There was no creek. There were twenty yards of low grass and rock with stones shining in the starlight and then a bank of scrub. This must be the creek. Carefully observing every step, he went to the bank, which was a foot or two higher than the land around him. There was no creek. He saw nothing, no line of bushes which he and Wright had appeared to follow hours earlier, he felt he had been lifted up and taken into country he had never seen before. From where he stood he could see his hat in the gap and he returned to it rapidly, dreading that it would vanish or change before he reached it. He got there. His hand trembling as he took it and now he made for Wright. The world had opened loneliness upon him. In every direction it seemed certain that the river lay. The dark bush did not lose the distinctness, the simplicity of its shapes. He looked down upon the pale face of Wright.
‘God, I’m a bloody fool,’ Johnson said. ‘How have I done this?’ He stood stiff, ripples of coldness passing through his body, unable to decide anything. Once he thought he heard the sound of the river but it was a movement of night breeze soughing in the distant trees and passing over them like some lost human breathing. He fought with all his slow will the impulse to dash here or there following this certainty and the other.
‘Wait. Wait,’ he said.
He knelt down beside Wright and talked to him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon be there. I’ll get you down somehow. Just taking a breather.’
Wright’s breathing seemed easier. The pulse was unchanged. The ground, Harry felt, was sodden with dew.
But this trick of calming and distracting himself and then of looking up with an open mind, to see the scene afresh and find conviction in a flash, did not succeed. There was a momentary illusion of vision, then it dissolved.
He thought, ‘Shall I pray?’
If there were someone outside or above, with simple ease this person could point out the path to the river. It would be very simple. He thought, ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’; no, what’s the use of panicking! I’m not going to wander round in circles. Light a fire. They’ll see that. It can’t be very long before they start searching.’
He said, ‘This is not admitting defeat,’ and ‘Wright will not die.’ There is always some other small thing and after that another small thing which can be done before a man dies.
Harry had no watch. He stood trying to calculate the time. He set about lighting a fire, gathering the dry sticks. He took out his matches and his pipe and put it in his mouth. Then he could not, for some reason, smoke while Wright was lying there helpless. He lit the fire and as its light made a glowing room from which the sparks dances, his spirits rose. He did not like the thought of the black, distinct caped figures of the trees behind that unnatural and fluid wall of light. He worked hard collecting and piling on the sticks. The flame went up in a waving spire. He worked ceaselessly, taking no notice of Wright. ‘It was an accident. It was an accident.’ Branch after branch he brought and made a stack within reach of the fire. His whole life went into making the pile. The fire blazed high, yellow and dancing. Like an animal leaping, some yellow cat, the flame licked up in the dark, sending out claws at the darkness. He looked up and he and Wright seemed to be in a huge glowing temple, higher than the highest trees, wide and palatial. A fire that could be seen for miles. He shouted and listened. There was no answer, yet there had seemed to be a thousand faint answers, the movements of leaves or the scuttlings of night animals. He sat down beside Wright, exhausted, his throat dry; realised now how his head ached and that he was sick with hunger.
But Johnson could not sit by the fire and wait. ‘In a moment,’ he said, ‘I will go and look for the river. If I make the fire high it will guide me. I can’t be lost. I can get water for him.’
Wright was murmuring again for water.
‘Poor devil. I’ll bring it you. Just getting a breather.’ The heat of the fire was strong and flat against his skin. He stared, exhausted, thinking out his plans.
And suddenly it was curiously easy, as if in the darkness a hand behind him guided him through the scrub. And it was near. Nearer than he would have imagined. They were camped, he discovered, within fifty yards—no, it seemed only twenty—from the river. The creek bank and its long clump were just as he remembered. He went down the bank of the river and so great was his joy that he did not even look for signs of the rescuers, but himself put down his hat—now the only thing he had for water—beside him and drank deeply from the river. It was cold and glorious water, so cold that it made his hot lips and his dry mouth sparkle with delight and his body shuddered.
Shuddering, in amazement, he woke up. The fire had gone low. He had dreamed.
He could not tell how long he had slept; it seemed only a few seconds; yet the lowness of the fire showed that it must have been much longer.
‘Wright!’ he called. ‘Wright!’
‘Thank God,’ he said when Wright murmured.
Johnson could not see his face. He jumped up and put more sticks on the fire. His head was throbbing violently. The flame started at once, but now the glow was weary and wretched. His body ached. He heaped on the sticks.
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’
He shouted to no answer.
‘I must go now,’ he said.
He turned to shout again and then he saw he could not go.
Seated like a large dog at the rim of the circle of light, pale and dabbled by it and unmoving, was the jaguar. The animal had, indeed, been many yards nearer when the fire was low, but had turned back when Johnson had awoken and made it up.
Days afterwards, when Johnson could speak to Phillips of the happenings on this night, he said:
‘It was the most bloody awful luck that we hadn’t taken the rifle. I damn and curse myself for being such a fool. We shan’t see another and he certainly won’t come to sit and watch us, like that one did, as if we were a pair of clowns in a circus ring.’
Johnson stood still with the branch in his halted hand frowning at the jaguar. Like nearly all animals they are, he knew, afraid of man and avoid him, but there is a point at which fear becomes fascination. If he stepped out of the exorcising circle of firelight and walked out into the dark in search of the river, the animal might recover from his trance and follow him.
‘What do you want?’ called Johnson sharply.
The creature pricked its ears.
‘Clear off,’ Johnson shouted.
The jaguar rose and moved nervously away, but fascinated by the fire, did no more than move further round the circle. Once more he sat down like a dog with heavy front paws. Johnson knew he was safe with the fire. His real concern, amounting to a shocked anger with himself, was that he had fallen asleep; his only fear that he had slept for hours and that the camp party had not seen the glow of his fire because it was low. They might have passed hours before.
The life of Wright was the important thing. Harry picked up his gun and fired another shot. The echoes fell in a hard rebounding shower over the bush. The jaguar started up and crashed away into the darkness. There was the old silence swirling into stillness like a dark pond after a stone has been thrown into it, and the rim of the circle of light had a more sinister loneliness now that its sentinel had gone. It was not a time when it is easy to be patient. One counts the minutes.
There was no answering shot.
Johnson turned to Wright. His lips were cracked and bloodless, his tongue protruding and dry, his eyes staring. He murmured sometimes words and names which Johnson could not catch.
‘Why the hell don’t they come!’ said Johnson. ‘Has he got to lie here and die because those fools don’t answer?’
He stood up and fired again.
‘They’re coming,’ he said to Wright as the echoes rained. But he had no evidence that they were coming.
He cursed them quietly; but he was still most appalled by his own guilt in losing his way and in falling asleep. He was eaten by shame and by horror at himself, his ignorance, his inc
ompetence and his guilt. He walked up and down looking at Wright, maddened by his inability to do anything. In his mind he continually saw a brilliantly lighted room—the drawingroom of Wright’s house in England—and there Mrs Wright was reading and Lucy was standing by the open window. They were talking. Suddenly he was there walking across the room and they got up and walked quickly, exclaiming, towards him. They came very close to him, Lucy was laughing and the laughter and some words passed near to his face and then over and beyond him, and once more the room reappeared as it had been at first, with Mrs Wright and her book and Lucy at the open windows. They got up and came to him as before. Over and over again, with the tireless mechanism of pictures, these two scenes were enacted. He could not shake them out of his mind, as he bent to collect sticks or piled them on the fire or turned round to speak, for his own relief, to Wright. Johnson had never seen a dying man before.
He stood looking up at the darkness and the words came to him, ‘My luck has gone.’ He saw in the darkness the lighted room, the two women, and then beyond them hundreds of small fragments, glittering, out of his own life and his father like a shadow thrown upon it all. He felt again what he had felt intermittently during the past six months, that he had no longer a self, that he was scattered, disintegrated—nothing.
Then the jaguar returned and sat down in the rim of light and its eyes were as brilliant as motionless lamps.
‘God!’ exclaimed Johnson and, without thought, advanced running towards the creature with a burning root in his hand, shouting, ‘Get out, you fool! I’ll beat your brains out if you don’t clear out.’ He raised the torch of shrub high as he ran, shouting. The animal turned tail and sprang before him into the scrub breaking down the branches, and Johnson went after it. For fifty yards he ran and roosting birds clapped up in the dark. The ground rose and he heard the tiger still springing far away. And then Johnson dropped his arm in amazement. There was the river streaming in the rising moon within a hundred and fifty yards of the camp. There was the creek bank. He looked back. The camp which had seemed to be on rising ground was in a wide hollow and its light was invisible. The river was exactly in the direction from which he thought he and Wright had come after the accident.
He ran back to the camp. He marked the direction by the brand; and with rough care for Wright he knelt down and got him on his back. His weight was dead. Staggering with the man he made in the direction of the river. Wright groaned as he jolted over the rough ground.
There was no sign of the jaguar, no answer to his shout as he stood on the shore.
He paddled out to midstream to be in the path of the rising moon. ‘Then it must be nearly midnight.’ No action or sensation of Johnson was nervously harassed or feverish. His struggle with the weight of Wright, his staggering blindly through the bush, his guilt, his visions of Wright’s home and of his own life, culminating in the words, ‘My luck has gone,’ he experienced slowly and laboriously. He passed through this suffering like an ox.
The current was with him. On the blank surface of the air were scratched the thin night-piping and croaking of water birds, but as the moon came up the surface began to glimmer. Faintly at first his shadow and the shadow of the gunwale were placed like hands upon the form of Wright and his face took on a deeper waxen whiteness.
‘You’re all right now. We’re there,’ Johnson said. The warm wash of moonlight unclosed into a radiance rich like the whiteness of a lily and the river became like a white path of voluptuous funereal marble between cypresses in some southern cemetery. The night was warm.
All Johnson’s thoughts were fixed on the camp, estimating the distance, noting landmarks, his eyes constantly searching for the gleam of the fire. Not for one moment did he think, ‘This is the end of the expedition,’ but he thought of the journey back to Calcott’s town and who would take Wright there. To him every one of his paddle-strokes was something that detained Wright from dying. He was confident of his judgement though his luck had gone. His anxiety was that the others, who had not apparently come out to look for him, should have let their fire go out.
Presently, far ahead of him, he heard a shot. It came from far down the river and, seemingly, from the opposite bank to the one where the camp was. He took his gun and fired an answer to it. An answer quickly came. He paddled rapidly.
‘They’re here,’ he said.
Wright began to gasp and rave and then fell quiet. Where the hell are they? What are they doing down there?
A strong smell of burning wood hung over the river, dry and acrid. It blew over from the opposite bank. He passed—he remembered it—the opening of a wide creek—and suddenly voices were plain. They were coming from the creek. Loudly another shot sounded. It was from the creek. He paused and shouted. He shouted several times. The voices came confusedly over the water and then there was an answering shout. He turned the canoe towards the sound and as he approached the creek mouth he saw their boat come down. Again he shouted and now there was no doubt about it. They called, and from under the fantastic shadows of the branches, the men rowing in the bows, the black craft appeared with Phillips and Silva standing in it. Then there’s no one in the camp. The fools. Any animal may have pinched the stores.
They came alongside.
‘Don’t run me down,’ Johnson said. ‘There’s been an accident. It’s Wright. He’s got shot.’
Phillips and Silva looked down into the canoe. ‘We’ve been searching for you. The trees were fired opposite and we thought you were up the creek, cut off.’
‘Don’t move him. But let’s get to the camp quickly. Where is it?’
The men in the boat were silent. The Brazilians gazed down at the figure of Wright. ‘He’s dead,’ they said among themselves. Feverishly they rowed over and Johnson went ahead of them, the two parties shouting across the water.
They arrived as Johnson was pulling his canoe into the shore. They jumped into the water, ignoring their boat to crowd round the canoe.
‘Look after the boat,’ Johnson said. Two went shouting after it into the current to tie it up.
‘He’s unconscious,’ said Johnson. ‘Lift him carefully. It’s the chest. He’s lost blood.’
Easily they lifted him ashore and laid him on their coats on the ground. They switched on their torches. The men were called to make up the fire. Johnson and Phillips knelt beside him and Silva was opening the medicine-box.
‘Harry,’ said Phillips in a startled voice. ‘He’s not unconscious. He’s dead.’
They both stared at the white face, the staring eyes, the protruding neck. ‘He’s alive. He was speaking in the canoe.’ But when they felt the pulse and listened for the heart and put a mirror to his lips, they knew he was dead.
They stood up and all gathered round. Their torches played in balls of light about their feet and they stood in the vivid whiteness of the moon, looking speechlessly into one another’s faces.
Chapter Eleven
All night their voices went on. They talked to create the illusion that he was still alive. The moment one voice stopped another began so as not to leave a silence in which his death could become real to them. They had spread a mosquito net over him, and that suggested he was no more than ill and sleeping. Themselves, they had a horror of sleep.
But sleep overcame them. They sank down where they were before dawn and Silva covered them. So deeply did they sleep that they were not awakened by the crew, who came noisily to look at the body under the net. The sun was high when they woke up at last. It was a shock to wake up in the face of the unchanged sun.
Even when they set to work with two of the crew to cut out a grave in the root-tangled earth, they could not believe he was dead. There were no spades. They had to use their long knives. They unbent from their task and, looking down to the river, expected to see him stripped and washing there, waited for him to come and laugh at them for sweating at a hole in the earth. They expected he would stand there and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing.
Ph
illips was ill. Twice he had to leave the job and when the time came—which they all dreaded—to lift the body, he got away. Johnson beckoned to Silva and those two carried the body to the grave. The crew stood by watching. When the body was put into the trench, the crew crossed themselves and then a murmur started among them.
‘What is it?’ Johnson said.
The men were protesting that Wright was being buried in his boots. These had been admired. Johnson told the men to shut up. He had them stand in silence at the graveside. Phillips came up and looked away at the sky but the others were watching Johnson. He was the leader.
‘All right,’ he said after the silence.
Then Silva, who had made a cross out of two branches of wood, stuck it at the head of the grave. Phillips and Johnson looked with surprise at him. They had not thought of this. Afterwards they were grateful.
Johnson went to his hammock. They were all hungry, but except the men, could not eat. They stood about in the camp pretending to do things but chiefly stopping to stare at the river. Only the men watched them and talked continuously, sitting close together in the boat.
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