Part 16

Ann would further borrow five of Brentham's gun-men to escort her and her fifteen women-porters—her Big-geru—back to Hangodi. She had also engaged at extravagant pay a dozen of the Wagogo, fleet of foot and brave hunters. These, armed with their long-bladed spears, would guide and precede her little party, scaring away the wild beasts by their cries. Lions and rhinoceroses were distinctly a danger to be reckoned with.... By forced marching, especially at night, Ann would be back at Hangodi in two days. It was therefore unwise to miss a single moonlight night as the moon would soon be on the wane. The Ruga-ruga and Wangwana never attacked at night, and if they were anywhere in the neighbourhood—which the Wagogo scouts would soon find out—the party would hide in the daylight hours.

Meantime Brentham and Lucy could remain encamped at Burungi awaiting the return of Ann's escort. If the message was "All's well," they could start off for the coast by the roundabout northern route....

"You seem to be a very capable woman," said Brentham, "as well as being an obstinate one. I agree to your plan, though I have a presentiment I may regret it. If you change your mind and come back I shan't reproach you for being fickle. And besides, you may bring us later news. I must in any case stay here for a few days to prepare for the big march. I must shoot game and have a lot of 'biltong'[#] made for the men...."

[#] Strips of lean meat dried in the sun and thus preserved for a considerable time in dry weather.

"I'm glad you agree," said Ann. "I know I shall be in the right place at Hangodi—for many reasons. As it is, I've already had an idea. The Stotts seem to have been saved by the Masai. The Masai that our Walunga people call 'Wahumba' are on good terms with us. We brought about peace between them and Mbogo. They come to our station to trade and we have cured several of their wounded men from bad lion bites. We will send messengers to the Humba Masai asking for a large war party of spearmen to await down below in the plains any attack by the Arabs. I think the mere knowledge the Masai are there will keep the Arabs from coming near Ulunga."

So the next morning Ann rode off at five o'clock astride her Masai donkey, on which some makeshift arrangement of padded cloths had been tied by way of saddle. Her buxom Big-geru hoisted their light loads and struck up a Moody and Sankey hymn translated by Ann into Kagulu. The grinning Wanyamwezi gunmen brought up the rear, and the wild, unclothed Wagogo with fantastic ostrich feather or zebra-mane head-dresses dashed on ahead, whooping and leaping and shouting their determination to scare away the beasts of the field from the white woman-chief who talked like a man.

CHAPTER XI

THE HAPPY VALLEY

Roger, left alone with Lucy, resolved he would "do the right thing," clenched his teeth so to speak on the vow. He was the more fiercely determined to act honourably because he felt himself to be fighting against her own weakness of fibre, against her overpowering inclination as well as his own. Her attractiveness for him had greatly increased since the renewal of their comradeship. In the early days of the acquaintance, though her prettiness and virginal charm were appealing, she had the naivete and insipidity of an inexperienced girl which soon weary a man of the world who tires of the relation between master and pupil. Now she was a married woman; tempered, rendered more subtle by suffering and experience of mankind, who was readier to express her feelings through her eyes and her reticence than by direct speech. She talked less unreflectingly, and the things she said were more due to her own observation and reasoning than second-hand opinions picked up from other people.

Ann, in the week in which he had seen the two women together, had been just the right foil to throw up Lucy's charming femininity, her refinement in dress and appearance and in the tones of her voice. Ann by contrast was an impudent self-assertive virago with the worth at best of a good drudge. After a year and a half's absence from Europe he made this rediscovery of Lucy, set against a background of Savage Africa—coarse landscapes, jagged rocks, unwieldy trees, bush conflagrations, naked men, wild beasts just kept at bay. (On moonlight nights they could actually descry the grey-white forms of lions and hyenas padding noiselessly round the precincts of their boma.) These violent incongruities made her seem to him a being of exquisite refinement and yet of physical charm. Returning health, intense happiness, the dawning hope of a bright future were dispelling the anaemia and giving back to her face and neck the tinted white of a healthy skin, warmed in tone by a good circulation. There was a sparkle of animation in her violet eyes and a new lustre in her brown gold hair.

It would be a good thing for both, he felt, if he found the Stotts as soon as possible and induced them to join company in a march to the coast. His career—Yes, he must remember that. His career above all things. He must not be turned aside from his great ambitions by any woman. Yet he had missed fire over the Unguja appointment and wanted consolation elsewhere. It was rather weary always to be at work, in an office, or in the field: never to settle down to a honeymoon and the joys of domesticity. Perhaps he should have taken another line—the Colonial Office and administrative work, not the Foreign Office and adventurous diplomacy in Savage Africa.... He wanted to explore, create, and then administer a great African Empire, tasks infinitely above the mean capacity of a Godfrey Dewburn or a Spencer Bazzard. Why could he not now—straight away—plunge into the vast unknown which lay before him to the north, to the north-west? Where had Stanley disappeared to? What had become of Emin? What was happening in Uganda since the death of Mutesa? What unsolved mysteries lay west of the Victoria Nyanza, north of Tanganyika, south of the Bahr-al-ghazal? Should he take Lucy to his heart, throw conventions and commissions to the winds, and start away with her on a wonderful journey of discovery, leaving the world and the Rev. John Baines to say what they liked, and covering his private treachery by his amazing discoveries?

Nonsense! Why, Queen Victoria would never overlook this act of adultery. He might discover twenty lakes and name them all after princes of her family or annex gold mines and pipes of diamonds and she would refuse the accolade, and Society at her bidding would close its ranks against the dishonoured missionary's wife. Besides, he had barely enough trade goods with which to pay his way back to the coast, especially by a round-about route. The African soon looks coldly on the god-like white man if he has no more beads, cloth, copper wire, knives, and gun-caps with which to pay road dues, "customs" or good-will presents.

And his armed porters? They were only engaged for a six-months' safari. They must be fed and paid or they would desert.... He must put all this nonsense out of his head—take a few pills, a little bromide—tire himself out every day big game shooting or scouting till the men sent with Ann Jamblin returned with their news.

If he took all this exercise, he would not lie awake at night in his hot tent, under his mosquito curtain longing, aching to go to Lucy's quarters and say, "I love you: let us fight against it no longer. We may all be dead a month hence."

To guard against such impulses he had insisted on Halima's sleeping on an Unguja mat in her mistress's tent, and had surrounded the tent with a square of reed fence which gave her a greater degree of privacy than the wretched tent afforded. Within this there was space for a bathroom and a "sitting-room," a shaded retreat to which she could retire for a siesta or a confabulation with Halima who was still giving instruction in Swahili. Outside this "harim"—as his men who constructed it certainly took it to be—there was a "baraza" common to them both: a thatched shelter open all round. Here the camp table was placed for meals.

Roger determined to shut Lucy out of his thoughts as much as possible, to think only for the day, for the dangers by which they were surrounded, the hundred risks which attended their ever getting back to civilization.... As soon as they could reach the coast he would send Lucy to England and return to his Consulate at Medinat-al-barkah.... Of course, should John Baines die of fever—missionaries often did—or—if—he were killed? ... Suppose his station really was attacked...? But then, again, such thoughts as these were of the order of David's when he hankered after Bathsheba....

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.

"That's all right," said Roger, his mind greatly relieved. "Then let's give our safari a half-holiday and take things easy. We'll pitch our camp on that knoll. How delightful is this short green turf after the miles and miles of burnt grass we've passed through. The spring has begun here a month earlier than in the lower-lying country. I expect the high mountains to the north have attracted the rains, though it's only October. Have you noticed, also, since we entered this valley we've had no mosquitoes? I wonder why? Something p'raps they don't like in the water, or not enough long grass?..."

As soon as the camp was finished, the pastoral people brought them rich, sweet milk for sale, in tightly-woven grass receptacles, in calabashes, or clay pots. Sometimes this milk had a smoky taste from the rough methods by which the milk pots were cleansed. But it was as sweet as a nut and seemed to Lucy, who had long been deprived of milk, except doled out in small quantities for tea, incomparably delicious as a thirst-quencher. And these Egyptian-like people—so often showing a Pharaonic profile and speaking a language which Roger afterwards declared not very far removed from Gala—also traded in honey, honey flavoured with the scent of the acacia blossoms, appearing now as golden fluff on the awakening trees.