rters. They soon disappeared into a jungle of spear grass, above
which the sunrise was spreading its bands of smoky gold and rose. The
chosen porters forgot their lacerated bodies; a song floated back from
them to those who must still press onward.

"I have killed him, Hamoud."

"Who knows? It is true that he is old and has had this fever before.
But we do not need him. Maybe he has fulfilled his destiny. And we
have not." In the glory of the sunrise he turned to meditate over her
thin, tortured face. He observed, with a lyrical sadness, "What is
life? A running this way and that after mirages. A thirsting for
sweet wells of which one has heard in a dream. Does one ever taste
those waters? Are they sweet or bitter? Perhaps this is the
secret--that to taste them is death."

The safari marched on. She rode the Muscat donkey, which was dying
from the bites of tsetse flies.

CHAPTER LX

Next morning she marched afoot in the blaze of the sun. Trailing
thorns pierced her ankles; the stipa shrubs showered her with little
barbs, and from another bush was detached an invisible pollen that
penetrated her clothing and burned her skin. At the noon halt they
made a hammock of tent cloth, in which she was carried all the
afternoon by four porters. At nightfall they saw, across a valley, the
edge of the Mambava forests, the towering tree trunks banked with huge
thickets and bound together by nets of vines.

They camped in the valley, where a stream flowed through a tangle of
indigo plants. The warm bath steamed in her tent; the fresh evening
garments were laid out; everything was the same in this canvas ark that
proceeded farther and farther into the wilds with its atmosphere of
rude luxury intact. When she emerged from the tent, in her polo coat
and suede mosquito boots, the table glistened with its china and
glassware.

She sat looking at the black forest.

"He is there!"

But she was very tired.

Ah, to lie down, grope no longer for her will, drift away into a region
where there was no love or remorse, sleep forever! Why should she feel
like this with the goal so near at last, unless from a premonition that
all her efforts were useless?

Never before had this land and its phenomena appeared so cruel, so
perfectly the manifestation of a superhuman force that clothed its
malignancy in a primordial splendor. Here, she reflected, was the
quintessence of earthly beauty inextricable from the quint