CHAPTER IX
THE SWAMP
Neither Hans nor I carried rifles that we knew would be in the way onour business, which was just to scout. Moreover, one is always temptedto shoot if a gun is at hand, and this I did not want to do at present.So, although I had my revolver in case of urgent necessity, my onlyother weapon was a Zulu axe, that formerly had belonged to one of thosetwo men who died defending Inez on the veranda at Strathmuir, while Hanshad nothing but his long knife. Thus armed, or unarmed, we crept forwardtowards that spot whence, as we conjectured, we had seen the line ofsmoke rising some hours before.
For about a quarter of a mile we went on thus without seeing or hearinganything, and a difficult job it was in that gloom among the scatteredtrees with no light save such as the stars gave us. Indeed, I was aboutto suggest that we had better abandon the enterprise until daybreak whenHans nudged me, whispering,
"Look to the right between those twin thorns."
I obeyed and following the line of sight which he had indicated,perceived, at a distance of about two hundred yards a faint glow, sofaint indeed that I think only Hans would have noticed it. Really itmight have been nothing more than the phosphorescence rising from a heapof fungus, or even from a decaying animal.
"The fire of which we saw the smoke that has burnt to ashes," whisperedHans again. "I think that they have gone, but let us look."
So we crawled forward very cautiously to avoid making the slightestnoise; so cautiously, indeed, that it must have taken us nearly half anhour to cover those two hundred yards.
At length we were within about forty yards of that dying fire and,afraid to go further, came to a stand--or rather, a lie-still--behindsome bushes until we knew more. Hans lifted his head and sniffed withhis broad nostrils; then he whispered into my ear, but so low that Icould scarcely hear him.
"Amahagger there all right, Baas, I smell them."
This of course was possible, since what wind there was blew from thedirection of the fire, although I whose nose is fairly keen could smellnothing at all. So I determined to wait and watch a while, and indicatedmy decision to Hans, who, considering our purpose accomplished, showedsigns of wishing to retreat.
Some minutes we lay thus, till of a sudden this happened. A branch ofresinous wood of which the stem had been eaten through by the flames,fell upon the ashes of the fire and burnt up with a brilliant light. Init we saw that the Amahagger were sleeping in a circle round the firewrapped in their blankets.
Also we saw another thing, namely that nearer to us, not more than adozen yards away, indeed, was a kind of little tent, also made of furrugs or blankets, which doubtless sheltered Inez. Indeed, this wasevident from the fact that at the mouth of it, wrapped up in something,lay none other than her maid, Janee, for her face being towards us, wasrecognised by us both in the flare of the flaming branch. One more thingwe noted, namely, that two of the cannibals, evidently a guard, weresleeping between us and the little tent. Of course they ought to havebeen awake, but fatigue had overcome them and there they slumbered,seated on the ground, their heads hanging forward almost upon theirknees.
An idea came to me. If we could kill those men without waking the othersin that gloom, it might be possible to rescue Inez at once. Rapidly Iweighed the _pros_ and _cons_ of such an attempt. Its advantages, ifsuccessful, were that the object of our pursuit would be carried throughwithout further trouble and that it was most doubtful whether we shouldever get such a chance again. If we returned to fetch the others andattacked in force, the probability was that those Amahagger, or one ofthem, would hear some sound made by the advance of a number of men, andfly into the darkness; or, rather than lose Inez, they might kill her.Or if they stood and fought, she might be slain in the scrimmage. Or,as after all we had only about a dozen effectives, for the Strathmuirbearers could not be relied upon, they might defeat and kill us whomthey outnumbered by two or three to one.
These were the arguments for the attempt. Those for not making it wereequally obvious. To begin with it was one of extraordinary risk; the twoguards or someone else behind them might wake up--for such people, likedogs, mostly sleep with one eye open, especially when they knew thatthey are being pursued. Or if they did not we might bungle the businessso that they raised an outcry before they grew silent for ever, in whichcase both of us and perhaps Inez also would probably pay the penaltybefore we could get away.
Such was the horned dilemma upon one point or other of which we ran therisk of being impaled. For a full minute or more I considered the matterwith an earnestness almost amounting to mental agony, and at last allbut came to the conclusion that the danger was too enormous. It would bebetter, notwithstanding the many disadvantages of that plan, to go backand fetch the others.
But then it was that I made one of my many mistakes in life. Most ofus do more foolish things than wise ones and sometimes I think thatin spite of a certain reputation for caution and far-sightedness, I amexceptionally cursed in this respect. Indeed, when I look back upon mypast, I can scarcely see the scanty flowers of wisdom that decorateits path because of the fat, ugly trees of error by which it isovershadowed.
On that occasion, forgetting past experiences where Hans was concerned,my natural tendency to blunder took the form of relying upon another'sjudgment instead of on my own. Although I had formed a certain view asto what should be done, the _pros_ and _cons_ seemed so evenly balancedthat I determined to consult the little Hottentot and accept hisverdict. This, after all, was but a form of gambling like pitch andtoss, since, although it is true Hans was a clever, or at any rate acunning man according to his lights, and experienced, it meant thatI was placing my own judgment in abeyance, which no one consideringa life-and-death enterprise should do, taking the chance of that ofanother, whatever it might be. However, not for the first time, I didso--to my grief.
In the tiniest of whispers with my lips right against his smelly head, Isubmitted the problem to Hans, asking him what we should do, go on or goback. He considered a while, then answered in a voice which he contrivedto make like the drone of a night beetle.
"Those men are fast asleep, I know it by their breathing. Also the Baashas the Great Medicine. Therefore I say go on, kill them and rescueSad-Eyes."
Now I saw that the Fates to which I had appealed had decided against meand that I must accept their decree. With a sick and sinking heart--forI did not at all like the business--I wondered for a moment what hadled Hans to take this view, which was directly opposite to any I hadexpected from him. Of course his superstition about the Great Medicinehad something to do with it, but I felt convinced that this was not all.
Even then I guessed that two arguments appealed to him, of whichthe first was that he desired, if possible, to put an end to thisintolerable and unceasing hunt which had worn us all out, no matterwhat that end might be. The second and more powerful, however, was, Ibelieved, and rightly, that the idea of this stealthy, midnight blowappealed irresistibly to the craft of his half-wild nature in which thestrains of the leopard and the snake seemed to mingle with that of thehuman being. For be it remembered that notwithstanding his veneer ofcivilisation, Hans was a savage whose forefathers for countless ages hadpreserved themselves alive by means of such attacks and stratagems.
The die having been cast, in the same infinitesimal whispers we made ourarrangements, which were few and simple. They amounted to this--thatwe were to creep on to the men and each of us to kill that one who wasopposite to him, I with the axe and Hans with his knife, rememberingthat it must be done with a single stroke--that is, if they did notwake up and kill us--after which we were to get Inez out of her shelter,dressed or undressed, and make off with her into the darkness where wewere pretty sure of being able to baffle pursuit until we reached ourown camp.
Provided that we could kill the two guards in the proper fashion--rathera large proviso, I admit--the thing was simple as shelling peas which,notwithstanding the proverb, in my experience is not simple at all,since generally the shells crack the wrong way
and at least one of thepeas remained in the pod. So it happened in this case, for Janee, whomwe had both forgotten, remained in the pod.
I am sure I don't know why we overlooked her; indeed, the error wasinexcusable, especially as Hans had already experienced her foolishnessand she was lying there before our eyes. I suppose that our minds wereso concentrated upon the guard-killing and the tragic and impressiveInez that there was no room in them for the stolid and matter-of-factJanee. At any rate she proved to be the pea that would not come out ofthe pod.
Often in my life I have felt terrified, not being by nature one of thosewho rejoices in dangers and wild adventures for their own sake, whichonly the stupid do, but who has, on the contrary, been forced toundertake them by the pressure of circumstances, a kind of hydraulicforce that no one can resist, and who, having undertaken, has beencarried through them, triumphing over the shrinkings of his flesh bysome secret reserve of nerve power. Almost am I tempted to call itspirit-power, something that lives beyond and yet inspires our frail andfallible bodies.
Well, rarely have I been more frightened than I was at this moment.Actually I hung back until I saw that Hans slithering through the grasslike a thick yellow snake with the great knife in his right hand,was quite a foot ahead of me. Then my pride came to the rescue and Ispurted, if one can spurt upon one's stomach, and drew level with him.After this we went at a pace so slow that any able-bodied snail wouldhave left us standing still. Inch by inch we crept forward, lyingmotionless a while after each convulsive movement, once for quite along time, since the left-hand cannibal seemed about to wake up, for heopened his mouth and yawned. If so, he changed his mind and rolling froma sitting posture on to his side, went to sleep much more soundly thanbefore.
A minute or so later the right-hand ruffian, my man, also stirred, sosharply that I thought he had heard something. Apparently, however, hewas only haunted by dreams resulting from an evil life, or perhapsby the prescience of its end, for after waving his arm and mutteringsomething in a frightened voice, he too, wearied out, poor devil, sankback into sleep.
At last we were on them, but paused because we could not see exactlywhere to strike and knew, each of us, that our first blow must be thelast and fatal. A cloud had come up and dimmed what light there was, andwe must wait for it to pass. It was a long wait, or so it seemed.
At length that cloud did pass and in faint outline I saw the classicalhead of my Amahagger bowed in deep sleep. With a heart beating as itdoes only in the fierce extremities of love or war, I hissed like asnake, which was our agreed signal. Then rising to my knees, I liftedthe Zulu axe and struck with all my strength.
The blow was straight and true; Umslopogaas himself could not havedealt a better. The victim in front of me uttered no sound and madeno movement; only sank gently on to his side, and there lay as dead asthough he had never been born.
It appeared that Hans had done equally well, since the other man kickedout his long legs, which struck me on the knees. Then he also becamestrangely still. In short, both of them were stone dead and would tellno stories this side of Judgment Day.
Recovering my axe, which had been wrenched from my hand, I crept forwardand opened the curtain-like rugs or blankets, I do not know which theywere, that covered Inez. I heard her stir at once. The movement hadwakened her, since captives sleep lightly.
"Make no noise, Inez," I whispered. "It is I, Allan Quatermain, come torescue you. Slip out and follow me; do you understand?"
"Yes, quite," she whispered back and began to rise.
At this moment a blood-curdling yell seemed to fill earth and heaven, ayell at the memory of which even now I feel faint, although I am writingyears after its echoes died away.
I may as well say at once that it came from Janee who, awaking suddenly,had perceived against the background of the sky, Hans standing over her,looking like a yellow devil with a long knife in his hand, which shethought was about to be used to murder her.
So, lacking self-restraint, she screamed in the most lusty fashion, forher lungs were excellent, and--the game was up.
Instantly every man sleeping round the fire leapt to his feet and rushedin the direction of the echoes of Janee's yell. It was impossible to getInez free of her tent arrangement or to do anything, except whisper toher,
"Feign sleep and know nothing. We will follow you. Your father is withus."
Then I bolted back into the bushes, which Hans had reached already.
A minute or two later when we were clear of the hubbub and nearing ourown camp, Hans remarked to me sententiously,
"The Great Medicine worked well, Baas, but not quite well enough, forwhat medicine can avail against a woman's folly?"
"It was our own folly we should blame," I answered. "We ought to haveknown that fool-girl would shriek, and taken precautions."
"Yes, Baas, we ought to have killed her too, for nothing else would havekept her quiet," replied Hans in cheerful assent. "Now we shall have topay for our mistake, for the hunt must go on."
At this moment we stumbled across Robertson and Umslopogaas who, withthe others, and every living thing within a mile or two had also heardJanee's yell, and briefly told our story. When he learned how near wehad been to rescuing his daughter, Robertson groaned, but Umslopogaasonly said,
"Well, there are two less of the men-eaters left to deal with. Still,for once your wisdom failed you, Macumazahn. When you had found the campyou should have returned, so that we might all attack it together. Hadwe done so, before the dawn there would not have been one of them left."
"Yes," I answered, "I think that my wisdom did fail me, if I have any tofail. But come; perhaps we may catch them yet."
So we advanced, Hans and I showing the road. But when we reached theplace it was too late, for all that remained of the Amahagger, or ofInez and Janee, were the two dead men whom we had killed, and in thatdarkness pursuit was impossible. So we went back to our own camp to restand await the dawn before taking up the trail, only to find ourselvesconfronted with a new trouble. All the Strathmuir half-breeds whom wehad left behind as useless, had taken advantage of our absence and thatof the Zulus, to desert. They had just bolted back upon our tracks andvanished into the sea of bush. What became of them I do not know, as wenever saw them again, but my belief is that these cowardly fellows allperished, for certainly not one of them reached Strathmuir.
Fortunately for us, however, they departed in such a hurry that theyleft all their loads behind them, and even some of the guns theycarried. Evidently Janee's yell was the last straw which broke the backof such nerve as remained to them. Doubtless they believed it to be thesignal of attack by hordes of cannibals.
As there was nothing to said or done, since any pursuit of these curswas out of the question, we made the best of things as they were. Itproved a simple business. From the loads we selected such articles aswere essential, ammunition for the most part, to carry ourselves--andthe rest we abandoned, hiding it under a pile of stones in case weshould ever come that way again.
The guns they had thrown aside we distributed among the Zulus who hadnone, though the thought that they possessed them, so far as I wasconcerned, added another terror to life. The prospect of going intobattle with those wild axemen letting off bullets in every direction wasnot pleasant, but fortunately when that crisis came, they cast them awayand reverted to the weapons to which they were accustomed.
Now all this sounds much like a tale of disaster, or at any rate offailure. It is, however, wonderful by what strange ways good resultsare brought about, so much so that at times I think that these seemingaccidents must be arranged by an Intelligence superior to our own, tofulfil through us purposes of which we know nothing, and frequently,be it admitted, of a nature sufficiently obscure. Of course this is afatalistic doctrine, but then, as I have said before, within certainlimits I am a fatalist.
To take the present case, for instance, the whole Inez episode at firstsight might appear to be an excrescence on my narrative, of which theobject is to describe how
I met a certain very wonderful woman and whatI heard and experienced in her company. Yet it is not really so, sincehad it not been for the Inez adventure, it is quite clear that I shouldnever have reached the home of this woman, if woman she were, or haveseen her at all. Before long this became very obvious to me, as shall betold.
From the night upon which Hans and I failed to rescue Inez we hadno more difficulty in following the trail of the cannibals, whothenceforward were never more than a few hours ahead of us and had notime to be careful or to attempt to hide their spoor. Yet so fast didthey travel that do what we would, burdened and wearied as we were, itproved impossible to overtake them.
For the first three days the track ran on through scattered, rollingbush-veld of the character that I have described, but tendingcontinually down hill. When we broke camp on the morning of the fourthday, eating a hasty meal at dawn (for now game had become astonishinglyplentiful, so that we did not lack food) the rising sun showed beneathus an endless sea of billowy mist stretching in every direction far asthe sight could carry.
To the north, however, it did come to an end, for there, as I judgedfifty or sixty miles away, rose the grim outline of what looked like ahuge fortress, which I knew must be one of those extraordinary mountainformations, probably owing their origin to volcanic action, that are tobe met with here and there in the vast expanses of Central and EasternAfrica. Being so distant it was impossible to estimate its size, whichI guessed must be enormous, but in looking at it I bethought me of thatgreat mountain in which Zikali said the marvellous white Queen lived,and wondered whether it could be the same, as from my memory of his mapupon the ashes, it well might be, that is, if such a place existedat all. If so the map had shown it as surrounded by swamps and--well,surely that mist hid the face of a mighty swamp?
It did indeed, since before nightfall, following the spoor of thoseAmahagger, we had plunged into a morass so vast that in all myexperience I have never seen or heard of its like. It was a veritableocean of papyrus and other reeds, some of them a dozen or more feethigh, so that it was impossible to see a yard in any direction.
Here it was that the Amahagger ahead of us proved our salvation, sincewithout them to guide us we must soon have perished. For through thatgigantic swamp there ran a road, as I think an ancient road, since inone or two places I saw stone work which must have been laid by man. Yetit was not a road which it would have been possible to follow withouta guide, seeing that it also was overgrown with reeds. Indeed, the onlydifference between it and the surrounding swamp was that on the roadthe soil was comparatively firm, that is to say, one seldom sank intoit above the knee, whereas on either side of it quagmires were oftenapparently bottomless, and what is more, partook of the nature ofquicksand.
This we found out soon after we entered the swamp, since Robertson,pushing forward with the fierce eagerness which seemed to consume him,neglected to keep his eye upon the spoor and stepped off the edge on toland that appeared to be exactly similar to its surface. Instantly hebegan to sink in greasy and tenacious mud. Umslopogaas and I were onlytwenty yards behind, yet by the time we reached him in answer to hisshouts, already he was engulfed up to his middle and going down sorapidly that in another minute he would have vanished altogether. Well,we got him out but not with ease, for that mud clung to him like thetentacles of an octopus. After this we were more careful.
Nor did this road run straight; on the contrary, it curved about andsometimes turned at right angles, doubtless to avoid a piece of swampover which it had proved impossible for the ancients to construct acauseway, or to follow some out-crop of harder soil beneath.
The difficulties of that horrible place are beyond description, andindeed can scarcely be imagined. First there was that of a kind of grasswhich grew among the roots of the reeds and had edges like to those ofknives. As Robertson and I wore gaiters we did not suffer so much fromit, but the poor Zulus with their bare legs were terribly cut about andin some cases lame.
Then there were the mosquitoes which lived here by the million and allseemed anxious for a bite; also snakes of a peculiarly deadly kind werenumerous. A Zulu was bitten by one of them of so poisonous a nature thathe died within three minutes, for the venom seemed to go straight to hisheart. We threw his body into the swamp, where it vanished at once.
Lastly there was the all-pervading stench and the intolerable heat ofthe place, since no breath of air could penetrate that forest ofreeds, while a minor trouble was that of the multitude of leecheswhich fastened on to our bodies. By looking one could see the creaturessitting on the under side of leaves with their heads stretched outwaiting to attack anything that went by. As wayfarers there could nothave been numerous, I wondered what they had lived on for the last fewthousand years. By the way, I found that paraffin, of which we had asmall supply for our hand-lamps, rubbed over all exposed surfaces, wasto some extent a protection against these blood-sucking worms and thegnats, although it did make one go about smelling like a dirty oil tin.
During the day, except for the occasional rush of some great iguanaor other reptile, and the sound of the wings of the flocks of wildfowlpassing over us from time to time, the march was deathly silent. But atnight it was different, for then the bull-frogs boomed incessantly, asdid the bitterns, while great swamp owls and other night-flying birdsuttered their weird cries. Also there were mysterious sucking noisescaused, no doubt, by the sinking of areas of swamp, with those ofbursting bubbles of foul, up-rushing gas.
Strange lights, too, played about, will-o'-the-wisps or St. Elmo fires,as I believe they are called, that frightened the Zulus very much, sincethey believed them to be spirits of the dead. Perhaps this superstitionhad something to do with their native legend that mankind was "torn outof the reeds." If so, they may have imagined that the ghosts of men wentback to the reeds, of which there were enough here to accommodate thoseof the entire Zulu nation. Any way they were much scared; even the boldwitch-doctor, Goroko, was scared and went through incantations with thelittle bag of medicines he carried to secure protection for himself andhis companions. Indeed, I think even the iron Umslopogaas himself wasnot as comfortable as he might have been, although he did inform me thathe had come out to fight and did not care whether it were with man, orwizard, or spirit.
In short, of all the journeys that I have made, with the exception ofthe passage of the desert on our way to King Solomon's Mines, I thinkthat through this enormous swamp was the most miserable. Heartily did Icurse myself for ever having undertaken such a quest in a wild attemptto allay that sickness, or rather to quench that thirst of the soulwhich, I imagine, at times assails most of those who have hearts andthink or dream.
For this was at the bottom of the business: this it was which haddelivered me into the hands of Zikali, Opener-of-Roads, who, as now Iam sure, was merely making use of me for his private occult purposes. Hedesired to consult the distant Oracle, if such a person existed, as togreat schemes of his own, and therefore, to attain his end, made useof my secret longings which I had been so foolish as to reveal to him,quite careless of what happened to me in the process. [A bit narrow anduncharitable, this view. It seems to me that Zikali is taking a big riskin giving him the Great Medicine.--JB]
Well, I was in for the business and must follow it to the finishwhatever that might be. After all it was very interesting and ifthere were anything in what Zikali said (if there were not I could notconceive what object he had in sending me on such a wild-goose chasethrough this home of geese and ducks), it might become more interestingstill. For being pretty well fever-proof I did not think I should diein that morass, as of course nine white men out of ten would have done,and, beyond it lay the huge mountain which day by day grew larger andclearer.
Nor did Hans, who, with a childlike trust, pinned his faith to the GreatMedicine. This, he remarked, was the worst veld through which he hadever travelled, but as the Great Medicine would never consent to beburied in that stinking mud, he had no doubt that we should come safelythrough it some time. I replied that this
wonderful medicine of his hadnot saved one of our companions who had now made a grave in the samemud.
"No, Baas," he said, "but those Zulus have nothing to do with theMedicine which was given to you, and to me who accompanied you when wesaw the Opener-of-Roads. Therefore perhaps they will all die, exceptUmslopogaas, whom you were told to take with you. If so, what doesit matter, since there are plenty of Zulus, although there be but oneMacumazahn or one Hans? Also the Baas may remember that he began byoffending a snake and therefore it is quite natural that this snake'sbrother should have bitten the Zulu."
"If you are right, he should have bitten me, Hans."
"Yes, Baas, and so no doubt he would have done had you not beenprotected by the Great Medicine, and me too had not my grandfather beena snake-charmer, to say nothing of the smell of the Medicine being on meas well. The snakes know those that they should bite, Baas."
"So do the mosquitoes," I answered, grabbing a handful of them. "TheGreat Medicine has no effect upon them."
"Oh! yes, Baas, it has, since though it pleases them to bite, the bitesdo us no harm, or at least not much, and all are made happy. Still,I wish we could get out of these reeds of which I never want to seeanother, and Baas, please keep your rifle ready for I think I hear acrocodile stirring there."
"No need, Hans," I remarked sarcastically. "Go and tell him that I havethe Great Medicine."
"Yes, Baas, I will; also that if he is very hungry, there are some Zuluscamped a few yards further down the road," and he went solemnly to thereeds a little way off and began to talk to them.
"You infernal donkey!" I murmured, and drew my blanket over my head ina vain attempt to keep out the mosquitoes and smoking furiously with thesame object, tried to get to sleep.
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