To the joy of the Negro the young Hellene ate with good appetite and for the first time that day raised his head in an effort to look round (during the march, when he lay on the litter, Pandion’s face was usually kept covered with big leaves plucked from bushes near the water-holes). With an effort Pandion stretched out his hands to Kidogo and his weak fingers pressed the Negro’s hand. But there was something dull and pitiful in the young Hellene’s eyes.
Kidogo was very excited and asked his young friend how he felt, but got no answer. The wounded man’s eyes again closed as though the feeble spark of returning life had tired him beyond all measure. Kidogo left his friend in peace and hurried to tell Cavius the good news. Cavius, who had grown still more morose since the day of the awful battle, went over to the litter and sat down, peering into his friend’s face. By placing his hand on Pandion’s breast he tried to judge the strength of his heart-beats.
While he was sitting by Pandion, one of the Nubians, who had climbed to the top of the tree to survey the surrounding land, let out a loud shout. He called out that far ahead of them, almost on the horizon, he could see the dark lines of fences of thorn-bushes such as the nomad herdsmen build to protect their cattle from predatory animals.
It was decided, to spend the night under the tree and set out at dawn in order to reach the nomad encampment early in the day. By sundown the whole sky was overcast with heavy clouds; the starless night was unusually quiet and dark; the velvet darkness was so intense that they could not see a hand held before the face.
Very soon zigzag shafts of lightning made a ring round the whole sky and peals of thunder came rolling from afar. The lightning flashes grew in number, hundreds of fiery snakes twisted across the sky like the huge dry branches of some gigantic tree. The roar of the thunder deafened them and the lightning blinded those who sought to leave their refuge. From a great distance came a noise that steadily increased to a fierce roar. This was an approaching wall of violent rain. The tree shook as an entire ocean of water poured down from the heavens. Cascades of cool rain beat on the earth with an awful noise and a lake formed around the tree that hid its thick roots. In the light of the solid walls of fire that alternated with absolute darkness it seemed that the whole plain would be flooded by the great mass of rainwater that kept pouring down on it. The flashes of lightning, however, soon stopped, the rain died down and a starlit sky spread over the plain; a slight breeze brought with it the odours of grasses and flowers invisible in the darkness. The Libyans and the Etruscan were dumbfounded at a storm which seemed like a terrible catastrophe to them, but the Negroes laughed gleefully, telling them that it was an ordinary shower, such as are common in the rainy season, and not a very heavy one at that. Cavius could only shake his head, telling himself that if such rains were considered ordinary in these parts they were likely to meet with many strange adventures in the Land of the Black People.
And he guessed right.
Next day their journey was suddenly interrupted by the barking of dogs. Long thorn hedges appeared through the mist, caused by the evaporation of the previous day’s rain-water, and behind the hedges they saw the low huts of the herdsmen.
A crowd of men wearing leather aprons surrounded the travellers. Their high-cheekboned faces were inscrutable, their narrow eyes looked with suspicion at the Egyptian weapons carried by the former slaves. The symbol they had received from the Nubian, however, produced a most favourable impression. Out of the crowd stepped five men wearing black and white feathers, their hair dressed high on their heads and held in place by plaited twigs with green leaves.
The Nubians could understand the language of the nomads and soon the newcomers were seated sipping sour milk within a close circle of listeners. The Nubian slaves told their story. Interrupting each other they jumped up and down in their excitement and their tale was greeted by a chorus of exclamations of astonishment. The feather-bedecked chieftains merely slapped their thighs.
The nomads provided six guides and ten asses to help the strangers on their way. The guides were to take the travellers some seven days journey to the south-west to the big village of a settled tribe that stood on the banks of a river that always contained water.
The litters were remade and fixed to four asses, the other animals carried water, sour milk and hard cheese in strong leather bags. As the men now had no loads to carry, they could make longer journeys, covering no less than a hundred and twenty thousand cubits a day.
Day followed day. The endless plain lay under the broiling sun, at times silent and languid in the heat, at others swept by winds that made the grass billow like the waves of the sea. The travellers penetrated farther and farther into the wild lands of the south where there were countless herds of savage beasts. Their unaccustomed eyes did not at first notice herds of animals that flashed by in the tall grass — only their backs could be seen above the grass or sometimes their horns, short and curved, long and straight or twisted into a spiral. Later they learned to distinguish the different kinds — the long-antlered oryx, the reddish bull antelope, heavy and short in the body, the hairy gnu, with its ugly humped nose, and the long-eared antelopes, no bigger than a small calf, that danced on their hind-legs under the trees. (The gerenuk or Waller’s antelope — a long-necked animal that stands on its hind-legs to reach the leaves of the trees on which it feeds.)
Coarse, hard-stemmed grass, the height of a man, waved round them on all sides like a boundless field of corn. This expanse of grass, turned golden in the sunlight, was broken by patches of fresh green along the wadies and holes that were now filled with water. The blue and purple spurs of mountains piled up beyond the horizon cut deep into the grassy plain.
At times the trees grew close together, forming a darker island in the yellow grass, then again they would be scattered far from each other like a flock of frightened birds. They were mostly the umbrella-shaped trees that had so astonished Cavius when he first made the acquaintance of the golden plain — their thorny trunks spread upwards and outwards from the roots to form a funnel so that they looked like inverted cones. Some of the trees had thicker and shorter trunks that also divided into a huge number of branches — the thick, dark foliage of these latter looked like green domes. The palms were visible from a great distance on account of their double, forked branches with the dishevelled, knife-like feathery leaves bunched at the ends of them.
As the days passed Cavius noticed that the Negroes and the Nubians who had been so clumsy and slow-witted in Tha-Quem and on the Great River had now become stronger, more resolute and confident in themselves. And although his authority as leader was still undisputed, he began to lose confidence in himself in this strange land with laws of life that he could not understand.
The Libyans who had shown themselves so well in the desert were helpless here. They were afraid of the grassy plain, inhabited by thousands of animals; they imagined countless dangers in the grass and thought they were threatened with unknowable calamities at every step.
It was certainly no easy road to travel. They came across growths of grass with heads containing millions of needle-like thorns* that penetrated the skin, causing great pain and suppuration. During the hottest hours of the day many of the beasts of prey lay hidden under the trees. The lithe spotted body of a leopard would sometimes appear out of a patch of black shadow that looked like a cave amongst the brightly sunlit tufts of grass.