Lukundoo | Page 5

boyish dash and grace had vanished
utterly, of course. But his head was even more leonine; his hair was
still abundant, yellow and wavy; the close, crisped blond beard he had
grown during his illness did not alter him. He was big and big-cheated
yet. His eyes were dull and he mumbled and babbled mere meaningless
syllables, not words.
Etcham helped Van Rieten to uncover him and look him over. He was
in good muscle for a man so long bedridden. There were no scars on

him except about his knees, shoulders and chest. On each knee and
above it he had a full score of roundish cicatrices, and a dozen or more
on each shoulder, all in front. Two or three were open wounds and four
or five barely healed. He had no fresh swellings, except two, one on
each side, on his pectoral muscles, the one on the left being higher up
and farther out than the other. They did not look like boils or
carbuncles, but as if something blunt and hard were being pushed up
through the fairly healthy flesh and skin, not much inflamed.
"I should not lance those," said Van Rieten, and Etcham assented.
They made Stone as comfortable as they could, and just before sunset
we looked in at him again. He was lying on his back, and his chest
showed big and massive yet, but he lay as if in a stupor. We left
Etcham with him and went into the next hut, which Etcham had
resigned to us. The jungle noises were no different than anywhere else
for months past, and I was soon fast asleep.
Chapter V
Sometime in the pitch dark I found myself awake and listening. I could
hear two voices, one Stone's, the other sibilant and wheezy. I knew
Stone's voice after all the years that had passed since I heard it last. The
other was like nothing I remembered. It had less volume than the wail
of a new-born baby, yet there was an insistent carrying power to it, like
the shrilling of an insect. As I listened I heard Van Rieten breathing
near me in the dark; then he heard me and realized that I was listening,
too. Like Etcham I knew little Balunda, but I could make out a word or
two. The voices alternated, with intervals of silence between.
Then suddenly both sounded at once and fast. Stone's baritone basso,
full as if he were in perfect health, and that incredibly stridulous
falsetto, both jabbering at once like the voices of two people quarreling
and trying to talk each other down.
"I can't stand this," said Van Rieten. "Let's have a look at him."
He had one of those cylindrical electric night-candles. He fumbled

about for it, touched the button and beckoned me to come with him.
Outside the hut he motioned me to stand still, and instinctively turned
off the light, as if seeing made listening difficult.
Except for a faint glow from the embers of the bearers' fire we were in
complete darkness, little starlight struggled through the trees, the river
made but a faint murmur. We could hear the two voices together and
then suddenly the creaking voice changed into a razor-edged, slicing
whistle, indescribably cutting, continuing right through Stone's
grumbling torrent of croaking words.
"Good God!" exclaimed Van Rieten.
Abruptly he turned on the light.
We found Etcham utterly asleep, exhausted by his long anxiety and the
exertions of his phenomenal march, and relaxed completely now that
the load was in a sense shifted from his shoulders to Van Rieten's. Even
the light on his face did not wake him.
The whistle had ceased and the two voices now sounded together. Both
came from Stone's cot, where the concentrated white ray showed him
lying just as we had left him, except that he had tossed his arms above
his head and had torn the coverings and bandages from his chest.
The swelling on his right breast had broken. Van Rieten aimed the
center line of the light at it and we saw it plainly. From his flesh, grown
out of it, there protruded a head, such a head as the dried specimens
Etcham had shown us, as if it were a miniature of the head of a Balunda
fetish-man. It was black, shining black as the blackest African skin; it
rolled the whites of its wicked, wee eyes and showed its microscopic
teeth between lips repulsively negroid in their red fullness, even in so
diminutive a face. It had crisp, fuzzy wool on its minikin skull, it turned
malignantly from side to side and chittered incessantly in that
inconceivable falsetto. Stone babbled brokenly against its patter.
Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty.
When he was awake