"They are off"; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible. Then silence came again for a few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets stormed the stars.
Hillyard drew a breath.
"Let us go on," he said.
They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that morning smote upon his eyes. A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out among the tree-boles.
Hillyard looked at his shikari. But the shikari neither spoke nor altered the regularity of his face. Hillyard put no question in consequence. The Arab was ten days" journey from the nearest village and, even so, his back was turned towards it. He was moving from solitude into solitude still more silent and remote. It was impossible.
Hillyard"s eyes were playing him false.
He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the vision would have gone. But there was the Arab still nearer to them and moving with a swift agility. A ray of sunlight struck through the branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something the man carried--a carbine with a bra.s.s hammer. And the next moment a sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive him. For he heard the slapping of the Arab"s loose slippers upon the hard-caked earth.
Oh yes, the man was real enough. For the shikari suddenly swerved from the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped. The two men talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted.
Hillyard lit his pipe.
"Who is it, Hamet?" he cried, and the shikari turned with his companion and came back.
"It is the postman," he said as though the delivery of letters along the Dinder River were the most commonplace of events.
"The postman!" cried Hillyard. "What in the world do you mean?"
"Yes," Hamet explained. "He carries letters between Abyssinia and Senga on the Blue Nile. He is now on his way back to Abyssinia."
"But how long does it take him?" Hillyard asked in amazement.
"He goes and returns once a year. The journey takes him four months each way unless he meets with a party shooting. Then it takes longer for he goes with the party to get meat."
Hillyard stared at the Arab in amazement. He was a lean slip of a man, almost as black as a negro, with his hair running back above the temples, and legs like walking-sticks. He stood wreathed in smiles and nodding confirmation of Hamet"s words. But to Hillyard, with the emotions of the dark hour just past still shivering about him, he seemed something out of nature. Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the carbine from the postman"s hand. It was an ancient thing of Spanish manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.
"But this can"t be of any use," he cried. "Is the man never attacked?"
Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at all; and interpreted the conversation.
"No. He has only once fired his rifle. One night--oh, a long way farther to the south--he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away. You must know that all these little Korans he carries on his arms and round his neck have been specially blessed by a most holy man."
The postman"s shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck were circled about by chaplets on which little wooden Korans were strung. He fingered them and counted them, smiling like a woman displaying her jewels to her less fortunate friends.
"So he is safe," continued Hamet. "Yes, he will even have his picture taken. Yes, he can afford to suffer that. He will stand in front of the great eye and the machine shall go click, and it will not do him any harm at all. He has a letter for you." Hamet dropped from his enthusiasm over the wonderful immunity of the postman from the dangers of photography into a most matter-of-fact voice.
"A letter for me? That"s impossible," cried Hillyard.
But the Arab was thrusting his hand here and there in the load on the donkey"s back and finally drew out a goatskin bag. Hillyard, like other Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the inefficiency of all Postmasters-general. A blight fell upon such persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest caricatures of bureaucrats. It could not be that the postal service was now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance. Yet the Arab drew forth a sealed envelope and handed it to Hillyard. And it bore the inscription of his name.
Oh, but it bore much more than that! It was written in a hand which Hillyard had not seen for seven years, and the mere sight of it swept him back in a glory of recollections to Oxford, its towers and tall roofs, which mean so much more to the man who has gone down than to the youth who is up. The forest, with its patterns of golden sunlight and its colonnades of trees crowding away into darkness, was less visible than those towers to Hillyard, as he stood with the envelope in his hand. Once more he swung down the High and across the Broad from a lecture with a ragged gown across his arm. Merton and the House, New College and Magdalen Tower--he saw the enchanted city across Christ Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington, and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy used to roam. For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell.
He tore it open and read:
"_Some one in London is asking for you. Who it is I don"t know. But the message came through in a secret cipher and it might be important. I think you should pack your affs. and hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you._"
Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.
"He will find food in our camp," he said to Hamet, with a nod towards the postman. "We may as well go on."
Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that day. The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon the camels. The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to gather. He had one of the green volumes of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne"
in his pocket, but this morning the splendid Four for once did not enchain him. Who was it in London who wanted him--wanted him so much that cipher telegrams must find him out on the banks of the Dinder River? Was this letter the summons to the something more and something different? Was the postman to Abyssinia the expected messenger? The miracle of that morning predisposed him to think so.
He sat thus for an hour, and then stepping daintily, with timid eyes alert, a tall reed-buck and his doe came through the glade towards the water. But they did not drink; they waited, cropping the gra.s.s.
Gradually, through a long hour, others gathered, tawny and yellow, and dappled-brown, and stood and fed until--perhaps a signal was given, perhaps a known moment had come--all like soldiers at a command, moved down to the water"s edge.
Six nights later Hillyard camped at Lueisa, near to that big tree under which it is not wise to spread your bed. He took his bath at ten o"clock at night under the moon, and the water from the river was hot. He stretched himself out in his bed and waked again that night after the moon had set, to fix indelibly in his memory the blazing dome of stars above his head, and the Southern Cross burning in a corner of the sky.
The long, wonderful holiday was ended. To-morrow night he would sleep in a house. Would he ever come this way again?
In the dark of the morning he struck westwards from the Dinder, across a most tedious neck of land, for Senga and the Blue Nile.
CHAPTER VI
THE HONORARY MEMBER
At six o"clock in the evening Colin Rayne, a young civilian in the Sudan Service, heard, as he sat on the balcony of the mess at Senga, the rhythmical thud of camels swinging in to their rest in the freshness of the night air.
"There"s our man," he exclaimed, and running downstairs, he reached the door just as Hillyard"s twelve camels and his donkeys trooped into the light. Hillyard was riding bareheaded, with his helmet looped to his saddle, a young man, worn thin by sun and exercise, with fair burnt hair, and a brown clean shaven face. Colin Rayne went up to him as he dismounted.
"Captain Luttrell asked me to look after you. He has got some work on hand for the moment. We"ll see after your affs."
"Thank you."
"You might show me, by the way, where your cartridges are."
Hillyard selected the camel on which they were packed and Rayne called a Sudanese sergeant to take them into the mess.
"Now we will go upstairs. I expect that you can do with a whisky-and-soda," he said.
Hillyard was presented to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers of this headquarters of a Province. They were all young, Hillyard himself was older than any of them.
"Oh, we have got some married ones, too," said Rayne, "but they live in houses of their own like gentlefolk."
"There are some Englishwomen here then?" said Hillyard, and for an appreciable moment there was silence. Then a shortish, square man, with a heavy moustache explained, if explanation it could be called.
"No. They were sent off to Senaar this morning--to be out of the way.
Wiser."
Hillyard asked no questions but drank his whisky-and-soda.
"I haven"t seen Luttrell since we were at Oxford together," he said.