"I?" Her voice expressed in that syllable such arrogance as youth feels at the thought of death; yet she did not look young—she looked as old as eternity, and as passionless and overpowering.
He bowed his head beneath the pressure of this will, and the weight of his obligation. He perceived the uselessness of describing to her the dangers that she would run there, especially at the season that was beginning. Still, for a moment he pondered the trouble he would have in taking his broken body on that pilgrimage. "And this time it will get me: just one or two little chills," he reflected, thinking of black-water fever. The thought came to him, however, that his life was no longer worth much, even to himself. This sitting with folded hands, a cane between one's knees, in the tidy little house that she had given him—and but for her it might have been the crutches!
Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded stars.
CHAPTER LIII
She crossed the Atlantic, traveled swiftly down from Cherbourg to Marseilles, embarked on a ship that steamed through the Mediterranean toward the Orient. At last she saw Port Said, Suez, and the red and purple lava islands of the Red Sea, splendid in a sunset of extravagant hues.
The heat was intense.
But the ship emerged from the Gulf of Aden into a still greater heat; and suddenly the air was saturated with moisture. The walls and the ceiling of her cabin were covered with drops of water; exposed objects were defaced by rust and mildew overnight; while the human body seemed to be deliquescing in a torrid steam. A sickly breeze, filled with the odors of a strange world, hardly rippled the languid sea.
On the right, beyond a heat mist through which flying fish were darting, loomed a new coastline. Yellow beaches appeared, interrupted by lagoons where the slow waves abruptly spouted high into the air—white geysers against somber forests and jungles. From these dark green fastnesses, ascending threads of smoke inveigled the gaze far upward into space, to where, above a belt of hazy blue that one had taken for the sky, mountain peaks revealed themselves, unrelated to the earth, and half dissolved, like a mirage.
Night fell. The velvety blackness of the heavens was powdered with star dust; in the wash of the ship there gleamed a profound phosphorescence, as from a decaying ocean. The coast hung like a mass of inky vapor above the fitful shimmer of the surf from which was wafted a faint, interminable booming that suggested the roaring of lions and the thunder of savage drums.