Koos arose slowly from his seat and stretched his hands out towards Nathan, who, seeing murder in his eye, retreated into the corner.
“Stop, Koos!” he almost screamed. “So help me God, I know nothing more about it than what I’ve told you. I only came home just before you did.”
Koos sank back into the chair and covered his face with his hands. After a few minutes he arose and staggered out of the room. He went to where his tired horses were still standing in the harness, outspanned them, and after tying the front legs of each together with a reim, turned them out to graze. Then he wrapped himself in his kaross, for the night air was chilly, and laid himself down under the cart.
He could not sleep. It seemed to him as if he had never slept, as if the axis upon which the hollow globe of stars turned was laid through his brain, as if there were no such thing as sleep in the whole wide world. The sky was clear and limpid, as only the sky which leans over and seems to love the Desert can be. The sweet, piercing smell of the dew-wet sand came to him and brought memories of nights spent on the hunting-field, when the pungent scent, the very breath and essence of the quick earth, had seemed to renew his spent strength, after the fatigues of the chase. But then he had not stained his hands with blood.
But the awful silence. Would nothing break it? It seemed to press upon and crush him like something ponderable and tangible. He lifted his fist and smote lightly the bottom of the cart just over his head. The sound seemed to split his brain like an axe. Then the returning wave of silence surged around him, and under its impact he seemed to sink as into a quicksand.
At length, a sound. Far away on the waste he heard the long-drawn nasal, melancholy howl of a jackal. Before the weird cry came to an end it was taken up by others at a greater distance, and then repeated on and on like the challenges of crowing cocks in the dawning.
A gush of gratitude came from his darkened heart; he felt that he almost loved the prowling brutes that had drawn his soul out of the quagmire of silence in which it had been sunk. He seemed to feel a kind of fellowship and sympathy with the jackals. He wondered why this was. Then he remembered—
The waning moon had been making paler the western stars, but he had not noticed it. The straining of his sound-sense had left no room for that of sight to come into play. Now the spell of silence was broken, and the sense of sight began to assert itself.
His eyes had been closed for some little time. When he opened them the Desert was flooded with a gentle haze of diaphanous pearl. This made the Namies kopjes look like a group of enchanted islands floating in an unearthly sea. The scene was almost too beautiful for mortal eyes.
As the moon soared higher and higher the stones and bushes, which at a few paces’ distance could not be separated from their shortening shadows, took on strange and ever-changing shapes. God! What was that a few yards from him? Surely they cannot have brought the body up from the gully and left it exposed upon the kopje-side? Yes, there it lay, huddled and horrible.