hought of death; yet she did not look young--she looked
as old as eternity, and as passionless and overpowering.

He bowed his head beneath the pressure of this will, and the weight of
his obligation. He perceived the uselessness of describing to her the
dangers that she would run there, especially at the season that was
beginning. Still, for a moment he pondered the trouble he would have
in taking his broken body on that pilgrimage. "And this time it will
get me: just one or two little chills," he reflected, thinking of
black-water fever. The thought came to him, however, that his life was
no longer worth much, even to himself. This sitting with folded hands,
a cane between one's knees, in the tidy little house that she had given
him--and but for her it might have been the crutches!

Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more
with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering
against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the
crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded
stars.

CHAPTER LIII

She crossed the Atlantic, traveled swiftly down from Cherbourg to
Marseilles, embarked on a ship that steamed through the Mediterranean
toward the Orient. At last she saw Port Said, Suez, and the red and
purple lava islands of the Red Sea, splendid in a sunset of extravagant
hues.

The heat was intense.

But the ship emerged from the Gulf of Aden into a still greater heat;
and suddenly the air was saturated with moisture. The walls and the
ceiling of her cabin were covered with drops of water; exposed objects
were defaced by rust and mildew overnight; while the human body seemed
to be deliquescing in a torrid steam. A sickly breeze, filled with the
odors of a strange world, hardly rippled the languid sea.

On the right, beyond a heat mist through which flying fish were
darting, loomed a new coastline. Yellow beaches appeared, interrupted
by lagoons where the slow waves abruptly spouted high into the
air--white geysers against somber forests and jungles. From these dark
green fastnesses, ascending threads of smoke inveigled the gaze far
upward into space, to where, above a belt of hazy blue that one had
taken for the sky, mountain peaks revealed themselves, unrelated to the
earth, and half dissolved, like a mirage.

Night fell. The velvety blackness of the heavens was powdered with
star dust; in the wash of the ship ther