Chapter XXIV

We were in high country covered with tall grass, sparsely set with trees, sweeping to a climbing forest. There was a ragged, deep-cut water-course, and there were ant-hills, little lower than the native huts and shaped much like these. So high were we that there was no great heat. We breathed salubriousness. The mountains above us had snow upon their brows. This was elephant country, and we kept fires about our camp to ward off any trampling rush from the herds we saw, chiefly afar, but sometimes near. We had had a stiff three days' march through broken and hilly country, thinly inhabited. Sir Charles called a halt of two days and nights.

Maxwell, Ferraro, and I, and with us Ahasuerus and two Bantu porters, made our way along the flanks of a hill a mile or two from camp. We had climbed a bold point and had gazed thence over a green and tawny, just undulating sea to gigantic tumbled, frozen waves, white-tipped. Coming down, we saw below us at no great distance a piece of the forest in agitation, shaking and bending as though a bag of Eolus were opening just there and nowhere else. "Elephants!" said the Bantus.

We came from the hillside out upon the plain and began to cross this toward the watercourse. Trees were still about us, but not many. Between us and the camp stretched a ribbon of wood through which we must pass. We neared it. Suddenly it, too, shook, and there poured from it angry trumpeting. We stopped short. The Bantus began to chatter. "They surmise," said Ferraro, who was the language-master of the three, "that the camp made some elephants angry, coming near it perhaps and driven away by shots and sight of fire. We missed hearing the shots because the wind is blowing straight from us to the camp. But by the same token we had best look to ourselves, for the elephants will presently know that we are here. And they are angry. Some one of them is hurt."

We were as far from the deeper forest that clothed the hill as from the ravine of the watercourse, down which we might conceivably make our way safely enough. The grass grew so tall that in part it screened us. We began to move quickly across the plain to the watercourse. We had gone but a little way when the note of the trumpeting changed. "They've got our wind," said Maxwell.

The edge of the ribbon of wood seemed to bulge, to start forward, to shake out pieces of shadow. There were ten or twelve of these protuberances. They came away from the ribbon--showed themselves for angry giants willing to charge us, overtake and trample us. We were men, not elephants, but we must and did run. There was a great bull in front. We reached the watercourse, before us a precipitous bank, down which we might plunge with some risk to neck and limb, but which the angered herd and the more than angered leader might hardly attempt. Ferraro, Maxwell, Ahasuerus, the Bantus, and myself--all seemed there. Ahasuerus--

We were over the rim when I missed Ahasuerus. I turned back. I saw him a hundred yards and more away, limping, trying to run. The eight or ten cows and young elephants with the great bull had stopped in a grove of slender trees to the right, near the hill. But the bull, with lifted trunk, with gleaming tusks, was racing, trumpeting, toward him. I ran. I shouted. I waved above my head, above the grass, a coat that I carried.

The oncoming elephant saw me and swerved from Ahasuerus. I ran, drawing him farther.... There was little in my mind but a singing of old days in the corn-field, Ahasuerus and I working in the hot sun, in the same furrow. The corn-field and the swimming-hole--

The voice of the elephant was in my very ears. I seemed to see blended with my shadow the shadow of his tusks, of the trunk curving toward me like a sickle, of the vast, lifted leg. The report of Maxwell's rifle blended with the trumpeting.

The elephant received the ball, but was not apparently severely hurt. He half wheeled, missed me, tore beyond me, and stopped, bellowing. Then from the distant wood, in agitation, came a burst of calling. The cows moving in this direction now also called. The elephant seemed for one moment to think. Then he swung his bulk about and left us, trumpeting of his griefs.

Ahasuerus, running with the rest of us, had caught foot in some root, suffered a heavy fall and a sprained ankle. Now we gathered him up and, keeping to the watercourse, made our way to camp.

Ahasuerus said: "Twas worse 'n cramp in the swimmin'-hole! First, I saw the horrors and nothing else to amount to anything. And then I saw Daddy Guinea, sitting somewhere, smoking his pipe, and looking happy as a June-bug, and he said, 'Come erlong, boy--come erlong through!' I sho' was glad to hear you shouting at that elephant!"

Maxwell, in camp that night, supper eaten and bedtime come, leaned against a tree before the tent. "Ahasuerus all right?"

"Oh yes! He'll have to ride one of the mules for several days."

Maxwell stood listening to the night sounds in the bush, beyond the smoky ring of our fires. "If that fellow had trampled you into pulp, as for a little it certainly seemed that he would ... what then? What next?"

"I didn't think," I answered; "but if I had, I should have said, 'There will still be a "then," and a "next."' How are you going to stop there being? The rush of a bull-elephant--yes, or of Niagara--is nothing to the impetus of you or of me!"

Lying on my bed that night the "you" and "me" went more subtly together. Variation and Unity. Why did we think "Variation," and then "Unity," and turn from one to the other, restless, perplexed, still keeping succession, opposition, parties to choose between? But Variation-and-Unity, or Unity-and-Variation--the phrase one noun.... I lay there one power, an organism, and yet, God knows, I included variousness.... To feel as and with this camp, both in its oneness and its multiplicity--what was that but self-cognition as a larger organism? This camp, this Africa, these seven seas and five continents, this earth, this solar system, this visible and invisible universe.... Ever a greater, more conscious self....

Magnitude was around me, power, an upper realm of mind. But it sank away, it vanished, like sheet lightning. It ever vanished thus, and I cried within, "O God! when will the wings hold?"

But out of the flash came always, I knew, an angel into one of my many hells. Down there, under my daily consciousness, a light in darkness, it continued to work.

Definitely now, in my life, I was come to the plane where two lives, the inner and the outer, are in the crucible and must melt together. Now the heat and light that were the crucible increased in intensity, and now they sank to scarcely a glowing. The crucible was immense, the lives within it multiform; the process due to extend itself over centuries, possibly through eons. Much was within the crucible that was obstinate, ignorant, selfish, and perverse. But I knew at least that I was in the crucible ... also that I was the crucible.

We went on from this country. Here we changed carriers save for a few who would still accompany us. Zanzibar and Coast men, well paid, in good humor, gave us ample good-bys. Uganda men, tall and strong, shouldered rolls and cases. The moving line stretched afar over rolling grassland. I thought of Indians afile long since, through American woods. These Uganda folk, Hamitic men, placed beside the Indian might not seem so very different.

The mountains rose higher. We gazed upon purple giants, with helmets, under the equator, of silver. As we marched the robes grew green, and we saw the shoulders of naked rock, and the whitened heads held stark and high. Now we were climbing, a moving line like an ant army, upon the lower reaches of the giant's robe. About us were trees of wonder, and from them monkeys chattered at us.

At sunset the extended line subsided into the root-knot of camp. We slept in the midst of a forest much less than half asleep. Plateau that we had left, slope that we had mounted, we were eight thousand feet above the sea. High above us yet watched the snowy heads.

The following day we sought and found a lofty pass through which the line might cross the range and begin the descent upon the western side. Here, in a hollow of fine Alpine grass and flowering shrub, we slept, ten thousand feet above the far-distant sea. The next day and night camp rested here, under charge of Robinson, the trader, long known and well liked by the Bahima men. With him stayed Carthew Roberts, and likewise Ahasuerus. The rest of us would climb to the helmet that lifted over the pass, to the very helmet feather.

So we did. In the good, late afternoon light we came out below the snow, upon a wide ledge of rock, from which we might see afar from north to south by way of the west. The white head above us, the very crest, we left for sunrise. This ledge was fitted for the night. There was not only right surface, but at the back a sheltered half-cavern.

Chancing to be in advance, I came first upon the ledge. I saw, with an intake of the breath, the great view. To right and left mountain arms; below in the pass the fairy plumes of our camp-fires; out and beyond and very far below, washed in the gold of the lowering sun, illimitable forest. I stood and looked. Out of a belt of dwarf growth, up the difficult stony slope toward the ledge, came the others, one by one. With the sun behind me, I watched their coming. Maxwell, with his long stride and his dry, poised strength, was ahead. Ferraro, so much smaller, but agile as a grasshopper, came next, then Llewellyn, then Mannheim, then Sir Charles, then John Sydney.

As I stood there Conrad Conrad flashed into mind--Conrad and the Peaks of Otter and the tawny man.

The rich, the amber light bathed me standing on the rock, and bathed them coming on. But to my senses there seemed something more than warm light from a ninety-odd million miles away, eight hundred thousand miles in diameter, ball of fire. There streamed from within outward a happiest sense of strength and lightness. It was as though I had caught a ray from a supersensible sun. My frame felt vast, fluid without waste, transparent without colorlessness, strong without weight, plastic to thought, a thrilling, lucent, finer matter. I felt this of the frame I called mine, and I felt it of those companions in Africa coming toward me. It was as though, feeling it of the one frame, I must feel it of the others, because all were in truth one frame. The sense was of new bodies breaking from old sheaths, bodies fed with, built up from, elements highly evolved, grain of upland fields ground in golden mills. It came with indescribable breadth and depth, indescribable exquisiteness of sensation, indescribable delicacy, richness, and strength of emotion. Maxwell, stepping now upon the rock, was beautiful to me, and so were Ferraro and Mannheim, Llewellyn, Sir Charles, John Sydney, and so were the two Bahima men.

They mounted to the shelf of rock with the farther snowy crest behind and half Africa, it seemed, below. "Ha!" said Sir Charles. "I suppose we live for high lights such as these!" His grim face relaxed. There came to him, and I suppose to all of us, the wave of Philip Grantham's hand and his infectious laughter.

Below the ledge was broken scrub enough. We gathered wood and made a great fire. We had food with us and we cooked and ate our supper. It tasted most good there in the winey air, by the crackling flame. Supper over, we examined the half-cave behind us for sleeping-quarters and we gathered more wood.

We felt as yet no desire for sleep, and the west was magnificent, while all the land below lay still beneath a purple pall. Llewellyn broke into song. The words were Welsh. "In praise of mountains," explained the singer. "Of mountains and the spirit who couches among them!"

We sat about the fire and fell to talking. Llewellyn, usually rather silent, seemed to have his lips unlocked by this place. "There comes out the golden Venus--Venus Urania! Mannheim! Where do you think may be what they call the fourth dimension?"

"In the subjective. Within us."

"We must be just being born in that world," said the Welshman. "Earth and heaven! What an objective we'll make ere we are grown!"

Sir Charles spoke. "Where do you think are the dead?"

"Within us."

"But there's no real realization of that--any more than there is of other things I read about, hear talked about, in this amazing world!"

"Give Time time. You've just said that it is amazing."

Llewellyn began a half-spoken, half-chanted processional of thought. It may have been partly an improvisation, partly a recitation from some old bard. It began about the mountains, and it went on about the great drama and beauty of the earth. He chanted of seas and islands and continents, of zone and clime, of the outstretched landscape of time, of scintillant currents of peoples. And all came under the mantle of an Individual.

He ceased his chant. We looked at the stars--Rigel and Canopus and Sirius, Achernar and the Southern Cross. John Sydney spoke. "Universal Energy or Everlasting God? Which do you say, Mannheim?"

"I say the Self that I merge toward," answered Mannheim. "It is the same with Universal Energy and Everlasting God."

"And you, Michael?"

"I say the same."

We watched the sky. There was splendor, there was pureness, there was vigor. Each one seemed to feel the center in the other, take thence the point of view. Therefore we had many mountain-tops in one.