me, and that of Clarence away on Fernando Po. These two-
stood out alone, like great island masses made of iron rising
from a formless, silken sea.
The space around seemed boundless, and there was in it
neither sound nor colour, nor anything with form, save those
two terrific things. It was like a vision, and it held me spellbound,
as I stood shivering on the rocks with the white mist
round my knees until into my wool-gathering mind came
the memory of those anything but sublime men of mine; and
I turned and scuttled off along the rocks like an agitated ant
left alone in a dead universe.
I soon found the place where I had come up into the crater
plain and went down over the wall, descending with twice
the rapidity, but ten times the scratches and grazes, of the
ascent.
I picked up the place where I had left Xenia, but no Xenia
was there, nor came there any answer to my bush call for him,,
so on I went down towards the place where, hours ago, I had
left the men. The mist was denser down below, but to my jo y
it was warmer than on the summit of the wind-swept wall.
I had nearly reached the foot of this wall and made my
mind up to turn in for the night under a rock, when I heard
a melancholy croak away in the mist to the left. I went towards
it and found Xenia lost on his own account, and distinctly
quaint in manner, and then I recollected that I had
been warned Xenia is slightly crazy. Nice situation this:
a madman on a mountain in the mist. Xenia, I found, had
no longer got my black bag, but in its place a lid of a saucepan
and an empty lantern. To put it mildly, this is not the sort o f
outfit the R.G.S. Hints to Travellers would recommend for
African exploration. Xenia reported that he gave the bag to-
Black boy, who shortly afterwards disappeared, and that he
had neither seen him nor any of the others since, and didn’t ex pect
to this side of Srahmandazi. In a homicidal state o f
mind, I made tracks for the missing ones followed by
Xenia. I thought mayhap they had grown on to the rocks
they had sat upon so long, but presently, just before it became
quite dark, we picked up the place we had left them in and
found there only an empty soda-water bottle. Xenia poured out
a muddled mass of observations to the effect that “ they got
fright too much about them water palaver.”
I did not linger to raise a monument to them, but I said
I wished they were in a condition to require one, and we went
on over our hillocks with more confidence now that we knew
we had stuck well to our unmarked track.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide :
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.”
Only she was a young and inefficient moon, and although we
were below the thickest of the mist band, it was dark.
Finding our own particular hole in the forest wall was
about as easy as finding “ our particular rabbit hole in an unknown
hay-field in the dark,” and the attempt to do so afforded
us a great deal of varied exercise. I am obliged to
be guarded in my language, because my feelings now are only
down to one degree below boiling point. The rain now began
to fall, thank goodness, and I drew the thick ears of grass
through my parched lips as I stumbled along over the rugged
lumps of rock hidden under the now waist-high jungle grass.
Our camp hole was pretty easily distinguishable by daylight,
for it was on the left-hand side of one of the forest
tongues, the grass land running down like a lane between two
tongues here, and just over the entrance three conspicuously
high trees showed. But we could not see these “ picking-up ”
points in the darkness, so I had to keep getting Xenia to
strike matches, and hold them in his hat while I looked at
the compass. Presently we came full tilt up against a belt o f
trees which I knew from these compass observations was our
tongue of forest belt, and I fired a couple of revolver shots
into it, whereabouts I judged our camp to be.
This was instantly answered by a yell from human voices
in chorus, and towards that yell in a slightly amiable— a very
slightly amiable— state of mind I went.
I will draw a veil over the scene, particularly over my
observations to those men. They did not attempt to deny
their desertion, but they attempted to explain it, each one
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