Читать книгу Children of the Wind - M. P. Shiel - Страница 14
ОглавлениеTHE SIGODHLO
Two mornings afterwards Cobby wrote in his journal: "My sentiment toward Rolls would better be named affection than liking: an affection based on respect. I have known no intelligence whose judgments in general were more trustworthy; and though his moral sense was not dainty, being as rough-and-ready as the whole Rolls, his substance was sound as a nut. Innate, moreover, in the man, strange to say, was a soul of poetry, a relation with the soul of Nature—a thing without song, or voice, or, I think, much emotion—hidden behind hides of commonness, but really there, and rare. My friend; my dear friend. Never shall I forget the sense of loss, of solitude, the pang of heart, when, near seven last night, I saw Macray riding in alone over the plain in the moon's light, leading Rolls' mare by the rein, and I knew that the moving Finger had written and moved on, as when the funeral is over now and done, and man has gone to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.
"And so perplexing the way of it! It appears that the two abandoned their horses too soon, walked a long way toward the mountains, and stopped to rest in a forest, where Rolls desired to sleep, but was disturbed by a roaring, which Macray said was a lion's, but Rolls maintained that it was an ostrich's; and at last, exclaiming 'Oh, stash it!' Rolls dashed away to shoot the (supposed) ostrich. Macray heard Rolls' revolver pop, then an outcry, and ran to Rolls' assistance, to find him dead under a lion and lioness, which Macray contrived to kill, after dislocating his arm in climbing a tree.
"Such is Macray's account of things. But who could ever have predicted that Ulysses would die in that silly way—by a lion. He himself would have derided the prediction, I think; and there is something in it which the brain will not realize. Moreover, I remember hearing my friend say that he at least could always distinguish between the roarings of lion and ostrich; nor do ostriches usually roar at so late an hour. Very strange: I do not understand; must only accept.
"Well, farewell, you brave R. K. R.: gone; but not to be forgotten.
"Then, alone, Macray walked on northward, following directions that had dropped from Rolls; passed over the mountains; and at two in the morning actually effected an entry into the town, into the royal enclosure, and on to the grounds of the royal hut. So he reports. And his report is anything but heartening. 'We will never make her, baas,' is his comment, this her not referring to a lady, but to an enterprise. Three sentries, it appears, at the royal gates, each a giant. So—'take my advice'—I am now to throw away so many months of effort, to turn tail at the very gates of the enterprise, and to 'be quick about it,' ere the Wa-Ngwanya get wind of our presence here, for then 'all will be up with all of us.'
"This irritated me, and I said to Macray: 'By no means up with us. Understand, Macray, that one white man armed with the science of Europe is mightier than all the Wa-Ngwanya, backed by all the blacks of Africa—given the opportunity to use the tools of his science. Am I to take it, then, that you are losing nerve?'
"'Not a bit, inkoos,' was his nonchalant answer: 'if you are for seeing it through without Rolls, here am I. But I'll cry to see a head like yours chopped off. You should be killed by electricity—something scientific—not by a nigger's bill. Turn back, isinduna—take my tip.'
"'On the contrary,' I answered, 'I will go on.'
"'Good egg,' he said: 'I admire your spirit, if not your cunning.'
"I wonder why he chose this word 'cunning'—a quality which he himself may not lack, perhaps. Certainly, I have a sense of some unknown quantity in Macray, an X, a mask—my fancy perhaps. Throughout the trek he has shown himself ever jovial, cheerily enduring, cool in danger, quick to learn, versatile, serviceable, exhibiting no little initiative and efficiency as hunter, soldier, and traveller, so that I have congratulated myself on the bargain I made with him at Johannesburg. But there has never been any love lost between him and Rolls, I could see; and, as for me, something in him undoubtedly repels something in me. However, we are now bound together for good or evil. A week hence will test his mettle.... Meantime, hunting, improving the food-stock, and maturing a scheme for making the attempt when the moonlight is over, I cautiously excogitating each detail. I have determined to move the expedition no further northward, since it appears that many of the blacks feel nervous of advancing nearer the Wa-Ngwanya, whose reputation has bred terror in their breasts. And now, thou Pallas of Good Counsel, be my goddess...."
But on the seventh day thence, when the venture was to have been made, Macray stated that he was "seedy" from his sick arm, so it was not till the ninth night that, all being at last ready, the attempt was made, Cobby taking with him Macray, two Zulus, and a mule, which, like the men, was shod with rubber. Overcast and dark as the night was, they contrived, soon after abandoning their animals, to find that same pass up which Rolls and Macray had travelled, and, not without the aid of electric torches, crossed the maze of mountain shortly after one in the morning.
Macray acting as guide, they found out a town that lay drowned in darkness, and by an hour's prowl round its outer stockade, came to its back part, Cobby estimating that the place, though more compact and peopled, was hardly bigger than Midhurst or Petersfield; and Macray whispered that from that back part to the sigodhlo, or royal kraal, was hardly a quarter-hour's walk.
When, from the mule's back, Macray had cast a rope-ladder, its grapples wrapped in rubber, the four were speedily in the outermost round of street, and thence prowled down a street that led pretty steeply centreward. No sentinel in all this part—a fact which astonished both Cobby and his blacks; and not a sound in all that gloom, only remotely somewhere the dumb boom of a drum going, and far off a baby clamouring, and presently far off the exclamations of a dog barking at the arising of some event in the reign of nothingness, and presently the shine of a fire in the round doorway of a round hut, and in there, suckling a child, a woman seated, quite close to whom they moved unseen.
Then an enclosure, woven of fine tambuti grass, over which they climbed, without needing to fall upon, chloroform, bind, gag or gas any guardsman, for none appeared. Inside—a village within a city—stood residences of royal son or cousin, of the late King's ladies, of Court-officials, roomy intervals separating the residences, every residence being a group of huts slumbering within its own enclosure, grossly embowered within its own grove of equatorial foliage and flower, which breathed out a sigh to the night-breeze, so that here the darkness was even deeper, because of all these arbours of large-leaved boscage, palm and sarsaparilla, banana, tree-fern; and it was beneath a big fig-tree near the middle of the ring that the marauders paused to take their bearings.
Here Cobby whispered at Macray's ear: "No sentries?"—for at this oddity, although it had an aspect of luck, he felt nevertheless a vague apprehension.
"Funny thing," Macray whispered him; and one of the Zulus whispered: "Something wrong! Take care!"
At the same time Macray was whispering: "See that junk of bush straight ahead? In there she should be."
"Come," Cobby now whispered, and went headlong, bent, prowling keen and quick.
