Part 23

And then Lucy, again, Lucy might die of fever--she scarcely seemed cut out for an African life, which is why he had begun pitying her.....

"I've had perfectly splendid sport to-day," said Roger, standing before Lucy's "baraza" where the camp table was laid for tea. "I've shot a rhino--they're cutting it up now--two hartebeests, and two impala. That'll give us all the 'biltong' we can carry. I'm filthily dirty, as you can see--ash and charcoal from the burnt bush, and sweat--God! It has been sweltering!--and the run after that--and from that--rhino! No. I'm not wounded--there's no need for emotion--but the rhino as he charged--and I doubled--squirted blood over me from his nostrils--I must look like a fighting chimney sweep--I'll go and have a bath and then you shall give me tea."

"Don't be long," said Lucy. "There's such lots to talk about. Your men have come back from Hangodi with a note to me from John! He says so far 'all's well.' And two Masai, Halima says, are waiting to see you. They keep saying 'Sitoto,' which means, I suppose, some news about the Stotts' whereabouts. How exciting it's all getting. I am enjoying it!"

"Halima" (to her maid): "Waambia watu wa mpishi tunataka chai, marra moja!"

Four days afterwards, everything being ready for the fresh venture into the unknown, loads lightened and tightened, and the biltong sufficiently dry to be tied on top of the loads (imparting a disagreeable smell of a butcher's shop to the caravan as it passed in single file), they set out with Masai guides to find the Stotts. They travelled over the water-parting from the rivers flowing to the Indian Ocean to those that ended in vague marshes and bitter lakes. They climbed great escarpments and descended into broad valleys between high cliffs and found themselves amongst strange peoples, chiefly pastoral, keepers of great herds of sleek, humped cattle, of dwarf African goats and fat-tailed sheep.

The first of these, the Warangi, were fortunately allied in speech to the Wagogo--so could be communicated with. They were a truculent lot, inclined to make trouble with strangers. They seemed on this occasion, however, too much excited over affairs of their own to be much interested in the arrival of white folk, whom they had probably never seen before except in the form of pale-faced Arabs. They replied briefly that a white man and woman and their children had preceded Brentham's party by a few days--when the moon was still at the full. They were accompanied by a band of Masai with whom the Warangi were friends....

"Are there any Arabs here?" asked Brentham through his interpreter. "Waalabu?" No! They came sometimes to buy ivory, but on their last visit they had tried to carry off some Rangi people as slaves, and if they showed their faces again in Burangi, they would be driven away.

"Then what are you all so excited about?"

They replied it was an affair of their clan, of the people who lived in these villages. Their young married men had gone out this dry season to kill elephants as was their custom, but had returned after three months with no luck at all: hardly a tusk worth looking at, very little meat, and two men killed by the elephants. There could be but one explanation for this. Their wives had been unfaithful to them as soon as their backs were turned. It was well known that if a wife and husband were separated and the wife was unfaithful, a misfortune at once fell on the husband. Consequently the custom of their tribe in such cases was to burn the guilty women on large pyres of brushwood. These pyres were now finished--the white man could see them there along the bank of the river.... Presently the adulterous ladies whose husbands had returned from the luckless elephant-shoot would be led out, tied to the brushwood bundles, and set on fire. He might stay and witness the imposing spectacle if he chose. They learnt that he too was accompanied by a wife--a white woman. It might be a moral lesson to her--if white women were ever unfaithful....

Roger begged the Warangi to spare the women this time. By and bye he would come back to them and explain the whole mystery of luck in sport and the ensuring of an accurate aim, perhaps give them a "medicine," to produce the result they wanted. But meantime he assured them that if they burnt so much as one woman's little finger a terrible curse would fall on the land.

Lucy asked what all this talk was about, and he replied: "Oh, nothing very important--big game shooting." She was preoccupied with pleasanter subjects, the greater coolness of the air now that they had ascended to a higher level, the new green grass of the coming spring, and her own greatly improved health....

"If all goes well," said Roger, "we ought to reach the place where the Stotts are in two long days' march."

"Shall we? I'm rather sorry, as though something was going to break our delicious dream. I should like to go on and on like this for a year...."

"And what about my official duties? I, too, am enjoying this to the full, but I am worried about whether I have done the right thing.... With a desire to please every one all round I sometimes fancy I have embarked on a perilous adventure.... However we must hope for the best. Of course all this is absolutely new ground. I ought to be earning a Geographical medal; instead of which I shall only get an official rebuke.... Did you notice that we seem to have entered a new watershed?"

Lucy: "Although I taught Geography at school, I never really understood what a 'watershed' was. What is it?"

Roger: "I suppose it means the area in which all the waters flow to the same receptacle--a sea, a lake, a marsh. We've just left a river which was flowing steadily to the south, to some unknown end. We rode up a small rise, and now, see, the gathering streams are all flowing northwards. The Masai say these brooks unite farther on to form a river which ends in a lake. Think of that, Lucy! We shall discover a new lake! It ought to be called 'Lake Lucy.'..."

Lucy (blushing): "Oh no, indeed, I should feel quite uncomfortable if I were made so prominent.... But the country seems to get lovelier and lovelier...."

The new streams to which Roger referred irrigated a broad and even expanse of fertile plain sloping gently to the north, and seeming to terminate at the base of gigantic cliffs or lofty mountains which surrounded this valley on three sides. They could only make out dimly the forms of the highest mountains because of the dry-season haze, but they seemed like the craters of volcanoes. Riding to the top of an isolated hillock Roger obtained confirmation of the guides' story. The valley ended in a lake of respectable size.

The grassy flats between the converging rivulets swarmed with big game which showed comparatively little fear of man and might be seen grazing with herds of the natives' cattle. A succession of exclamations, half wonderment, half fear, came from Lucy.

"Oh! ... I ... say! ... I thought those were great tree trunks till they moved, but ... they're..."

"They're giraffes, by Jove! I wonder whether I ought to bring one down? Better not ... might delay us ... and I don't know how the natives 'ud take it...."

A herd of six or seven stately giraffes suspended their browsing on the upper branches of an acacia tree, and gazed at them with their liquid eyes, flicking their satiny bodies with tails that terminated in large black tassels.

"O-oh!'" came from Lucy, as she reined in her donkey. "Look at those things over there! Like houses or great rocks, but they're moving too!"

She pointed with her riding whip to some grey bulks in the middle distance which, as they swished through the herbage, showed here and there a gleam of polished tusks.

"Shoot! Master, shoot!" exclaimed the Wanyamwezi.... "Elephants, Master!" But Roger called for silence and held his hand. Supposing the elephants charged down on Lucy? And then he did not know how the sounds of guns would be received in this new country, what the unknown natives might think, and lastly, perhaps there was beginning to dawn on him an appreciation of what this spectacle meant: a piece of absolutely unspoiled Africa, not yet ravaged by the white man or the native hunter, armed with the white man's weapons. His caravan had plenty of dried meat. They should not break the charm of the Happy Valley--the phrase came suddenly into his mind, some dim remembrance of Dr. Samuel Johnson's ponderous romance.

As they advanced northwards the scenes grew more idyllic. Herds of gnus, hartebeests, elands, and zebras, intermingled with reed buck and impala, alternately stared in immobility, then dashed off in clouds of yellow dust, and once more stood at gaze. Gazelles with glossy black, annulated horns and bodies brilliant in colour--golden-red, black-banded, and snowy-white below--cropped the turf a few yards from the faintly marked track which the caravan was following; and though the bucks lifted their heads to observe this advancing file of human beings they scarcely moved away more than a few yards.

The Valley was not entirely given up to wild life, though it seemed likely that it was only used by man as a pasture ground, and that he preferred the higher country, the hillocks on either side of the plain, for his habitations, out of the way of floods and swamps. But large herds of cattle browsed among antelopes and zebra and were watched over by herdsmen who displayed singularly little curiosity over this first invasion of the Happy Valley by the white man. The Stotts who had preceded Roger and Lucy seemed to have satisfied their curiosity, once and for all. These cattle-tenders were different in physical type to the ordinary Bantu Negro. They were tall; gracefully, slenderly built; and reminded Brentham of Somalis, though their head-hair was close-cropped. Such women as were met showed no sign of fear. They were clad in ample garments of dressed leather. But the men had all the gallant nakedness of the Masai--a skin cape over the shoulders, otherwise only ivory arm-rings and metal-chain necklaces.

The Masai guides occasionally plucked handfuls of grass and exhibited them to the groups of herdsmen as a testimony to the peaceful intentions of the white man's caravan. This voucher was further confirmed by the returning band of Masai who had escorted the Stotts to this Arcadia and were now returning to northern Nguru. They exchanged musical salutations with Roger's guides and told them the "Sitoto" were camped in a village one day's further journey to the north, near the shores of the lake.