“We must keep to the thorn,” whispered M‘Crae.
She obeyed. But here, on the edge of the bush, where the lower branches of the thorn-trees had pushed out into sunlight and more luxuriantly thriven, it was not easy going. They moved slowly, and in a little while Eva’s dress was torn in many places. Thorns from the low branches tore at her back and remained embedded in her flesh. She was very miserable, but never, never tired. In the bush on their left they heard a melancholy, drooping note. It was the cry of a bird with which Eva had grown very familiar at Luguru, and she scarcely noticed it until M‘Crae stopped dead.
“Yes. . . . But a hornbill never calls at night.”
While he spoke the call was echoed from the woody edge beyond their slade of grasses. Again on their left: and this time very near.
“An escort,” said M‘Crae. “We must get closer in.”
He led the way into a denser thicket of thorn. “We can never force our way through this,” she thought. Upright they could not have penetrated this spinous screen. Crouching low, they managed to pass beneath its lower branches where they drooped to the level of many fleshy spears of the wild sisal. At last Eva found that they had reached a little clear space about the root of a gigantic acacia.
“Now lie down,” said M‘Crae. She lay down in the dark and the shed spines of other years drove into her limbs till she could have cried. In this secret lair they waited silently for a long while. They heard no longer the mocking hornbill call, nor any sound at all until their silence was suddenly shattered by a burst of firing over the grass-land on their right. “They think that they have seen something,” said M‘Crae. “Don’t be frightened. You are quite safe here. Quite safe.”
And so this firing ceased, or rather bore away to the south-east across the line which they were following, and then again to the full south, in distant bush, where it muttered and died away. All this time Eva was lying with her arms between the thorny ground and her head, gazing up at the flat, horizontal tapestries of the acacia and beyond to a clear sky in which the moon sailed lightly as though it were rejoicing in the freedom of the heaven from any wisp of cloud to mar its brightness; for all the cloudy content of the sky lay piled upon the hills beyond which she had risen, in monstrous gleaming billows that dwarfed the dark hill-chains, but stood up so far away that Eva had no notion of their presence. A little wind passed in the night, and she grew aware of many dead or dry leaves shivering all around.