The Leopard Woman | Page 7

find people and to find water, if possible. The

cook camp, too, was afoot, dark figures passing and repassing before a
fire. But the rest of the men slept heavily, seizing the unwonted chance.
When the first rays of the sun struck the fly of the small green master's-
tent Kingozi appeared, demanding water wherewith to wash. At the
sound of his voice men stirred sleepily, sat up, poked the remains of
their tiny fires. As though through an open tap the freshness of
night-time drained away. The hot, searching, stifling African day took
possession of the world.
After breakfast Kingozi looked about him for shelter. A gorgeous, red-
flowering vine had smothered one of the flat-topped thorn trees in its
luxuriance. The growths of successive years had overlaid each other.
Kingozi called two men with pangas who speedily cut out the centre,
leaving a little round green room in the heart of the shadow. Thither
Kingozi caused to be conveyed his chop-box table, his canvas chair,
and his tin box; and there he spent the entire morning writing in a blank
book and carefully drawing from field notes in a pocketbook a sketch
map of the country he had traversed. At noon he ate a light meal of
bread, plain rice with sugar, and a balauri of tea. Then for a time he
slept beneath the mosquito bar in his tent.
At this hour of fiercest sun the whole world slept with him. From the
baked earth rose heat waves almost as tangible as gauze veils. Objects
at a greater distance than a hundred yards took on strange distortions.
The thorn trees shot up to great heights; animals stood on stilts; the tops
of the hills were flattened, and from their summits often reached out
into space long streamers. Sometimes these latter joined across wide
intervals, creating an illusion of natural bridges or lofty flat-topped
cliffs with holes clear through them to the open sky beyond. All these
things shimmered and flickered and wavered in the mirage of noon.
Only the sun itself stared clear and unchanging.
At about two o'clock Kingozi awoke and raised his voice.
Mali-ya-bwana, next in command after Cazi Moto and Simba,
answered.
"Get the big gun," he was told, "and the water bottles."

Mali-ya-bwana was not a professed gun bearer, but he could load, and
Kingozi believed him staunch. Therefore, often, in absence of Simba,
the big Baganda had been pressed into this service.
The blasting heat was fiercest at this hour. The air was saturated by it
just as water may hold a chemical in solution. Every little while a wave
would beat against the cheek as though a furnace door had been opened.
Nevertheless Kingozi knew that this was also the hour when the sun's
power begins to decline; when the vertical rays begin to give place. For
it is not heat that kills, but the actinic power of rays unfiltered by a long
slant through the earth's atmosphere.
The two men tramped methodically along, paying little attention to
their surroundings. Game dozed everywhere beneath the scanty shade,
sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in herds.
Motionless they stood; and often, were it not for the switch of a tail,
they would have remained unobserved. Even the sentinel hartebeestes,
posted atop high ant hills on the outskirts of the herds, seemed half
asleep. Nevertheless they were awake enough for the job, as was
evidenced when the two human figures came too near. Then a snort
brought every creature to its feet, staring.
The objective of the men seemed to be a rise of land which the
lessening mirage now permitted to appear as a small kopje, a solitary
hill with rocky outcrops. Toward this they plodded methodically:
Kingozi slouching ahead, Mali-ya-bwana close at his heels, very proud
of his temporary promotion from the ranks. Suddenly he snapped his
fingers. At the signal Kingozi stopped and looked back inquiringly over
his shoulder.
Mali-ya-bwana was pointing cautiously to a low red clay ant hill
immediately in their path and about thirty yards ahead. To the casual
glance it looked no different from any of the hundreds of others of like
size and colour everywhere to be seen. Kingozi's attention, however,
now narrowed to a smaller circle than the casual. It did not need
Mali-ya- bwana's whispered "_faru_" (rhinoceros) to identify the
mound.

Cautiously the two men began to back away. When they had receded
some twenty yards, however, the huge beast leaped to its feet. The
rapidity of its movements was extraordinary. There intervened none of
the slow and clumsy upheaval one would naturally expect from an
animal of so massive a body and such short, thick legs. One moment it
slumbered, the next it was afoot, warned by some slight sound or jar of