“Very well, then, you must stay with the _bwana_,” she said: and Onyango, who still wanted to be ingratiating and was ready to do anything but face the new moon and the Waluguru, slunk into the house. She took a last look at James. There was no difference in his condition except that now he was obviously alive, breathing stertorously through his mouth, lying there with his eyes half opened. She wondered for a moment if she dared leave him. “Tell the _bwana_ when he wakes,” she said to Onyango, “where I have gone. Say that I will come back again.” She feared to stay there any longer, for in a little while it would be dark. She comforted herself with the thought that the road through the forest to Njumba ja Mweze must be fairly well defined, since Godovius used it so often. She couldn’t disguise from herself the fact that the adventure was rather frightening, but the thing had to be done, and there was an end of it.
So she took the forest road. In the open Park Steppe there were already signs of night: most of all a silence in which no voices of birds were heard, and other dry rustlings, which would have been submerged beneath the noises of day, heralded the awakening of another kind of life. In the branches of thorn-trees on every side the cicalas set up vibrations: as rapid and intense as those of an electric spark: a very natural sound, for it seemed to be an expression of that highly charged silence. In a wide slade of grasses a herd of kongoni were grazing. When they caught the scent of Eva they reached their heads above the grasses and after following her for a little with their eyes one of them took fright, and with one accord they flashed into the bordering bush, a flying streak of brown. An aged wildebeeste bull, vanquished in some old duel and banished from his own herd, stood sentinel to the kongoni, and when the others disappeared he held his ground, standing with his enormous shoulders firmly planted on his fore feet. Eva was rather frightened of him, for she knew nothing of the nature or habits of big game. As she passed across the opening of that glade he slowly turned, so that his great shoulders and lowered head were always facing her. Some unimaginable breeze must have been moving from her towards him, for he suddenly threw up his head, snorting, and stamped the ground. Then she picked up her skirts and ran, with his mighty breathing still in her ears. She saw that this night journey of hers was going to be no joke. In the night so many savage beasts were abroad. She remembered that less than a week before Godovius had shot a leopard on the edge of the forest. He had told her how the creature had been lying along the low branch of a tree, and how it had sprung into the midst of a herd of goats which a Waluguru boy was driving along the track. Godovius had been near and his second shot had killed it. He had offered her the skin. Now, for the very first time, she realised the savagery of that land. In the mission there had always dwelt a sense of homeliness and protection. She realised, too, the conditions in which James had been working. Poor James. . . . She couldn’t help feeling that she herself was better qualified to deal with that sort of thing than her brother. She pulled all her courage together.