking back she tried to penetrate the maze of trees. As she raked the hillside, hope leapt within her. High up, near the torn throat of the little volcano, in the fading light, she saw a native.
Dick must have found a village and help was coming.
Then her heart turned to lead. It was Changalilo ... alone. Her worst fears had come true: something had happened to Dick. The criticism that had been forming in her mind since the fiasco of the dinghy fell to dust. Dick was dead or disabled. Her gallant, lovely Dick.
She would have stumbled into the hills, but fear that she would miss Changalilo in the dark restrained her. She waited.
* * * * * * *