"Ghastly! It looks like a place where a stream should be running, too."
"Well, I"ve seen such a roaring, racing, mountainous torrent galloping down here, that there wasn"t foothold for man or beast anywhere between these krantzes. By-the-by, you may devoutly pray that there"s no rain during the next few days. A thunder-storm in the mountains higher up would set the whole of this place humming with water."
The sun had left them, and the grey dead silence of the savage defile seemed to echo back the tones of their voices and the clink of the horses" hoofs, with abnormal clearness. Sellon eyed the grim rock walls towering over their heads, and growled.
"Well, it"s a beastly place, as I said before. And talking about water, that"s the worst of this country--you always have either not enough or else too much of it. All the same, I"m glad to hear we shall soon have some to dilute our grog with tonight. This rattling over stones is dry and throaty work, and the water in your leathern thing must have touched boiling point by now. What"s the row?"
The last came in a quick, startled tone. Renshaw had suddenly slid from his saddle, and was picking up some of the large stones which lay in such plentiful profusion. As he arose from this occupation a great rolling, writhing shape became apparent upon a sandspit barely a dozen yards off. Up went the hideous head into the air, waving to and fro above the great heaving coil, and the cruel eyes scintillated with a baleful fire. The horses backed and shied in alarm, snorting violently.
Shorter and shorter became the movements of the head, and the forking tongue protruded as the formidable reptile emitted a bloodcurdling hiss.
Maurice Sellon felt himself shuddering with horror and repulsion as he gazed for the first time upon the glistening, check-patterned coils of a large python.
Whizz! Whack! The stone launched from Renshaw"s practised hand just grazed the waving neck, knocking splinters from the rock behind. With another appalling hiss, the creature, its head still aloft, began to uncoil, as if with the object of rushing upon its antagonist.
Whack! With unerring aim, with the velocity of a catapult, the second stone came full in contact with the muscular writhing neck. The frightful head dropped as if by magic, and the great scaly coils heaved and sprawled about on the sand in a dying agony.
"Broken his neck," said Renshaw, cautiously approaching the expiring reptile, and letting into him with the remaining stones he held in his left hand. "Python. Twelve feet if he"s an inch."
"Good old shot! First-rate!" cried Maurice, enthusiastically. "I say, old chap, I envy you. A great wriggling brute like that makes me sick only to look at him. Pah!" he added, with a shudder.
"Look out for his mate," said Renshaw, remounting. "Pythons often go in couples. And I am sorry to say there are a good many snakes about here."
"Baugh! Bau--augh!"
The loud sonorous bark echoed forth in startling suddenness among the overhanging cliffs. But it didn"t seem to come from high overhead. It sounded almost in their path.
"Baboons!" said Renshaw. "They must be all round our water-hole. There they are. No--on no account fire."
The poort here widened out. Gra.s.sy slopes arose to the base of the cliffs. In the centre lay a rocky pool, whose placid surface glittered mirror-like in the gloaming. But between this and the hors.e.m.e.n was a crowd of dark, uncouth shapes. Again that loud warning bark sounded forth--this time overhead, but so near that it struck upon the human ear as almost menacing.
"Baboons, eh?" said Sellon, catching sight of the brutes. "I"m going to charge them."
Renshaw smiled quietly to himself.
"Charge away," he said. "But whatever you do, don"t fire a shot. It may bring down upon us a very different sort of obstructive than a _clompje_ of _baviaans_, and then this undertaking is one more added to the list of failures, even if we get out with whole skins."
But Maurice hardly heard him to the end, as, spurring up his horse, he dashed straight at the troop of baboons. The latter, for their kind, were abnormally large. There might have been about threescore of the great ungainly brutes, squatting around on the rocks which overhung the pool.
As the horseman galloped up they could be seen baring their great tusks, grinning angrily. But they did not move.
Sellon had not bargained for this. The great apes, squatted together, showing an unmoved front to the aggressor, looked sufficiently formidable, not to say threatening. Sellon"s pace slowed down to a walk before he got within sixty yards of them. Then he halted and sat staring irresolutely at the hideous beasts. Still they showed no sort of disposition to give way. For a few moments both parties stood thus eyeing each other.
All of a sudden, led by about a dozen of the largest, the whole troop of hairy monsters came shambling forward--gibbering and gnashing their great tusks in unpleasantly suggestive fashion. A second more, and Sellon would have turned tail and fled ignominiously, when--
Whizz! Whack-whack! whack! A perfect shower of sharp stones came pelting into the thick of the ugly crowd with the swiftness and accuracy of a Winchester rifle, knocking out eyes, battering hairy limbs, playing havoc among them, like a charge of grape-shot. With yells of pain and terror, the brutes turned and fled, scampering up the rocks in all directions.
Renshaw, guessing the turn events were likely to take, had quietly dismounted, and, filling his hands and pockets with stones, had advanced to the support of his now discomfited friend.
"Those brutes don"t understand us quite," he said, after the roar of laughter evoked by this sudden turn in the tide of affairs had subsided.
"One shot would have sent them scampering, but we dared not fire it.
They are not used to the human form divine in this wilderness, but they won"t forget that bombardment in a hurry."
"By Jingo! no. Fancy being obstructed by a herd of monkeys. All the same, old chap, they did look ugly sitting there champing their tusks at one like that."
"So they did. Now we"ll let our horses drink, and then adjourn to our sleeping-place. We mustn"t camp too near the water, because the krantzes swarm with tigers [leopards], to say nothing of worse cattle, who might interfere with us if we kept them from their nightly drink.
And we can"t light a fire to-night."
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE.
"A REGION OF EMPTINESS, HOWLING AND DREAR."
Right up under the cliff--the beetling rock overhead, the slope of the hillside falling away into the basin above described--did our adventurers make their fireless camp. But though fireless they were under no lack of ingredients for a substantial meal, nor of the wherewithal to wash it down satisfactorily; which latter fact was perhaps the better appreciated from the certainty of this being the last water they should find until their return.
"Queer thing this sort of contrast, Fanning," said Sellon, who with his back against the rock was blowing tobacco clouds with post-prandial contentment. "I suppose some of these evenings, when one gets back into dress clothes and heavy dinner-parties again, one will look back to this crouch under a big cliff as a kind of dream."
"I suppose so. Yet man is a would-be adaptable animal, after all. I remember a chap, an Englishman, who was with me sea-cow shooting up on the Tonga border. He had an idea of doing at Rome as Romans do, so he got hold of a Zulu _mutya_ [A kind of ap.r.o.n--pretty scanty in dimensions. It is usually made of cat-tails and bullock-hide], and cut about in nothing but that and a pair of canvas shoes. We were after the hippos in a boat, and it was risky, too--for the river was full of crocodiles--in case a hippo should tilt us over. Well, before we had pushed off an hour, the joker was burnt red, and in less than two was literally skinned alive. He didn"t kill any sea-cows that day."
"Battling sport, that sea-cow shooting must be. What do you say, Fanning, when we"ve found our Golconda, to starting a shooting-trip bang into the interior? Hallo! What"s that giving tongue? Sounds for all the world like a pack of foxhounds."
A shrill, long-drawn, baying chorus came floating upon the night-air, but very distant. Then it drew nearer, then faded again, then plainer still, then seemed to die away fainter and fainter in the distance. The chorus, borne upon the night in fluctuating waves of sound, blended in wild harmony with the frowning heights and untrodden desolation of this out-of-the-world gorge.
"Wild dogs," said Renshaw, listening intently. "They"re hunting something--running it pretty closely, too, or they wouldn"t be tonguing like that. By the way, talking of wild dogs, I had an experience with them once which was very much akin to that one of yours with the baboons a little while ago. I was returning from a trip into the Gaza country, with a waggon, and knocking around to shoot something, I fell in with a clump of giraffes. They were shyer than usual, and led me a long chevy.
I only managed to wound one--not badly enough--and then it got dark.
My horse was rather done up, and I didn"t quite know where I was. Then it became obvious I shouldn"t fetch the waggon again that night.
"Just as I was casting about for a good place to camp, I heard a whimper close at hand. The veldt was sprinkled about with clumps of mimosa and other thorns--in parts thickish--and all of a sudden the horse threw up his ears and began to snort. I looked up. There, right in front, squatted on their haunches in a semicircle, not a hundred yards off, were a lot of wild dogs. Couldn"t have been less than forty of them. I just gave a shout and rushed at them. But they didn"t move until I got within twenty yards, and then they got up, cantered away the same distance, and squatted down again. Then I lost patience, and picking out a big one, just bowled the brute over as he sat. He stiffened out without a yelp, but the rest didn"t seem to care. So I stuck in another cartridge, and stretched out another, and rushed at them at the same time. They scattered then, but in no hurry. Now, I thought, I"ll ride on. But I happened to look back to see if they had dropped off. Not a bit of it. The brutes were quietly trotting along in my wake. Again I turned back. They just stopped, and squatted down as before.
"Now I had never known wild dogs act like this, the difficulty being, as a rule, to get within shot of them at all, and I own to a kind of eerie feeling as I marked the persistency of these ordinarily sneaking and cowardly brutes, sitting on their haunches there in the dusk, licking their lips as if they knew I was for them. You see it wasn"t so much on their account I felt shivery, but it looked as if they knew what I didn"t--like the old superst.i.tion, if it be a superst.i.tion, of a shark following a ship, pointing to an approaching death on board, or the actual fact of a lot of aasvogels watching a wounded buck, or a wounded anything.
"All of a sudden, I became conscious of a most sickening and overpowering stench. By that time it was almost dark--but not too dark to make out objects indistinctly--and the objects that caught my eye at that moment were sufficiently hideous and appalling. All around, the veldt was strewn with human corpses--swollen and decomposed, torn and mangled by wild animals, or ripped and hacked by the a.s.segais of their slayers. They were natives, and of all ages and s.e.xes, lying about in contorted att.i.tudes, some heaped upon each other, the frightfully distorted countenances staring up at the sky. Pah! it was sickening, I tell you, coming upon this in the dusk. There seemed no end of them, and they were scattered as if cut down while fleeing. I learned afterwards it was the result of a Matabili raid. Well, this find accounted in a measure for the boldness of the wild dogs. They had been largely feeding on the human form divine, and had acquired a proportionate contempt for the same."
"What an experience!" said Sellon, whom this story, told amid the dark and savage surroundings of their fireless camp, considerably impressed.
"You must have seen some uncommonly queer things in your time, Fanning?"
The other smiled slightly.
"Well, yes, I have. This is a land of strange experiences, although prosaic enough on the surface. I hope none will befall us before we get home again--always excepting the strange experience of finding ourselves rich men in the shape of what we are looking for."
"By the way, whereabouts was it you were attacked that time? Anywhere near here?"
"About half an hour"s ride further on. The poort narrows very much, and the cliffs are not nearly so high. It was just sundown, and I was jogging quietly along homewards very much down on my luck over the third failure, when bang came a shower of a.s.segais and arrows and kerries, hurtling about the rocks like a young hailstorm. I spurred up then, you bet; but the ground is beastly rough, as you"ve seen, and the enemy could get along as fast as I could--besides, I had a brute of a pack-horse that wouldn"t lead properly. They chased me down to where we first entered this defile, and by that time it was dark--luckily for me.
As it was, I only shook them off by sacrificing the pack-horse."
"Now, how the deuce did you manage that?"
"Why, I knew they"d reckon on me taking the shortest cut for the river.
So when I got out of the poort at the bottom of the turret-head mountain--you remember that steep little slope where your horse turned a somersault--I put on pace a little so as to get a start. Then I stuck a burr under the pack-horse"s tail and cast him loose. Away he went, slanting off into the other poort, which seems to lead towards the river, while I lay low. I could see the devils skipping down the poort on his heels, in high old glee. In the night I moved on again, striking due north, and after making nearly a week"s cast--and nearly dying of hunger and thirst--I fetched up at the drift we came through day before yesterday. And, by the way, I think old Greenway was wrong in saying, "Beware the schelm Bushmen." Those chaps struck me as more like Korannas. There were some quite big fellows among them."