[#] "Come south wind, come!"
[#] Lady.
The strong odour of the oil in a few minutes caused the blood-sucking insects to withdraw and return to their lairs in the thatch and boards. The south wind came at last in puffs, which lessened the heat, but there set in a swell which caused the dau to roll. This movement disturbed the bilge water below the decks, and from this was disengaged a sulphuretted-hydrogen stench almost bad enough to drive the bugs from Lucy's mind. But the wind grew steadier and at last blew the rotten dau to the landing-place at the mouth of a river where they were to disembark.
Lingani was a smaller edition of Unguja Town: flat-roofed Arab houses of white-washed coral rock, thatched wattle-and-daub huts, groves of coco-nut palms, a few Casuarina trees and Frangipani shrubs, pariah dogs, wandering zebu cattle, and dwarf goats. The Mission Rest-house was a substantial stone building in the Arab style of East Africa. It was maintained jointly by four missionary societies for use by their members in transit. There was a Swahili couple in charge of it, husband and wife. The bed linen, table-cloths, napkins and cutlery were kept in cupboards fastened with cunning padlocks, which only opened when you set the letters of the lock to correspond with the word "open." This to thwart inquisitive natives, with a smattering of education, was written up for reminder in Greek letters. With this ruse John was fully acquainted, so that he lost no time in opening the cupboards and releasing the wherewithal for making up two beds and laying the table for an evening meal. The black housekeepers, proffering greetings and assurance of welcome while they worked, busied themselves in heating water for baths, in making the beds, laying the table, and killing chickens for soup and roast. John's activities were multifold. He had to see the dau unloaded and its precious cargo safely stowed away in the store below the Rest-house.
Lucy at first sat limply in the divan or main reception-room, sore all over, eyes blistered by the glare of sun on water, and with a headache which for crippling agony exceeded anything she had known. But she conquered her sullenness and made feeble attempts to help. John, however, seeing that bath and bath water were ready and that sheets, pillows and blankets had been placed on her Arab bedstead (a wooden frame with a lattice-work across it of ox-hide strips), advised her to undress, soothe her bites with spongings and ointment, and rest between the sheets. Her back ached unbearably; her head seemed half-severed at the neck, and she was seized with violent shiverings. The mosquitoes had given her a sharp attack of malarial fever.
Once in bed, she felt less acutely ill, but of all the nice meal that John and the Swahili man-cook had prepared she could only swallow a cup of tea. Her temperature was found to be up to 102 deg., so the first and the six succeeding nights of the honeymoon were spent in dire illness and dreary convalescence. But at the end of that time she seemed well enough to start on their up-country journey. John had obtained two Masai donkeys and had bought at Unguja a second-hand side-saddle. Lucy cheered up at the prospect of donkey-riding and above all at leaving this terribly hot coast town for the cooler nights of the interior. Though still deeply depressed and disheartened, she was sufficiently reasonable and well-disposed to be deeply touched by her husband's care of her, his forethought for her comfort and distress at the inconveniences of semi-savage Africa. Some measure of health came back to her, and even cheerfulness, during the first easy days of camp life, before they left the semi-civilized coast-belt, with its shady mango-trees for the midday halt, its unfailing water supply for the thirsty porters and the white man's meals; its comparative safety at night from wild beasts and wild natives.
But between the mountain ranges of the interior--whither they were bound--and this settled country of cultivation and villages more or less governed by the Sultan of Unguja, there lay a desert tract almost devoid of water and ravaged in recent times by a clan of the raiding Masai known to the Bantu natives as "Wahumba." They had recently carried out a ruthless foray across the plains. The native wells had fallen in or their location had been forgotten since the destruction of the villages. Lucy then knew for the first time what it was to suffer from thirst, and to have no water for washing in the morning or evening; and when a little water was obtained from nearly dried up rock-pools or the bed of a run-dry stream, to be hardly able to endure the sight of it, much less taste it when it looked like strong tea, or coffee-and-milk, when it smelt of stable manure or was alive with grubs or wriggling worms. It could only be drunk in the form of tea after it had been strained, boiled, and skimmed.
John had prepared for some such contingency in crossing this desert strip by bringing several dozen coco-nuts and a case of his father's cider--at the mention of which Lucy's mouth watered. But his porters in their own mad thirst had disposed of the coco-nuts and their milk, and the carrier who bore the case of champagne cider on his head had, of course, slipped on a slimy boulder, crossing a dry stream down had come his precious load, and at least half the bottles had cracked and poured forth their sparkling contents over the sand or into the porter's protruded mouth. Still, the other six bottles were retrieved by an indignant John who, in his rage, doffed the gentle long-suffering missionary--which, strange to say, he had become in these few months--witness his unselfish and patient care of his rather peevish wife--and kicked the careless, sticky, half-drunk porter with all the vehemence of an unregenerate Englishman. The porter took his chastisement philosophically. He had tasted nectar. John and Lucy drank the remainder of the cider during the second half of that day, without care for the morrow's drought, for fear lest they be robbed of it by some other accident....
At last they reached a running stream at the base of the foothills which marked the beginning of a slow ascent of three thousand feet. The verdure, and the shade this created, seemed by contrast a Paradise. They pitched their camp under fine umbrageous trees, near the site of a ruined village which a few months previously had been a populous centre. Around the mounds of clay and sticks and burnt thatch were luxuriant banana plantations with occasional bunches of ripening bananas--though the monkeys of the adjacent thicket had not left many fit for eating. When Lucy had quenched her thirst exuberantly from the rivulet, drinking from cups of folded banana fronds made for her by the repentant porter of the broken cider bottles, her sense of relief and contentment at their surroundings was a little marred by the consciousness of an unpleasant odour which came to them fitfully in puffs of the afternoon breeze. She started out to explore on her own account--she wore high boots and had a tucked-in, constricted skirt. Presently she came to an extensive clearing where banana trunks, brown and rotten, had been felled and lay prone in all directions, half covered with the clay tunnels and galleries of white ants. Amongst these crumbling cylinders lay twenty or thirty skeletons, some of them still retaining strips of leathery flesh and patches of Negro wool on the whitened skulls. The ground at the rustle of her approach began to swarm with a myriad of black, biting ants, disturbed in their daily meal off this immense supply of carrion. Lucy paid little heed to them for the moment as she stood horror-struck at the sight of hissing snakes, gliding into the rank weeds, probably more concerned over the swarming of the ants than at the approach of a solitary human being. She also noted a group of large, grey-brown vultures with lean whitish necks, which hopped heavily before her until they obtained enough impetus to rise above the ground and settle on the branches of a baobab-tree. Lucy, horrified by this unsavoury Golgotha and the slithering snakes, was uttering several squeaks of dismay, when as the terrible "siafu" ants began to nip the skin of her limbs and body, her cries changed to shrieks of terror. Half-blindly she floundered over disgusting obstacles back towards the camp.
John, looking very tired and very dirty, came rushing to meet her and upbraid her for imprudence in wandering off alone where there was danger at every turn; but, realizing she was being mercilessly bitten by the "siafu," he hurried her into the tent, let down the flaps of the entrance and assisted her to undress. She had to be reduced to absolute nudity before the ants could be removed. They had fixed their mandibles so firmly in the skin that in pulling them off the head and jaws remained behind, and for weeks afterwards this unhappy young woman went about with a sore and inflamed body.