United States or Tokelau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Durnovo never left them alone together that night. He watched their faces with keen, suspicious eyes. Behind the moustache his lips were pursed up in restless anxiety. But he saw nothing learnt nothing. These two men were inscrutable. At eleven o'clock the next morning the Simiacine seekers left their first unhappy camp at Msala.
His lips were apart, his jaw had dropped; he was hanging breathlessly on Guy Oscard's next word. "He died of the sleeping sickness," said Oscard. "We had come down to Msala before him Joseph and I. I broke up the partnership, and we left him in possession of the Simiacine Plateau. But his men turned against him. For some reason his authority over them failed.
He had left it a grim legacy to his torturers, and before he reached the river all was still on the Simiacine Plateau. And so we leave Victor Durnovo. His sins are buried with him, and beneath the giant palms at Msala lies Maurice Gordon's secret. And so we leave Msala, the accursed camp.
Oscard knew that he could apply no law to Victor Durnovo except the great law of humanity. There was nothing to be done, for one individual may not execute the laws of humanity. All were assembled before him the whole of the great Simiacine Expedition except the leader, whose influence lay over one and all only second to his presence.
I am going home to be married." "Indeed! Then I suppose you will wash your hands of Africa for ever?" "Not quite," he replied. "I told Meredith that I would be prepared to go up to him in case of emergency, but not otherwise. I shall, of course, still be interested in the scheme. I take home the first consignment of Simiacine; we have been very successful, you know.
Do you know that a gorilla's arm is not half so thick as yours, and yet he would take you and snap your backbone across his knee; he would bend a gun-barrel as you would bend a cane, merely by the turn of his wrist. That is Simiacine. He can hang on to a tree with one leg and tackle a leopard with his bare hands that's Simiacine.
"Tell me," he said, "have you ever heard of Simiacine?" "I cannot say that I have," replied Jack. "What is it for, brown boots or spasms?" "It is a drug, the most expensive drug in the market. And they must have it, they cannot do without it, and they cannot find a substitute. It is the leaf of a shrub, and your hatful is worth a thousand pounds." "Where is it to be found?" asked Jack Meredith.
There was too much time for thought and too little to think about. This girl only had the past, and her past was all comprised in a few months the few months still known at Loango as the Simiacine year. She had lapsed into a bad habit of thinking that her life was over, that the daylight of it had waned, and that there was nothing left now but the grey remainder of the evening.
It was a strange landscape; and any passing traveller, knowing nothing of the Simiacine, must perforce have seen at once that these insignificant little trees were something quite apart in the vegetable kingdom. Each standing with its magic circle, no bird built its nest within the branches no insect constructed its filmy home no spider weaved its busy web from twig to twig.
They have got it up there now." "Not now " "What do you mean, Oscard?" "Merely that all those fellows up there are dead. There is ninety thousand pounds worth of Simiacine packed ready for carrying to the coast, standing in a pile on the Plateau, and there are thirty-four dead men keeping watch over it." "Is it as infectious as that?" "When it first shows itself, infectious is not the word.
Word Of The Day