Chapter XXV: Escape

The elephant, with a heavy swinging gait, made its way through the green shade of the forest. Hanging from its side Lursac, with wide open eyes, shivered all over. Around him floated the stagnant, decaying smell of the undergrowth, like the sickening and enervating atmosphere of a hot greenhouse. The vegetation became thicker. A dull greenish half-light, like an illumination at the bottom of the sea, seemed to suck the color from the bushes and spread over the massed verdure a uniform light as of the interior of a tomb.

Hours passed thus, and finally the light grew dimmer. An acrid mist rising from the soil spread itself in long streamers and floated upward like a pallid veil. Under the frondage the dusk became more sombre and violent in tint; a shaft of reddish light struck through the branches, lingered for a moment; then suddenly darkness spread over the mountain and invaded the depths of the forest. The mahout continued to urge on his beast. The voices of the night arose, and unknown cries came out of the darkness. But now Pierre was delirious. Great phantoms, grotesque and nameless, danced and fled before his eyes. Imaginary scenes rose up before him, and with all his strength he tried to pursue them. He could not sleep; he hung there motionless watching the peopled night before him with fixed eyes....

In his waxen and rigid face only his eyes seemed to be still alive. They stared straight in front with a burning gaze focussed in the far distance. Now and again the strange shapes which inhabited the darkness caused him to break into a terrified laugh. The suspension of his reasoning powers had left him just a wounded animal clinging to life in spite of everything, with nothing but a persistent instinct to guide him.

Suddenly Father Ravennes, his head hanging loose and jerking with the steps of the elephant, began to groan. His moans broke the heavy silence of the night steadily, persistently, with a sound that was gently monotonous. And this was the last noise which Pierre remembered before falling into the depths of an unconsciousness as deep as death.

* * * * *

It was still this moaning that he heard when he came out of his insensibility and had begun reaching towards life again. He opened his eyes. It was day. Above his head he saw the leafy summit of a tree--the only thing within his circle of vision--with branches of a green that was almost black and leaves of a more vivid hue. He tried to move, to sit up, but an intense weakness held him full length on the earth, his backbone pressed to the cold damp soil and his face staring at the sky and watching through the leaves the trailing streaks of gray cloud.

He did not understand it yet. What was he doing there? Why were these trees all round him?

The groaning continued. Now and then it stopped, but went on again more heavily. He turned his head in the direction of the sound and he found, a few paces away from him, the missionary, his back supported against the trunk of a tamarind, his eyes closed, his face livid, and his half-open mouth emitting this endless moaning.

Suddenly his brain was flooded by a wave of remembrance which swept away his passive acceptance of things as they were. He struggled to his knees and cried out:

"Wanda!... Wanda!..."

Clutching the tree under which he had been lying, he managed to stand up, but he had to cling to the trunk to prevent himself falling. Leaning against it he cast a hesitating glance about him. He was on the outside of the forest, opposite a narrow clearing which ended in a definite opening, looking out upon a valley of which he was able to see the further end stretching southward to the horizon. Close by him, at his very feet, a ray of light struck down between two branches and broke in fragments of gold on the patches of moss. The dense shadows of the trees fell on the ground in parallel bars of black shade. A lizard, pressed into the warm hollows of the rock, shrilled its short musical cry. Dazed, and with flickering eyes, Lursac remained motionless. The sun flamed overhead, flooding the scene beyond the forest with merciless light. The radiant air seemed to vibrate.

The young man drew in one deep breath after another; the blood came back to his face and he cried again:

"Wanda!... Wanda!..."

At the sound of his voice the priest opened his eyes and his groaning became louder and more heart-rending. Pierre shook his head, trying with every ounce of strength that was in him to conquer his weakness. He managed to walk heavily and slowly in the direction of the missionary. When he got close up to him he felt like fainting at the terrible sight which he saw.

The whole side of the priest's tunic was stiff with coagulated blood. In the middle of this, through the rents made by the Moï sword, two ghastly wounds could be seen covered with ants,--the terrible red ants of the Lao-ese forest--which swarmed to the attack in a column along the leg of the helpless man.

Before the horror of the martyrdom which the missionary was undergoing and must have suffered for hours, Lursac shuddered and had to clench his teeth to prevent himself from crying out. He ran at the insects and dispersed them with stamps and blows, sweeping them away with his hands and tramping them into the ground. Then he pushed the priest a little further off to protect him from their attacks and laid him gently down. Tenderly raising the edges of the tears in the clothes he exposed the two wounds: a great deep slash in the side through which at every respiration the blood pumped afresh, and down the leg a long jagged tear. With a strip from the lining of his military tunic, Pierre cleaned the wounds, sweeping out the voracious insects which still clung there, and did his pitiful best to make the dying man comfortable. It was when he saw his own hands bathed in the blood of his friend like those of a butcher that once again a mortal sickness came over him and he was on the point of fainting.

The priest closed his eyes; he was no longer groaning. He murmured:

"Thank you.... I am not in pain now...."

Trying to raise his hand, he whispered:

"My cross."

Pierre, taking off the rosary of black wood which hung from the missionary's neck, put it between his fingers. The pale hand fumbled with the beads until it reached the silver cross, which it gripped caressingly. His features suddenly relaxed and took on an appearance of peaceful sweetness.

"And you ... you? ..." he muttered.

Pierre understood his thought; tears rose to his eyes.

He shrugged his shoulders wearily.

"Don't worry about me," he said, "I will take you home.... Afterwards ... afterwards ... I do not know...."

The priest moved his head; his voice became stronger, almost clear:

"No.... I am done for.... I am dying ... here in the heart of this country which I have loved so much and where I have suffered so much...."

His gray beard suddenly seemed to become darker against the livid pallor of his face.

"And then, I have seen," he said, "that wonderful thing, the Red Gods: a prehistoric tribe such as used to be thirty thousand years ago...."

A scarcely visible smile fluttered on his colorless lips.

"My God," he whispered, "pardon me!... This is my last attack of pride...."

He gave a groan; the movement having sent a spasm of torture through his side, he shut his eyes. His wax-like lids became gradually mauve, then white with a whiteness that seemed unreal and almost transparent.

Pierre bent over him, heard him murmuring softly, peacefully:

"Since it is here that you have willed that I should die.... Thy holy will be done, O God!..."

Then in a voice now vague and indistinct he said once more:

"Sweet Jesus, give me rest!..."

His words became still more indistinct and confused, and he repeated several times:

"Rest ... rest...."

And then he was silent. The pale and shrunken hand which pressed the crucifix against his lips stiffened, slipped, and fell back on his breast.

* * * * *

For a long time Pierre remained on his knees in contemplation before this ascetic, sad, waxen face now smiling with a curious smile--peaceful, tender and serene--a last gleam from this great sweet and kindly soul....

Then in a sort of unconscious torpor, against which vague images floated, flickered and vanished, he thought of the conventional rites; but the earth in which he would have dug a bed for this poor martyred body was cold and hard, full of tangled roots and crossed by veins of rock, and he had to content himself with drawing the corpse to the foot of a tree and covering it with a thick mass of leaves, branches and moss. From the branch of the tree above he hung the rosary of the priest, and over the rough and ready tomb the silver crucifix swung softly in the breeze.

When Pierre had finished this last office for his dead friend, he sat down and wiped the sweat from his face. He stayed motionless, delving among the remembrances of his childhood for the words of a prayer, but nothing came--only a single phrase kept recurring to his mind, and he repeated it mechanically over and over again:

"Our Father which art in Heaven.... Our Father which art in Heaven...."

The rest of the invocation had lost itself in the troubled night of forgetfulness, in a mingling and changing wave of images, thoughts and feelings which rushed into his mind, passed through it and fled....

Wanda.... The Post.... Redeski.... The temple.... The ravine of Gondwana.... The aurochs.... The mammoths.... Jieng.... The battle in the sanctuary.... The caverns.... And then Wanda again.... Wanda.... Wanda.... Wanda...!

He stood up: an immense despair fell upon him. He looked again at the simple tomb in which the missionary was sleeping; then he went. His legs bent under him with weakness, his brain reeled, as he walked towards the edge of the clearing. At the same moment a bell in the distance began to sound slowly. Stupefaction struck Pierre motionless, then a shock drove him forwards. A bell: houses, ... white men, ... help, ... life.... He ran forward stumbling, and, suddenly opening his arms wide, he fell on his knees.

At the bottom of the green, level valley, which he saw before him and recognized immediately, there was no longer any Post 32.... Its wrecked palisades showed great breaches. Against the background of the canal, which flowed peaceably on its way as usual, the burned piling showed its blackened stumps: of the huts which had sheltered Wanda and himself so recently, of the sheds which served as lodgings for the riflemen, of the stables and the guardhouse, nothing was left but five gray patches out of which stuck blackened beams.

But on the horizon, in the midst of its green peaceful oasis the bell of the Mission still sounded, and across the military post, which the people of the forest had just destroyed for the third time, its frail metallic voice was wafted on the wind, ringing the evening Angelus.