He caught up to her in quick strides. “You can’t go up into that forest alone, in a blind search for him.”
“It’s not a blind search. I think I know where he is,” Lys whispered. “But you should not go there. The tribesmen wouldn’t like it!”
Farris instantly understood. “That big grove up on top of the plateau, where we found the hunati natives?”
Her unhappy silence was answer enough. “Go back to the bungalow,” he told her. “I’ll find him.”
She would not do that. Farris shrugged, and started forward. “Then we’ll go together.”
She hesitated, then came on. They went up the slope of the plateau, through the forest.
The westering sun sent spears and arrows of burning gold through chinks in the vast canopy of foliage under which they walked. The solid green of the forest breathed a rank, hot exhalation. Even the birds and monkeys were stifledly quiet at this hour.
“Is Berreau mixed up in that queer hunati rite?” Farris asked.
Lys looked up as though to utter a quick denial, but then dropped her eyes.
“Yes, in a way. His passion for botany got him interested in it. Now he’s involved.”
Farris was puzzled. “Why should botanical interest draw a man to that crazy drug-rite or whatever it is?”
She wouldn’t answer that. She walked in silence until they reached the top of the forested plateau. Then she spoke in a whisper.
“We must be quiet now. It will be bad if we are seen here.”
The grove that covered the plateau was pierced by horizontal bars of red sunset light. The great silk-cottons and ficus trees were pillars supporting a vast cathedral-nave of darkening green.
A little way ahead loomed up those huge, monster banyans he had glimpsed before in the moonlight. They dwarfed all the rest, towering bulks that were infinitely ancient and infinitely majestic.
Farris suddenly saw a Laos tribesman, a small brown figure, in the brush ten yards ahead of him. There were two others, farther in the distance. And they were all standing quite still, facing away from him.
They were hunati, he knew. In that queer state of slowed-down life, that incredible retardation of the vital processes.
Farris felt a chill. He muttered over his shoulder, “You had better go back down and wait.”
“No,” she whispered. “There is Andre.”
He turned, startled. Then he too saw Berreau.
His blond head bare, his face set and white and masklike, standing frozenly beneath a big wild-fig a hundred feet to the right.
Hunati!
Farris had expected it, but that didn’t make it less shocking. It wasn’t that the tribesmen mattered less as human beings. It was just that he had talked with a normal Berreau only a few hours before. And now, to see him like this!
Berreau stood in a position ludicrously reminiscent of the old-time “living statues.” One foot was slightly raised, his body bent a little forward, his arms raised a little.
Like the frozen tribesmen ahead, Berreau was facing toward the inner recesses of the grove, where the giant banyans loomed.
Farris touched his arm. “Berreau, you have to snap out of this.”
“It’s no use to speak to him,” whispered the girl. “He can’t hear.”
No, he couldn’t hear. He was living at a tempo so low that no ordinary sound could make sense to his ears. His face was a rigid mask, lips slightly parted to breathe, eyes fixed ahead. Slowly, slowly, the lids crept down and veiled those staring eyes and then crept open again in the infinitely slow wink. Slowly, slowly, his slightly raised left foot moved down toward the ground.
Movement, pulse, breathing — all a hundred times slower than normal. Living, but not in a human way — not in a human way at all.
Lys was not so stunned as Farris was. He realized later that she must have seen her brother like this, before.
“We must take him back to the bungalow, somehow,” she murmured. “I can’t let him stay out here for many days and nights, again!”
Farris welcomed the small practical problem that took his thoughts for a moment away from this frozen, standing horror.
“We can rig a stretcher, from our jackets,” he said. “I’ll cut a couple of poles.”
The two bamboos, through the sleeves of the two jackets, made a makeshift stretcher which they laid upon the ground.
Farris lifted Berreau. The man’s body was rigid, muscles locked in an effort no less strong because it was infinitely slow.
He got the young Frenchman down on the stretcher, and then looked at the girl. “Can you help carry him? Or will you get a native?”
She shook her head. “The tribesmen mustn’t know of this. Andre isn’t heavy.”
He wasn’t. He was light as though wasted by fever, though the sickened Farris knew that it wasn’t any fever that had done it.
Why should a civilized young botanist go out into the forest and partake of a filthy primitive drug of some kind that slowed him down to a frozen stupor? It didn’t make sense.
Lys bore her share of their living burden through the gathering twilight, in stolid silence. Even when they put Berreau down at intervals to rest, she did not speak.
It was not until they reached the dark bungalow and had put him down on his bed, that the girl sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands.
Farris spoke with a rough encouragement he did not feel. “Don’t get upset. He’ll be all right now. I’ll soon bring him out of this.”
She shook her head. “No, you must not attempt that! He must come out of it by himself. And it will take many days.”
The devil it would, Farris thought. He had teak to find, and he needed Berreau to arrange for workers.
Then the dejection of the girl’s small figure got him. He patted her shoulder.
“All right, I’ll help you take care of him. And together, we’ll pound some sense into him and make him go back home. Now you see about dinner.”
She lit a gasoline lamp, and went out. He heard her calling the servants.
He looked down at Berreau. He felt a little sick, again. The Frenchman lay, eyes staring toward the ceiling. He was living, breathing — and yet his retarded life-tempo cut him off from Farris as effectually as death would.
No, not quite. Slowly, so slowly that he could hardly detect the movement, Berreau’s eyes turned toward Farris’ figure.
Lys came back into the room. She was quiet, but he was getting to know her better, and he knew by her face that she was startled.
“The servants are gone! Ahra, and the girls — and your guide. They must have seen us bring Andre in.”
Farris understood. “They left because we brought back a man who’s hunati?”
She nodded. “All the tribespeople fear the rite. It’s said there’s only a few who belong to it, but they’re dreaded.”
Farris spared a moment to curse softly the vanished Annamese. “Piang would bolt like a scared rabbit, from something like this. A sweet beginning for my job here.”
“Perhaps you had better leave,” Lys said uncertainly. Then she added contradictorily, “No, I can’t be heroic about it! Please stay!”
“That’s for sure,” he told her. “I can’t go back down river and report that I shirked my job because of—’’
He stopped, for she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, toward the bed.
Farris swung around. While they two had been talking, Berreau had been moving. Infinitely slowly — but moving.
His feet were on the floor now. He was getting up. His body straightened with a painful, dragging slowness, for many minutes.
Then his right foot began to rise almost imperceptibly from the floor. He was starting to walk, only a hundred times slower than normal.