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Updated: June 4, 2025
Still, the blaze failed to banish entirely the thrill of fear which pervaded the spot at night; for the unwonted glare dazzled and bewildered the bats and night-birds, and they fluttered about over the heads of the intruders in dark, ghostly flight. Many a one believed them to be the unresting souls of condemned sinners, and looked up at them with awe.
In the Rue des Martyrs and the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, the brothers found night-birds of another kind, women who slunk past them, close to the house-fronts, and men and hussies who belaboured one another with blows.
The mountain echoes, silent since the military sounds of battle had ceased, had now to answer these frantic and discordant shrieks of sorrow, which drove the very night-birds from their haunts in the rocks, as if they were startled to hear orgies more hideous and ill-omened than their own, performed in the face of open day.
Then when rainy days came we crouched together in the cave like night-birds sheltered from the day, and we whispered and recounted and planned. I scribbled in my diary in pencil, and he re-wrote my scribbling in bright-coloured chalks, and drew side pictures and wrote poems. Many are the pages we thus wrote together; some he wrote, some I wrote, and there are many from both of us in this volume.
The plumage was of a rich brown, streaked with black; its breast grey; its beak as sharp as a dagger. The loose plumes on its neck, with its large yellow eyes dilated, like all night-birds, gave it a stupid look. Lejoillie hurried back to the camp to skin it. On cutting it open, we discovered that it ate small birds, as a water-rail, which it had swallowed whole, was found in its stomach.
The whole thing had become intolerable. It was abject and degrading, like a falling-out among thieves. They reminded me of a group of drunken women I had once seen, shameless and foul-mouthed, fighting in the street, with grinning night-birds urging them on. I felt in some way horribly responsible, as though they had dragged me into it as though the flying handfuls of mud had splattered me.
"What is it?" asked Briscoe, at the end of a minute. "I heard a peculiar noise while you were speaking, but it is still now." "Birds night-birds," said Briscoe. "Our friends of the cavern grumbling because we've turned them out." "Oh, no; I don't fancy it was that," said Brace hurriedly. "It sounded like human voices singing in chorus."
There were, too, the cries of jackals, the laughing of hyenas, the occasional trumpeting of an elephant, the croakings of night-birds, or of insects or reptiles of various sorts, which, all mingled together, formed a concert which effectually banished sleep, and was anything but enlivening and inspiriting. Thus passed my second night in the midst of an African desert.
Leave me, brave men, and let me care for myself. Already it lightens in the east, and black will be your fate if you are taken. Go, and may the blessing of one who was once a holy nun go with you and guard you from danger!" Sir Robert Knolles was pacing the deck in the early morning, when he heard the sound of oars, and there were his two night-birds climbing up the side.
"To be beaten again?" he sneered. I said nothing to that, but asked him whither he was going. "God knows," he said. "God knows!" But when I went out, he accompanied me; and we slunk silently, like the pair of night-birds we were, through lanes and alleys until we were fairly in town again. By that time the sun was up and the market people were beginning to enter the city.
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