“I can’t help it, Meredith,” he said one day, with a scared look, after a particularly violent outburst of temper. “I don’t know what it is. I sometimes think I am going mad.”
And soon after that the change was made.
An advance column, commanded by Meredith and Durnovo, was selected to push on to the Plateau, while Oscard and Joseph followed more leisurely with the baggage and the slower travellers.
One of the strangest journeys in the vast unwritten history of commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range—unmarked on any map, unnamed by any geographer—to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau. It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could pierce the density of the forest where Nature had held unchecked, untrimmed sway for countless generations. Victor Durnovo noted a thousand indications unseen by his four companions. The journey no longer partook of the nature of a carefully calculated progress across a country untrodden by a white man’s foot; it was a wild rush in a straight line through unbroken forest fastness, guided by an instinct that was stronger than knowledge. And the only Englishman in the party—Jack Meredith—had to choose between madness and rest. He knew enough of the human brain to be convinced that the only possible relief to this tension was success.
Victor Durnovo would never know rest now until he reached the spot where the Simiacine should be. If the trees were there, growing, as he said, in solitary state and order, strangely suggestive of human handiwork, then Victor Durnovo was saved. If no such spot was found, madness and death could only follow.
To save his companion’s reason, Meredith more than once drugged his food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative, billow-like inequalities—the deposit of a glacial age—Durnovo refused to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy tinned meat as they went along, the four men—three blacks and one white—followed in the footsteps of their mad pilot.
“We’re getting to the mountains—we’re getting to the mountains! We shall be there tonight! Think of that, Meredith—tonight!” he kept repeating with a sickening monotony. And all the while he stumbled on. The perspiration ran down his face in one continuous stream; at times he paused to wipe it from his eyes with the back of his hands, and as these were torn and bleeding, there were smears of blood across his cheeks.
The night fell; the moon rose, red and glorious, and the beasts of this untrodden forest paused in their search for meat to watch with wondering, fearless eyes that strange, unknown animal—man.
It was Durnovo who, climbing wildly, first saw the break in the trees ahead. He gave a muffled cry of delight, and in a few minutes they were all rushing, like men possessed, up a bare slope of broken shale.
Durnovo reached the summit first. A faint, pleasant odour was wafted into their faces. They stood on the edge of a vast tableland melting away in the yellow moonlight. Studded all over, like sheep in a meadow, were a number of little bushes, and no other vegetation.
Victor Durnovo stooped over one of these. He buried his face among the leaves of it, and suddenly he toppled over.
“Yes,” he cried as he fell, “it’s Simiacine!”
And he turned over with a groan of satisfaction, and lay like a dead man.
XXI
The First Consignment
Since all that I can ever do for thee
Is to do nothing, may’st thou never see,
Never divine, the all that nothing costeth me.
One morning, three months later, Guy Oscard drew up in line his flying column. He was going back to England with the first consignment of Simiacine. During the twelve weeks that lay behind there had been constant reference made to his little body of picked men, and the leader had selected with a grave deliberation that promised well.
The lost soldier that was in him was all astir in his veins as he reviewed his command in the cool air of early morning. The journey from Msala to the Plateau had occupied a busy two months. Oscard expected to reach Msala with his men in forty days. Piled up in neat square cases, such as could be carried in pairs by a man of ordinary strength, was the crop of Simiacine, roughly valued by Victor Durnovo at forty thousand pounds. Ten men could carry the whole of it, and the twenty cases set close together on the ground made a bed for Guy Oscard. Upon this improvised couch he gravely stretched his bulk every night all through the journey that followed.
Over the whole face of the sparsely vegetated tableland the dwarf bushes grew at intervals, each one in a little circle of its own, where no grass grew; for the dead leaves, falling, poisoned the earth. There were no leaves on the bushes now, for they had all been denuded, and the twisted branches stood out naked in the morning mist. Some of the bushes had been roughly pruned, to foster, if possible, a more bushy growth and a heavier crop of leaves near to the parent stem.
It
