by Desmond Cory
“There must be native peoples in the Kob’ei, after all.” Madrid’s face seemed to be drawn tightly over its bones. “No animals use spears.”
“Not even gorillas?”
“Good heavens, no. They fight with their teeth, like other animals.”
“There must be men here, then.” Johnny looked down again at that horribly, pulverised cranium. “But what kind of man can hand out a Sunday punch like that one?”
“It was done with some sort of implement. Some sort of … catapult, perhaps …”
“But just look at that head. That brute’s got a skull like a lump of rock, and it’s been squashed flat.”
“I know,” said Madrid, in a very small voice.
Johnny turned and peered tentatively into the surrounding shadows. The forest seemed to be full of small sounds; yet nothing moved. “It’s a funny thing,” he said. “I had a dream …”
“A … A what did you say?”
“Never mind. Skip it.” Johnny forced his voice to a more cheerful and businesslike tones. “It’s all very odd, but it needn’t detain us. We’ve got more pressing matters to attend to.”
Madrid needed no urging. “The sooner we get out of here,” she said frankly, “the better I’ll be pleased. This place gives me the creeps.”
“All right, let’s go … Madrid …”
She looked at him.
“Stay fairly close to me. And keep your eyes open.”
By the time they had cleared the forest the sun had risen; its golden circle hung magnificently over the crest of the tall hill to their right, and for the first time since his long journey had started. Johnny was not altogether sorry to see it. They strode out into its beams, leaving the high trees behind them and entering a very curious country of short yellowish-green sward, punctuated by clumps of dense bush. They were well into the mountains now, walking up a mile-wide valley; the hills thrust out arms towards them from all directions, great spurs five miles long, that came driving down from the peaks. There was no fear of missing their direction, for the course of the valley was unmistakably marked; they saw the river from time to time, or rather the sides of the gulch where the river was running. When they had travelled some six miles, the river deceived them with a sudden turn; they came upon it unexpectedly, and were able to look down over its twelve-foot-high banks into the turbulent mass of rushing water tearing cheerfully down towards the waterfall.
“We won’t cross that lot in a hurry,” said Johnny.
“It’s lucky we don’t have to,” said Madrid who seemed a little more cheerful now that the forest was left five miles behind her. “You can’t blame it for going fast. It’s got a long way to go.”
“I suppose it has. Down the Kob’ei, down the Ubangi, down the Congo; three thousand miles to the sea. It’s a long way. And we’re going where it comes from.”
“All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”
“And the sun also ariseth, confound it.” Here in the depths of the valley they could walk comfortably side by side; and breath was not too short to make conversation difficult. “You must actually read that Bible of yours, Madrid?”
“I was brought up on it. A lot of us South Africans were. Even Otto always carries his prayer-book … but he likes the Afrikaans. I think the English version is better.”
“Oh well, most of the Bible is concerned with sudden death. The war-mongering English would naturally provide a pretty adequate translation.”
“Yes. But the rapes are pretty good too,” said Madrid modestly.
Johnny hardly felt himself to be in a position to resent the implications of this remark. Indeed, he eased the straps of his rucksack slightly and looked forward to the sun-slashed slopes of the hills. “What’s that bit that comes later? About the generations?”
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh.”
“I like it better when it’s put that way.”
“Let’s put it that way,” said Madrid.
They climbed on in silence, into the afternoon.
As they travelled the wind rose. At first it came as little more than a breeze drifting lazily down from the north; then for an hour they plodded through a series of hot, sultry breaths of air, each of which lasted no more than a minute. At two o’clock they stopped for half-an-hour to rest in the shade of an outcrop of rock, to brew coffee and eat biscuits; when they set off again, they found themselves walking into a steady head-wind of over ten miles an hour. They had gained a great deal of height and had left the straggled thorn of the parkland behind them; the valley was now almost bare of vegetation, and the naked rock to either side of them glittered long quartz-like veins to the sun; there was no shelter from the wind. As it heightened, it brought the dust; first in feathery trailers that rose no more than three or four inches from the ground, then in light brittle blasts that left a fine powdery deposit on their clothes and on their bare limbs. They could see it moving over the shoulders of the mountains as a fine golden veil through which the hard outlines of the rock were clearly visible; then, unexpectedly; it subsided for a while. But the sun remained tinged with a faint purplish hue, showing that the dust was not settling again; and certainly the wind showed no diminution in its strength.
Johnny was beginning to be slightly worried at the absence of game in the immediate vicinity. He carried little food, and was in the position of having to shoot for his supper – and for Madrid’s supper too; yet he had seen few signs of wild life in the last three hours. A pair of oribi travelling south round the hump of a nearby hill; two or three baboon colonies among the rocks by the river; a glimpse of an unidentified animal lolloping into the cover of one of the infrequent patches of scrub – that was all that he had seen. There were always birds, of course, there were bush-crows in plenty, gaily coloured hornbills that drifted down-river with a fine air of going nowhere in particular; and he resolved to pick up the first palatable-looking object he saw possessed of feathers and a bill. The trouble was, of course, that he carried only the Rigby and his revolver; and a .416 soft-nosed bullet makes a considerable mess of any bird that happens to be smaller than an ostrich.
He got one eventually, though; dextrously blowing its head off as it circled past him. It was a fairish-sized bird not unlike a pigeon, of an unobtrusive grey colour that spoke well for its eating qualities; Johnny was examining its plumage with interest when he noticed that Madrid was looking at him curiously.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I was just introducing myself to our future dinner.”
“Fedora. Have you noticed something?”
Johnny looked around him swiftly. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “No,” he said. “What’s the matter?” – and, as he spoke, realised what she meant.
The wind had died completely. Nothing in sight was stirring, except the river.
“Yes, the wind’s dropped. Good. Funny I didn’t notice it before.”
“It’s being going down for some time. But it stopped dead, just after you fired. As though you’d cut it off. Listen, I don’t like it, Fedora.”
“Why? Is it a bad sign?”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling there’s trouble coming. Look at the colour of the sun.”
Johnny raised his hand and squinted from under it. The sun certainly was a peculiar colour, a colour that he had never seen before; and its edges seemed curiously blurred. The sky itself seemed to have darkened, to have taken on a certain leaden solidity. “My word,” said Johnny. “That’s odd.”
“That dust isn’t local dust, you know.” Madrid ran a finger across her forehead and examined the feather-fine film that adhered to it. “That’s coming from the open wasteland hundreds of miles to the north – maybe even from the Sudan. If any of the heavy stuff is going to start lifting, it’ll be no joke if we’re caught out in it.”
Johnny was stuffing the decapitated bird into his rucksack. “It’s only two
hours to sundown,” he said. “We should be all right.”
“That’s when it’ll probably come,” said Madrid, helping him to readjust the straps.
She was wrong. It came not fifteen minutes later, with very little warning. As they watched, the sky to the north went pitch-black, as swiftly as the falling of a curtain; and the area of darkness grew while they looked at it. And a faint sound became audible, a faint and sinister rustling that had an even fainter undertone of shrillness.
“We’d better make for that spur,” said Johnny, pointing left. “Then we can get under the lee of those rocks and wait for it to pass over … whatever it is … Do you know what it is?”
“No. No, I don’t. But – I think we’d better run.”
The outcrop Johnny had indicated was no more than a quarter of a mile away; but before they were even halfway there the wind had risen again. It was very much stronger than before, and it whispered as it came; then it seized their clothes in great boisterous gusts and rattled stinging pellets of dust into their faces. Johnny pausing to squint through narrowed eyes to the north, saw that the shapes of the hills to the north were being swallowed up in the coming darkness, absorbed by it as completely as though a solid wall of blackness was moving over them. He hurried on after Madrid; caught her up, seized her by the arm and urged her on at the fastest pace they could manage.
“You were right,” he said, gasping for breath. “This is really something.”
Suddenly it was hot, stiflingly hot; hot, as though a great blanket had closed down over them; hot, as though the oven door of the northern sky had been swung abruptly open. The pores of Johnny’s skin began to burn and prickle; his lungs seemed to be bursting in a sudden absence of air; a vast shadow seemed to have passed over the tangle of rocks immediately before him. Madrid was shouting something to him; he turned a dust-caked face towards her.
“I think we’d better get down. Down behind those rocks.”
She threw herself to the ground and beckoned him imperatively. The dimness was growing with every second; a single short blast of sand hit the hillside, which seemed to whimper under the strain. The rustling noise, had changed to a deep and sonorous moaning; he looked again painfully into the spitting teeth of the wind, and saw the valley being blotted out by a swirling, writhing mass that seemed as opaque as the hills themselves.
He gave a last despairing glance about him and saw, in the deepening obscurity that shrouded the rocks, something that was even darker. He took two steps towards it, then turned to call to Madrid; the wind took his shout from his lips and sent it whirling southwards, mingled with its own deep roar. Johnny went back, lifted her bodily and went stumbling onwards towards the blotch of darkness; dust ripped at his shirt, stripped skin from his forehead, scraped vindictively at his legs. It lost its grip for a second as he ducked under the lee of a boulder; then, in a thrilling unbelievable stillness, he rolled forwards into the shelter of the cave, remembering somehow to twist as he fell so that the force of Madrid’s fall was broken. They lay there in the darkness, holding each other tightly, while a whistle like that of a giant express train gathered volume around them. Then the ground under them seemed to shudder; the rock about them creaked suddenly, and groaned with pain; while something incalculably vast and terrible pounded and whipped the air to frenzy a yard beyond their feet.
The grey light of morning showed that they were not alone in the cave. Johnny woke to find two pairs of small and semi-luminous eyes regarding him fixedly from a range of a couple of feet; he sat up with a jerk, and the hyraces scuttled earnestly away towards the depths of the cave, uttering high-pitched squeaks. Then they turned again, to regard him with their plaintive rabbit-like stare. One of them, tiring of the spectacle, rose on to his hind legs and began to wash itself.
Johnny rolled over on to his hands and knees, and found that at some time during the night he had wriggled free of his rucksack; it lay on its side half on top of Madrid. Johnny left it there and crawled forwards to the opening of the cave; where he rose slowly to his feet, feeling his muscles loosen and expand complainingly.
The sun had already risen, and the air was incredibly clear; the slopes of the mountains seemed to shine, as though freshly scoured with a scrubbing-brush. The sky was cloudless, a bright duck-egg blue, and there was an indefinable air of activity about the whole valley; as if its barren stretches were returning to life again after the passing of the dust devil. Johnny inhaled deep breaths of the morning air and knew himself to be achingly hungry. He eased his pistol-belt around his waist, and went off to look for firewood.
There was a leisureliness about that morning, as though the urgency of travel had departed. The sun was already up, and it seemed that the loss of another hour or two would make little difference now. When Johnny had built the fire he wakened Madrid, and they baked the bird in clay on the hot embers; while it cooked they sat silent on either side of the fire, nursing their respective hungers. The smoke rose almost vertically in the still air; Johnny cleaned the dust from the Rigby and his revolver, while Madrid superintended the boiling of the coffee. The hyraces emerged from the cave, sniffed inquisitively at Johnny’s feet, and finally mounted the rock to bask ecstatically in the sun.
“Nice little things,” said Madrid, watching them. “It was kind of them to lend us their cave.”
They ate the bird, which tasted extremely good; and drank the coffee, which tasted even better. Then they lay on their backs for a few minutes, finding the example of the hyraces almost irresistible; the rays of the sun scourged to soreness by the dust. Johnny rolled a cigarette and lit it.
“We were lucky,” he said. “Very lucky.”
“Yes. You saw the cave just in time. Fedora – I wonder what happened to Otto.”
“I expect he did the same as us,” said Johnny comfortably. “Got down under cover.”
“I hope so. If he was caught out in the open, he … he wouldn’t have much chance. That storm was a real killer. We’d have been choked in five minutes, if it had got hold of us.”
“That’s a nice cheerful thought to begin the day with.”
“Sorry,” said Madrid.
They lay in silence for a few more minutes, side by side. Then Johnny stamped the fire out and went back into the cave to bring out the rucksacks.
It was light inside there now, though entering from the glare of the sun it seemed almost pitch-black; Johnny leant against one wall for a few moments, accustoming his eyes to the gloom. When he had found the outline of the rucksacks as dark blurs on the ground, he moved forwards; and was about to pick them up when he caught a faint phosphorescent gleam on the floor, farther inside the cave. He investigated; then left the cave rather more quickly than he had gone in.
“Madrid,” he said. “I don’t think that cave belongs to the hyraces after all.”
“No?”
“No. There’s a dirty great pile of bones in there, and part of an antelope’s head. I think it must be normally rented by a lion.”
Madrid shook her head. “It can’t be. It doesn’t smell of cat.”
“That’s true,” admitted Johnny. But it smells of something. And if it’s big enough to eat antelope, I don’t know that I want to stay here and argue the toss with it.”
“It’s time we were going, anyway.”
They shouldered the rucksacks once again, wincing at the contact of the straps with the bruised flesh. They looked at the hills and at the length of the valley; then at each other.
“I hope Otto got through all right,” said Madrid.
And they set off again on the third day of their journey.
The valley mounted steadily to the north, twisting slightly as it rose, they travelled over a hubris of dry earth and pebbles, scraped free of dust by yesterday’s wind and dried hard by the morning sun. As his muscles settled themselves once more to the monotonous regularity of marching, Johnny found his thoughts also settling down to a steady, uninterrupted flow; so that he plodded along in a kind of comfortabl
e haze, aware of the changes in the surrounding scenery and yet able completely to ignore them.
In his haze of speculation, he found himself suddenly associating the cave in which he had slept with some other cave he had seen in the very recent past. The bones he had seen … he felt that he had seen them somewhere before; and now that he had left it behind, he remembered the shape of the cave as something previously familiar to him. But there was something uncanny about this recognition; he had seen no caves since he had passed the limestone ridges north of the Congo, and even those caves he had never entered. He was not, strangely enough, particularly surprised at this; he accepted it as part of the general oddness of the country through which he was moving, a country in which strange things happened very naturally to both the mind and the body. Sandstorms arose in a peculiar manner from nowhere, great blasts of wind against which the human physique was powerless to resist; if help was indeed to come from the hills, it seemed not surprising to Johnny that the help should be supernatural, perhaps even predestined. At the same time, he was conscious that he was very, very tired and that therefore, perhaps, his thinking processes were not functioning quite normally …
He wondered what had happened to Schneider and to van Kuyp, travelling each alone across the Mountains of the Sun. Perhaps they, too, had found adequate shelter in time; perhaps neither of them would ever be seen again. And what of Huysmans, living the life of a hermit in these great wastes where Nature struck so fiercely and with so little warning? He would have learnt how to survive, though; he would have learnt the language of the winds; as he had learnt the language of the rocks; perhaps he could even command the winds like some great magician of old. Perhaps he had seen his enemies coming; and had sent the wind to destroy them; a wonderful feat, but no more wonderful than that of commanding uranium-bearing rocks to raze whole cities to the ground and that he could certainly do.
A mysterious fellow, Huysmans. Perhaps he had chosen well in electing to spend his days in this mysterious country of mountain and valley; perhaps he had been right in his decision to refuse to return to civilisation. Surely he could have done so, had he wished; even without the aid of a flying-boat; even down the savage wilderness of the Ubangi? Perhaps; perhaps. That was a fairy-story word … perhaps … a word that ruled Africa. Everything about Africa was perhaps; everything about Huysmans was perhaps; the two went well together. Perhaps that was Huysman’s secret; perhaps … He emerged momentarily from his daydream, and glanced at Madrid; who was trudging along beside him, deep in her own thoughts.