Renshaw Fanning's Quest: A Tale of the High Veldt

“Look out for his mate,” said Renshaw, remounting. “Pythons often go in couples. And I am sorry to say there are a good many snakes about here.”

“Baugh! Bau – augh!”

The loud sonorous bark echoed forth in startling suddenness among the overhanging cliffs. But it didn’t seem to come from high overhead. It sounded almost in their path.

“Baboons!” said Renshaw. “They must be all round our water-hole. There they are. No – on no account fire.”

The poort here widened out. Grassy slopes arose to the base of the cliffs. In the centre lay a rocky pool, whose placid surface glittered mirror-like in the gloaming. But between this and the horsemen was a crowd of dark, uncouth shapes. Again that loud warning bark sounded forth – this time overhead, but so near that it struck upon the human ear as almost menacing.

“Baboons, eh?” said Sellon, catching sight of the brutes. “I’m going to charge them.”

Renshaw smiled quietly to himself.

“Charge away,” he said. “But whatever you do, don’t fire a shot. It may bring down upon us a very different sort of obstructive than a clompje of baviaans, and then this undertaking is one more added to the list of failures, even if we get out with whole skins.”

But Maurice hardly heard him to the end, as, spurring up his horse, he dashed straight at the troop of baboons. The latter, for their kind, were abnormally large. There might have been about threescore of the great ungainly brutes, squatting around on the rocks which overhung the pool.

As the horseman galloped up they could be seen baring their great tusks, grinning angrily. But they did not move.

Sellon had not bargained for this. The great apes, squatted together, showing an unmoved front to the aggressor, looked sufficiently formidable, not to say threatening. Sellon’s pace slowed down to a walk before he got within sixty yards of them. Then he halted and sat staring irresolutely at the hideous beasts. Still they showed no sort of disposition to give way. For a few moments both parties stood thus eyeing each other.

All of a sudden, led by about a dozen of the largest, the whole troop of hairy monsters came shambling forward – gibbering and gnashing their great tusks in unpleasantly suggestive fashion. A second more, and Sellon would have turned tail and fled ignominiously, when —

Whizz! Whack-whack! whack! A perfect shower of sharp stones came pelting into the thick of the ugly crowd with the swiftness and accuracy of a Winchester rifle, knocking out eyes, battering hairy limbs, playing havoc among them, like a charge of grape-shot. With yells of pain and terror, the brutes turned and fled, scampering up the rocks in all directions.

Renshaw, guessing the turn events were likely to take, had quietly dismounted, and, filling his hands and pockets with stones, had advanced to the support of his now discomfited friend.

“Those brutes don’t understand us quite,” he said, after the roar of laughter evoked by this sudden turn in the tide of affairs had subsided. “One shot would have sent them scampering, but we dared not fire it. They are not used to the human form divine in this wilderness, but they won’t forget that bombardment in a hurry.”

“By Jingo! no. Fancy being obstructed by a herd of monkeys. All the same, old chap, they did look ugly sitting there champing their tusks at one like that.”

“So they did. Now we’ll let our horses drink, and then adjourn to our sleeping-place. We mustn’t camp too near the water, because the krantzes swarm with tigers (leopards), to say nothing of worse cattle, who might interfere with us if we kept them from their nightly drink. And we can’t light a fire to-night.”

Chapter Twenty Five.

“A Region of Emptiness, Howling and Drear.”

Right up under the cliff – the beetling rock overhead, the slope of the hillside falling away into the basin above described – did our adventurers make their fireless camp. But though fireless they were under no lack of ingredients for a substantial meal, nor of the wherewithal to wash it down satisfactorily; which latter fact was perhaps the better appreciated from the certainty of this being the last water they should find until their return.

“Queer thing this sort of contrast, Fanning,” said Sellon, who with his back against the rock was blowing tobacco clouds with post-prandial contentment. “I suppose some of these evenings, when one gets back into dress clothes and heavy dinner-parties again, one will look back to this crouch under a big cliff as a kind of dream.”

“I suppose so. Yet man is a would-be adaptable animal, after all. I remember a chap, an Englishman, who was with me sea-cow shooting up on the Tonga border. He had an idea of doing at Rome as Romans do, so he got hold of a Zulu mútya (A kind of apron – pretty scanty in dimensions. It is usually made of cat-tails and bullock-hide), and cut about in nothing but that and a pair of canvas shoes. We were after the hippos in a boat, and it was risky, too – for the river was full of crocodiles – in case a hippo should tilt us over. Well, before we had pushed off an hour, the joker was burnt red, and in less than two was literally skinned alive. He didn’t kill any sea-cows that day.”

“Battling sport, that sea-cow shooting must be. What do you say, Fanning, when we’ve found our Golconda, to starting a shooting-trip bang into the interior? Hallo! What’s that giving tongue? Sounds for all the world like a pack of foxhounds.”

A shrill, long-drawn, baying chorus came floating upon the night-air, but very distant. Then it drew nearer, then faded again, then plainer still, then seemed to die away fainter and fainter in the distance. The chorus, borne upon the night in fluctuating waves of sound, blended in wild harmony with the frowning heights and untrodden desolation of this out-of-the-world gorge.

“Wild dogs,” said Renshaw, listening intently. “They’re hunting something – running it pretty closely, too, or they wouldn’t be tonguing like that. By the way, talking of wild dogs, I had an experience with them once which was very much akin to that one of yours with the baboons a little while ago. I was returning from a trip into the Gaza country, with a waggon, and knocking around to shoot something, I fell in with a clump of giraffes. They were shyer than usual, and led me a long chevy. I only managed to wound one – not badly enough – and then it got dark. My horse was rather done up, and I didn’t quite know where I was. Then it became obvious I shouldn’t fetch the waggon again that night.

“Just as I was casting about for a good place to camp, I heard a whimper close at hand. The veldt was sprinkled about with clumps of mimosa and other thorns – in parts thickish – and all of a sudden the horse threw up his ears and began to snort. I looked up. There, right in front, squatted on their haunches in a semicircle, not a hundred yards off, were a lot of wild dogs. Couldn’t have been less than forty of them. I just gave a shout and rushed at them. But they didn’t move until I got within twenty yards, and then they got up, cantered away the same distance, and squatted down again. Then I lost patience, and picking out a big one, just bowled the brute over as he sat. He stiffened out without a yelp, but the rest didn’t seem to care. So I stuck in another cartridge, and stretched out another, and rushed at them at the same time. They scattered then, but in no hurry. Now, I thought, I’ll ride on. But I happened to look back to see if they had dropped off. Not a bit of it. The brutes were quietly trotting along in my wake. Again I turned back. They just stopped, and squatted down as before.

“Now I had never known wild dogs act like this, the difficulty being, as a rule, to get within shot of them at all, and I own to a kind of eerie feeling as I marked the persistency of these ordinarily sneaking and cowardly brutes, sitting on their haunches there in the dusk, licking their lips as if they knew I was for them. You see it wasn’t so much on their account I felt shivery, but it looked as if they knew what I didn’t – like the old superstition, if it be a superstition, of a shark following a ship, pointing to an approaching death on board, or the actual fact of a lot of aasvogels watching a wounded buck, or a wounded anything.

“All of a sudden, I became conscious of a most sickening and overpowering stench. By that time it was almost dark – but not too dark to make out objects indistinctly – and the objects that caught my eye at that moment were sufficiently hideous and appalling. All around, the veldt was strewn with human corpses – swollen and decomposed, torn and mangled by wild animals, or ripped and hacked by the assegais of their slayers. They were natives, and of all ages and sexes, lying about in contorted attitudes, some heaped upon each other, the frightfully distorted countenances staring up at the sky. Pah! it was sickening, I tell you, coming upon this in the dusk. There seemed no end of them, and they were scattered as if cut down while fleeing. I learned afterwards it was the result of a Matabili raid. Well, this find accounted in a measure for the boldness of the wild dogs. They had been largely feeding on the human form divine, and had acquired a proportionate contempt for the same.”

“What an experience!” said Sellon, whom this story, told amid the dark and savage surroundings of their fireless camp, considerably impressed. “You must have seen some uncommonly queer things in your time, Fanning?”

The other smiled slightly.

“Well, yes, I have. This is a land of strange experiences, although prosaic enough on the surface. I hope none will befall us before we get home again – always excepting the strange experience of finding ourselves rich men in the shape of what we are looking for.”

“By the way, whereabouts was it you were attacked that time? Anywhere near here?”

“About half an hour’s ride further on. The poort narrows very much, and the cliffs are not nearly so high. It was just sundown, and I was jogging quietly along homewards very much down on my luck over the third failure, when bang came a shower of assegais and arrows and kerries, hurtling about the rocks like a young hailstorm. I spurred up then, you bet; but the ground is beastly rough, as you’ve seen, and the enemy could get along as fast as I could – besides, I had a brute of a pack-horse that wouldn’t lead properly. They chased me down to where we first entered this defile, and by that time it was dark – luckily for me. As it was, I only shook them off by sacrificing the pack-horse.”

“Now, how the deuce did you manage that?”

“Why, I knew they’d reckon on me taking the shortest cut for the river. So when I got out of the poort at the bottom of the turret-head mountain – you remember that steep little slope where your horse turned a somersault – I put on pace a little so as to get a start. Then I stuck a burr under the pack-horse’s tail and cast him loose. Away he went, slanting off into the other poort, which seems to lead towards the river, while I lay low. I could see the devils skipping down the poort on his heels, in high old glee. In the night I moved on again, striking due north, and after making nearly a week’s cast – and nearly dying of hunger and thirst – I fetched up at the drift we came through day before yesterday. And, by the way, I think old Greenway was wrong in saying, ‘Beware the schelm Bushmen.’ Those chaps struck me as more like Korannas. There were some quite big fellows among them.”

The time and place were singularly appropriate to the narration of wild and perilous experiences. But this latest in no wise tended to raise the listener’s spirits. Sellon was not of the stuff of which adventurers are made. He was keen enough on this expedition and the dazzling possibilities it held out. But he didn’t want to be killed or wounded if he could help it. No such thing as going into danger out of pure love of excitement found a place in his philosophy. He was not imaginative, yet the idea of being struck down by an unseen enemy, or worse still, perhaps, dragging himself away mortally wounded to die like an animal in a hole or cave, in the heart of this frightful desert, a multitude of foul and loathsome beasts howling for his blood, per adventure waiting till mortal weakness should embolden them to pounce on him before life was extinct – these considerations struck home to him now, and fairly made him shiver.

“By-the-by, Sellon,” said the careless voice of his companion, “do you think you’d be able to find your way back to the river again?”

“Now, why the deuce should you ask that, Fanning?” was the testy rejoinder.

“Oh, naturally enough. I wanted to know!” said Renshaw, astonished somewhat. “Besides, supposing anything happened to me – and a hundred things might happen – could you find your way out?”

“Well, it’s certainly an infernal labyrinth so far, and I suppose likely to get worse. Still, I’ll take extra notice of the landmarks,” growled Sellon.

Then he rolled himself up in his blanket to turn in, characteristically leaving his companion to do whatever watching was necessary. And there was some of the latter to be done, for ever and anon the scream of a leopard away among the crags, or the growling snuffle of some beast, unseen in the darkness, slaking his thirst at the waterhole just below, would cause the horses to snort wildly, and tug and strain at their picket reims in alarm. It needed the sound of a human voice, the touch of a human hand, and that frequently, to allay their fears – peradventure to prevent them from breaking loose and galloping madly off into the night; and however his less inured companion may have been able to revert to more congenial scenes in the blissful illusions of dreams, there was little sleep that night for Renshaw Fanning.

Chapter Twenty Six.

Selwood’s Dilemma

The post at Sunningdale was a weekly, not a daily event. Happy Sunningdale!

It was conveyed from the nearest Field Cornet’s, by a ragged native, bestriding a still more ragged pony, and who was “run” by general contribution on the part of those residents whose letters he delivered.

We have said that the postal delivery at Sunningdale was a weekly event. After rainy weather, when the Umtirara and other rivers were down, it was a fortnightly business; sometimes even three weeks would go by without postal communication with the outer world. Happy, happy Sunningdale!

To-day, however, the courier was up to time, and Christopher Selwood, unlocking the weather-beaten leather bag, began to sort and distribute its contents.

“Miss Avory – Miss Avory – Miss Avory – heavens! There’s no end to them. We shall have the postboy striking for double pay if Miss Avory’s correspondents don’t hold their hand.”

Violet – devouring with her eyes the contents of the bag as they came forth – laughed at her host’s remark, but the laugh was a hollow one. The missive she hungered for was not there. True, she had expected this contingency sooner or later – yet now that it had come it did not seem any the less poignant. Every post hitherto had brought letters from her lover, each with a different postmark. Now his silence meant that he was beyond the reach of any such civilised institutions. She would see no more of his handwriting until she should again have heard the sound of his voice. But – what if it were fated that never again should she hear that voice?

“That’s all the ‘hopes and fears’ this week,” said Selwood, holding the leather bag upside down. Then gathering up the bundle of his own correspondence he crammed it carelessly into his pocket and went out.