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Page 21
His piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was
like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook
their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a
blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the
little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of
time. D�fago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards
the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought
him--was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him,
gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The
darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later,
above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind,
all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry
that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and
distance--
"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of
fire ...!" then died away, into untold space and silence.
Dr. Cathcart--suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the
others--was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to
dash headlong into the Bush.
"But I want ter know,--you!" shrieked the guide. "I want ter see! That
ain't him at all, but some--devil that's shunted into his place ...!"
Somehow or other--he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished
it--he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor,
apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed
his own innate force to conquer. Certainly he "managed" Hank admirably.
It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave
him most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a
condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him
upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was
possible under the circumstances.
And there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the
lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into
the folds of his blanket. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height
and fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the classroom. "People
with broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace
towards the camp!" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit up
and stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, "How terrible
in the wilderness are--are the feet of them that--" until his uncle came
across the change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.
The hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just
as it cured Hank.
Till the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr.
Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the color of chalk, and there were
strange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul
battled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some of
the outer signs ...
At dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others,
and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp--three
perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his
inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematized order again.
IX
They talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common
things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that
clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank,
being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself,
for he was also less complex. In Dr. Cathcart "civilization" championed
his forces against an attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he
is not _quite_ sure of certain things. Anyhow, he took longer to "find
himself."
Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions
probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order.
Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely
witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that
had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically,
betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it
rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic
and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature
were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe
not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later
in a sermon "savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of
men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity
as it exists."
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