by Earl
Hackworth shook him, none too gently.
“Afraid? Afraid! Of what?” he roared.
Williams gulped before he spoke.
“Civilization. . . . I wouldn’t fit. . . . I’m only a white man by birth. . . . at heart, after these forty years, I’m like our safari boys . . . like faithful M’bopo—”
“Dan!”
It was just a name, a word wrung out of Hackworth by his cousin’s emotional outburst. Yet that name had power. It suddenly rolled the mists of dusty time away from the memories of youth in Williams’ mind.
“Dan!” continued Hackworth eagerly, seeing that he had fanned a spark. “Dan, you remember?—kids in Baltimore—how we played together, fought together; we were pals. . . . Dan, how can you say you belong to Africa?”
The blue eyes glistened from inner revelation, looking back upon a life that had been buried under a landslide of later impressions. Williams threw off his nostalgia for Africa and smiled weakly.
“Of course you’re right. I’ll go talk to the boys and start them off.”
As Williams left with a firm step, Hackworth reflected that not till that moment had either of them really realized who they were and what they were to each other. “Hackworth” and “Williams” they had called each other, as distant as strangers. Forty years of Africa had set up a barrier between them. Only that magic name, that timely cry of “Dan!” had pierced the wall of time.
l With a flood of native dialect, Williams got the safari men started with their heavy packs. Down the winding trail of crumbling sandstone, the party made its way. The two white men brought up the rear with rifles. A new eagerness had come into all of them, tired though they were from the three-week trek from wildest Congo. The spearing glint of the airship in the bottom of the valley promised rest and ease. They would reach it before sundown. Back of them the upflung ridge of wind-worn rock blotted out the jungle.
Dan Williams had left the United States in 1933 with his father, on an exploration into the Congo. He was then a lad of eighteen, but already full-grown and dependable. The elder Williams had had two purposes in mind: to penetrate the jungles just above the northern bend of the Congo River, and to find some trace of a previous expedition which was said to have gone in there and never returned. Both success and failure came to them. They came upon Pierre D’Lawoef, sole survivor of the other expedition, dying from knife wounds, in the hands of friendly Bantu natives.
D’Lawoef told a dreadful tale of savage Zulus, a wandering tribe from the south, attacking and destroying his five white companions and many black boys. He himself had managed to escape and lived with unwarlike tribes for eight years. The Zulus had apparently left. But just before the Williams’ expedition had come, the blood-thirsty Zulus had again reappeared and given the Frenchman his death wounds.
The elder Williams began to fear for his own party’s safety, and after the burial of D’Lawoef, gave the order to retrack back to the Congo River. Then it had come. Screaming Zulus with hideous painted faces had puffed out of the jungle and attacked with kris and spear. Rifle fire drove them off only after three of the white men and a dozen safari boys had been killed outright, and the others had been wounded in greater or lesser degree.
Dan Williams, a mere boy, had seen all this and not long after saw the remaining white man die of infection. Months after, his father died of fever, induced by his weakened condition. The kindly Bantu natives then adopted the orphan white boy and time had flown swiftly.
Forty years of Africa had made him a native in all but birth. He became as much a child of nature as the Bantus, and came to exceed them in both physical and mental exploits, so that for thirty years he had been unquestioned patriarch of the tribe. He thought of reaching the Congo River and civilization more than once, but the southern lands between had filled with Zulus, enough of them to prevent his ever crossing a mountain pass which was the only reasonable connection with the Congo valley.
The ever-present threat of Zulu attack aroused his fighting instinct. Under his guidance, the Bantus were trained in simple warfare, and the Zulus soon came to respect his tribe which, though they had only bone and flint weapons, fought like demons under the leadership of a clever general.
Thus had Dan Williams spent a lifetime in Africa.
Then had come an echo from the dim past. A lone white man and his native safari had come from the north. This white man talked patiently and stirred the jellied contents of the pot of the past. Then he had embraced him and called him “cousin.” And gradually Dan Williams had recognized his strange words.
Earl Hackworth had made three efforts in those forty years to find out what had happened to his uncle and cousin. The first two had failed by reason of the Zulu threat. The third had succeeded only after careful planning and mapping, discovering a northern route free of the Zulu menace.
Hackworth had found his cousin to be a tall and amazingly strong man whose elastic step and youthful poise belied the fifty-eight years of his age. Despite a dark brown skin, scraggly bleached hair, and unkempt beard, Dan Williams had immediately struck him as virile and sternly handsome. Decidedly, he was a man of men, a mass of muscle that had not yet succumbed to the senility of old age.
Hackworth, overjoyed that he had found at least one of his blood relatives alive, had immediately planned the return. Williams had appeared hesitant at first and then agreed. But all during the three weeks’ crossing of the jungles and wastes, he had been moody and taciturn. Hackworth attributed it to his African environment, but the truth was that Williams had been in a bewildered dream. His mind had not fully grasped the truth till that cry of “Dan!” had swept away the fogs of forgotten things.
And with that word had Dan Williams severed his last connection with Africa. From then on, the forty years’ life in the Dark Continent became just an interlude in his mind, a desert between two oases, He was going back to the white man’s world and take up the white man’s ways.
When they were within a mile of the ship, two tiny black dots separated from the bulk of the airship and waved threadlike arms.
“My two guards,” explained Hackworth, brandishing his gun in return. He had left two black boys armed with pistols to watch the ship. As a second safeguard, he had landed it in the valley, completely hidden from view of the wasteland level. He had taken no chance that wandering natives might find an unguarded, easily seen ship and damage or plunder it during his absence.
They reached it just as long evening shadows began to crawl with dark fingers across the valley floor. Hackworth shouted orders to the safari men in distorted dialect, helped now and then by Williams who would translate English phrases that the former hurled to him. Before the sudden tropical darkness had overtaken them, they had stored most of their supplies in the roomy hold of the rear fuselage.
“We’ll start at daybreak,” Hackworth shouted to the natives. “Make supper tonight with anything you please and then get to sleep.”
With an answering shout of joy in anticipation of a delectable meal and hearty sleep, the black boys set up their tents and built a fire.
Dan Williams looked over the airplane with an eager eye. Compared to the craft he had known of forty years before, this one seemed a monstrous distortion. Incredibly long and broad wings stretched from an ovular fuselage. In fact, to Williams it seemed practically all wings. Two mighty engines with long four-bladed propellers were set at about the mid-point of each tying. The ovoid fuselage bore a large window at the nose. From close up, it looked ungainly and ugly. Yet Williams remembered that from the ridge top through binoculars it had looked graceful and light, like a poised dragon-fly ready to spring enthusiastically into the air.
“You call this a helicopter,” Williams said when Hackworth had finally arranged things satisfactorily in the hold. “But I can’t figure out what makes it rise vertically.” He spoke in a slow, measured voice, for as yet English was laborious for him, his tongue having rolled off guttural Bantu dialect for forty long years.
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sp; l Hackworth chuckled. “What makes it go up, eh? Well, Dan, things have changed a lot since 1933. This is a 1973 model. Now look at the engines. See the cradle they’re in? At the flip of a lever in the pilot seat, the engines swing upright so that the propeller is nearly horizontal. Then they act as upward pulling screws. Of course, the wing design and draft deflectors are engineering developments never thought of in 1933. They make it possible for a heavy all-metal ship like that to rise vertically. Without cutting engine speed, the pilot swings the engines horizontal when the ship has gained sufficient altitude to clear obstructions.”
“Do you own. . . . the whole thing?” asked Williams.
“Sure. Why do you ask?”
“It looks expensive. You must have made a small fortune. . . . back home. Our families were never rich. My father could never have gone on his exploration without the Belgian Government standing all expenses.”
“I’ll explain how it is that I own that ‘expensive’ thing some other time,” returned Hackworth with a short laugh. “Without knowing the conditions of 1973, you would not understand.
“By the way, that rawhide bundle of yours; if it has anything fragile or precious in it, you’d better take it into the cabin with you. Otherwise I’ll put it in the hold.”
“In the cabin,” said Williams quickly. He muttered to himself as he picked it up from the sand and carried it into the cabin. Hackworth pointed to a ceiling rack which already held a medical kit and several cartons of matches.
“And tomorrow,” Hackworth said, “you’re going to dress in civilized clothes. Those loin skins may look right to your Bantu friends, but they would look like hell on the coast.”
Williams looked down at his practically naked body, and then raised amused eyes to his companion.
“Right you are. And I’m going to. . . . to. . . . yes, shave also.”
With a hearty laugh, Hackworth, pleased to find his cousin fast becoming culture-minded, linked his arm and pulled him to the fire. They partook of a delicious stew of broiled meats and vegetables in the soft blackness of a moonlit night and listened to the chattering of the natives for a while before retiring. Then they crawled into Hackworth’s tent.
Williams found it hard to sleep, despite aching muscles. Tomorrow he would see the coast and glide into civilization. Forty years—1933 to 1973! How much different would things be? What strange things had come to pass in that time? He got up once and breathed deeply of the night air. Africa; it was all around him, revealed in the silvered shafts of moonlight. His mind visioned what he could not see—desert, wasteland, jungle, fertile river areas, the village of his simple Bantu friends. He waved an arm in farewell. “Akka musri et kraal umo—farewell to my home that was,” he said.
Then he crept back to the side of the snoring Hackworth.
In the light of a newborn sun, the camp was quickly broken up and all stored away in the ship’s hold. The coast pilot whom Hackworth had hired at Kabinda, a tall mulatto, went busily about the ship, inspecting everything thoroughly preparatory to the departure.
Hackworth called to him the three Bantus who had accompanied the party from Williams’ tribe. They had cut down the return trip by several days with their knowledge of shorter trails. To them he handed a number of trivial articles—mirrors, combs, and colored beads—and as a gesture of great gratitude, presented a pair of binoculars to M’bopo.
The latter, who had been quite attached to Williams, stared dumbly at the glasses, turning them over and over.
“Goodbye, M’bopo,” said Williams in dialect. “May the spirits honor and cherish your prosperity in the years to come.” Hackworth looked on curiously, for he could detect some sort of deep feeling between them.
M’bopo, a wiry little soot-black man of thirty whose sleek body fairly writhed with muscle, suddenly dashed the binoculars to the ground so violently that a lens burst and scattered. In another moment he was kneeling before Williams and crying over and over: “Umo ishta umi—take me with you!”
Williams looked appealingly to Hackworth, with something like a tear forming in his eyes. Hackworth nodded in understanding.
Williams exchanged several rapid phrases with the black, pulling him to his feet. Then he turned to Hackworth.
“He says that he wants to go with me no matter if it be to the Seven Hills, which to the Bantus is equivalent to the end of space. If it’s all the same to you, Hackworth—”
Hackworth hesitated but the fraction of a second, thinking of an ignorant negro in the supercivilization of America. Then he said, “Plenty of room for him, Dan.”
M’bopo performed a most amazing trick even before Williams verbally told him he could go along, having seen the agreement in the white men’s faces with quick eyes. He leaped high into the air, turned his body around on its vertical axis once, and slapped the soles of his feet together—all before landing again.
“He was the moon-dancer,” explained Williams, seeing the astonishment in Hackworth’s face at the feat. “Some of his acrobatic tricks would make you believe he was a wizard. Clever fellow. Very attached to me. I am hardly sorry he asked to come along.”
Hackworth shrugged his shoulders and shouted for the men to board ship. Like a swarm of black hornets, screaming in childish joy, the natives scrambled into the ovoid. It was plain to see that they considered the ride to the coast in an airplane the greatest of all great things. When they were all in, arranged on the benches by the aloof, English-speaking pilot mulatto, the two white men and M’bopo entered. Hackworth pointed to a bench facing the front window, just back of the pilot seat.
Williams looked around at the simpleness of the cabin while the pilot warmed up the engines. It was roomy and bright with the light that streamed in from the front. The benches had soft woolen cushions and were form-fitting and delightfully comfortable. Broad straps came around one’s thighs.
At a signal from Hackworth, the pilot moved his hands on the controls. The ship trembled as the engines throbbed to high speed and gently rose, so gently that Williams was shocked to see the ground far below a moment later. Up and up it went as though pulled by some cosmic winch and chain. Then the tone-beats of the engines changed their howls as the pilot swung them to a horizontal pitch. With a pleasant surge, the airplane leaped forward. Below, the African topography blended into a flowing panorama.
Williams, with his eyes peering around in fascination, muttered to himself in Bantu dialect. Within him, two separate beings seemed to occupy his mind jointly. His white man’s soul tried to be nonchalant; his native superinduced temperament trembled. He realized that it might be days, perhaps weeks, before he could be free of Africa and its subtle influence.
CHAPTER II
The Return to Civilization
l “Well, Dan, old boy, what do you think of the ‘hyp-marine’ ?”
“Wonderful!” returned the other, looking down at the tumbled ocean surface. “But it doesn’t have any decks. I don’t like the idea of being cooped up in our little room here for several days. Give me the old-time ocean liners with a promenade where one could breathe fresh salt air.”
Hackworth smiled. “Several days, you say. Dan, we’ll be in New York in twenty hours! You forgot this is 1973. Our speed, constant and unvarying, is 300 miles an hour!”
“Impossible!” spluttered Williams aghast. “Six thousand miles in twenty hours?”
“What would you say if I told you that it is possible to cross from Europe to America in two hours—by means of stratosphere rocket ships?”
Williams relapsed into amazed silence.
It was the second day after the departure from interior Congo.
Hackworth had paid off his safari men at Kabinda on the coast—a very modern and important African port—and had arranged to have his airplane shipped to South Americd. He was a professional explorer, which strain had run in his and Dan’s line for many generations. His next expedition would take him into the Amazon region.
Obtaining passports for Williams and M’
bopo at Kabinda, and certain other matters, had taken up much of their time. There had been little chance for conversation, beyond a resume of family affairs. From this Williams had heard that the last remaining member of his family, his sister Helen, had died five years before. Hackworth, and the daughter that had been born to him, were his closest relatives.
Hackworth had bought tickets on the hyp-marine for quick passage to America. Williams first glimpsed the ship from the top of a hill in the city a mile from the dock. At first glance it looked like a snubnosed submarine, but there were noticeable differences: it had wings, short and stubby, at rear and front; along its upper length were spaced ten giant engine-housings from which protruded four-bladed propellers; and there were hundreds—no, thousands of tiny round spots running in lengthwise rows, gleaming with the iridescence of heavy glass. It rested high and dry on a runway of rails at the end of the huge dock. In size it was much smaller than a 1933 ocean liner, but carried twice as many passengers.
The departure from port had been a great thrill to Williams and his Bantu friend. First there had been the deep hum of the air engines above, gradually climbing the harmonic scale. Then with a slight jerk, the ship had moved from its berth and slid along the runway. There had been a sinking sensation and the sound of lapping water, followed by a deep-throated roar from above. For many minutes, the ship had swayed and rocked. Then gradually a smoothness had come over the ship’s motion and Williams had seen the ocean surface recede till not even the highest waves touched them. In a half-hour, the motion of the craft had become uniform and unfelt, and the noise above had become a muffled drone. At the constant height of a hundred feet above water level, the hyp-marine skimmed the ocean like a preying gull.
The ship’s interior ran in lengthwise tiers, each composed of five rows of rooms with suitable corridors in between. The price for a room against the hull, and therefore having a round window from which one could view the seascapes, was double the price of any interior room. But in comfort and elegance they were all uniform.