The Night Shapes

Kit stepped out of his lodge onto the springy turf and took a deep breath. All around him the baobab trees towered, except directly back of the lodge, where the mountain began. Pearly morning light filtered through the leaves onto the deep, rich green of the loam. Over the sonorous whispering of the nearby river, there came a chittering of monkeys, and the sound of a scampering game being played invisibly high up among the leaves.

Kit sighed. Here, in the deep Gunda province, it was cool and clear most of the day in this season. The coast was the steaming country, where white men wasted and died quickly, yellow with the jaundice of alcohol, their ears ringing with quinine. Here he was not even a white man, and he had no encumbrances. He should be satisfied. He was satisfied. What was the matter, anyhow?

The wind shifted slightly and Kit felt a delicate pulsing in his ears, as if tiny paws were pattering directly on his eardrums. He stiffened and turned. Yes, sure enough; there was a word in the air, from a long way away, somewhere down by the Luberfu. After a while the thrumming became stronger, as the Wassabi village girot picked up the message and passed it along.

Over Kit's head the foliage stirred, and a great, flat wedge dipped down to stare at the lone man. Kit grinned wryly.

"Hello, Manalendi. Hear something?"

The python shot out its forked tongue and withdrew it with the quickness of lightning. To that tongue the noise was painfully loud, and probably obscured sounds in which the snake was really interested, sounds no human being could hear. The huge head wove uneasily.

Kit could be of no help. Manalendi's overwhelming curiosity never failed to amuse him, but fundamentally he still did not like having been adopted by a twenty-five-foot constrictor. The creature had been following him around for nearly a year now, sleeping somewhere near the lodge, departing only on brief trips to snitch a chicken or a pig from the Wassabi; and who could say what that meant?

Kit resisted the temptation to believe that he understood it, even partially. It was true that he had something of an affinity for snakes, ever since that memorable summer at a boy's camp when a beautiful king snake had adopted the cabin in which the eight-year-old Kit slept, and had allowed him alone to handle the living cable—even to carry it about, coiled drily around one arm, tail high, head at wrist. He had rapidly lost all fear of snakes as a class, and soon thereafter had learned to respect them; but to understand them? That was something else again.

In the past year he had allowed no one to molest Manalendi, not even the justifiably resentful tribesmen on whom he was poaching; and once, with unusual fool-hardiness, he had helped the awesome mass of power through one session of its only recurrent crisis—the shedding of its skin. That had been downright crazy, for Manalendi had been very bad-tempered about it! Only the fact that he was also torpid had gotten Kit through it alive. Yet always thereafter he had seemed more amenable to being touched, to the point where he now allowed himself to be searched for mites—one affliction even he in his power could do nothing about for himself—though only for a yard or so at a time. Kit did not particularly care for this new custom, either, but he kept it up out of honest doubts as to the safety of discontinuing it.

Above all, it would be mortally easy to fall into the error of thinking that one of the two—-man or snake— had become the pet of the other. Death would be hot on the heels of any such assumption.

In fact, there was no safe assumption. Nobody could know why Manalendi did not go home. Were it possible to ask him, he too might well have no answer; or it might be that the question itself might be fatal. There are some facts one simply has to abide, especially if one of them is twenty-five feet long and will not go away.

The drum message was still a little garbled, but there was no doubt that it said something about white men. That was always bad news in this country and perhaps Manalendi knew it. He plainly hated drum noise, yet it always brought him out; it was Kit's guess that the python equated drums with trouble—if he were lucky, interesting trouble which would wind up in a fight. Manalendi was cold, but not vicious, and most of the jungle creatures big enough to match him left him strictly alone; it was, Kit supposed, a dull life for the most part.

But the python was a hole card which Kit had hopes of playing again. If possible, it ought not to be betrayed ahead of time. He gave the snake the one-word command he thought he had been able to teach it.

"Upstairs, handsome."

Manalendi refused to understand. After a moment, Kit spoke again, and rapped the cruel nose sharply with his closed fist. The snake drew back into an enormous, menacing S, taut in midair.

"Upstairs, handsome."

Manalendi shot out his tongue. Then, slowly, he withdrew, his dappled blue body blending with the shifting leaves. Kit resumed breathing. He had lived through another interview; but they were all different, providing no pattern or guidance for the next; the hammer at the end of that S might just as well have brained him.

The drumming went on. Kit looked speculatively at his own drums, which hung, their drawstrings flaccid, from the eaves of his lodge. Then he decided against it. He was a stammering drummer at best, and were the matter urgent enough to arouse Tombu, he'd already be on the way, since the Wassabi tribes were the ones now passing the message.

The thought had barely entered his head when he saw the brawny shape of the African king sprinting silently down the trail toward the lodge. Kit made the three signs.

"Long life, Tombu."

"A thousand years," Tombu said automatically. Then: "Ktendi! There is a safari coming here, a great one, with many guns, and many boys. They have whips."

"Whips? Real ones? Not the sjambok?"

"No, bondele, long plaited whips such as white men use on slaves. Already they have had many desertions. The deserters claim such cruelty as might frighten a Belgian."

A joke; then the matter was serious. Kit said, "What's it all about? Why do the boys have to be driven? Doesn't the baas pay enough?"

"The pay is high," Tombu said, squatting down on the turf with the natural grace of a creature to which furniture could be nothing but a crutch. Kit followed. "But there are whispers."

"There are always whispers. These people probably hope for gold. Maybe they want to get it from me—most of the whites know how I pay for my shells. There's a silly story about a hidden ancient temple under my hut—you've heard it. White men will believe anything."

"No, bondele. One can sense the gold fever; it shows in the eyes, and in the smell of the sweat. Besides, who would disturb Ktendi's gold? This is something else. They are said to be seeking the shapes."

"No."

"I tell you so."

Kit's lips whitened. "If it were not for the bearers." he said grimly, "one might almost wish that they find the shapes. This is very bad, Tombu. How came they to hear of the shapes? Do the deserters know?"

"Yes, they know. They are hard to talk to, but they know. We are to blame, Ktendi. They have heard of the shape that we saw. They have collected stories from warriors and chiefs; now they are talking to shamans; they believe in the shapes now and want to hunt them, such fools they are."

"Lokuta te. We are to blame. They will have to be stopped."

All in all, Kit was not surprised, though he was thoroughly disgusted. What footling admiration for Stahl's courage had prevented him from killing the fat little man when it had been practicable? Letting him get back to Europe with a tale of having seen a living Triceratops obviously was asking for trouble. Yet Kit had let him go, for no better fee than a promise not to come back.

And now here he was again, or someone probably much like him.

There was an abundance of evidence to lead them on, once they had accepted the bare possibility that such an animal might still survive in Africa. The shapes were a matter of common experience—not counting, for the moment, those which were not "real" in any sense a European could admit. The tribesmen, who knew no geology, accepted them with only a shudder; to them mokele-mbemba, the snake-headed lau, the Elephant-Eater, and all the others were frightful, but after all fundamentally only a few of the million heads of Father Death. Ibwa wete joi ja nkakamwa; that covered the matter.

To the European world, however, which knew these creatures only as faint traces in ancient rocks, such a discovery could not possibly be anything less than an explosion, no matter how conservatively, even incredulously, it was greeted at first. Long ago, Kit had known a white naturalist so fanatic on the subject that he cherished a thing called coprolith—a fossilized dinosaur dropping. He had used it for a paperweight.

But Kit had let Stahl go, and hardly a month had passed before he had become aware that Stahl, back in Belgium, was babbling. The first hint of it had turned up in one of Paula's letters from home; it had precipitated one of their many scarifying quarrels.

For these Kit blamed nobody but himself. He had been a damned fool to let her stay at all, knowing as well as he did how much she had to learn, and how little time he would be able to devote to teaching her. It speedily developed that his long years of isolation had left him with much to learn, too.

Kit had made no offer of marriage, nor had Paula ever raised the question. After a while, however, Kit had thought it incumbent on him to offer the explanation she had not asked for. As an explanation, it was a model of logic, to which no reasonable person could have objected: Paula was still a subject of the Crown and had some residual status back home—damaged though it must have been by her association with him, this was not a liaison susceptible to anything a court might call proof—as the widow of another servant of Her Majesty. On the other hand, were she to marry a stateless person, and under the aegis of Belgium at that, her legal immunities and recourses would probably be lost.

Paula had granted all this in one second and dismissed it in the next. She did not care about the logic, but instead tunneled directly through it to the buried assumption on which it rested—the assumption that she would someday go back to England, rather than staying with Kit forever.

That quarrel had been the first—and only the first of many, fundamentally, because it had never been resolved. The occasional letters from London exacerbated it each and every time. They came from Paula's one remaining loyal friend, a woman in the Whitehall circle who seemed to imagine Paula's life to be romantic, and Kit to be a noble savage out of Rousseau. What seemed to Kit to be an offhand and certainly mild comment on the woman's monumental silliness had sparked another explosion. Eventually, he had taken to postponing essential trips to the coast, and, when he finally did go, avoiding LeClerc, so as not to have to ask for or be forced to accept any mail; which, of course, Paula detected effortlessly.

Worst of all, she was often sick; she had none of the essential immunities. Those days and weeks were the most desperate of all….

Well, she was gone now, leaving behind a cold exhaustion of all feeling which Kit had no trouble recognizing. He had carried it with him ever since Kansas. It was his armor, such as it was, against self-reproach. He wore under it the bitterness, the alum-and-lye corrosion of his hatred for the whole white world.

Yet how could he blame Paula? Her background had overridden her, too. She had yearned for it inevitably after they had fought; yearned for the sound of nasal voices politely discussing things of no moment, yearned to be back where the food was cooked and the nearest snake—Manalendi had increasingly given her the horrors—could be assumed to be at least fifty miles away, and only a few inches long, to boot. In the end she had demanded a poshi of Tombu, and had left Kit's lodge for the—for her—long trek to Berghe Ste. Marie and civilization. With her she had taken Kit's last twinge of sympathy for the white man's world… plus certain other intangibles he did not think about anymore.

Nevertheless: Paula had been some kind of investigator—hardly a nabob, he supposed, but at the very least an authorized agent—for the Congo Inquiry Commission. If she had confirmed any part of Stahl's story of seeing an ancient monster in a Congolese swamp, the Admiralty would say, "My dear girl!"—but they'd believe her.

However it had happened, it had happened. Now there was a safari looking for that valley, and for the shapes… looking in the old familiar European way: with whips.

Tombu was watching Kit steadily.

"How would you?" he said. "An advance party to blunt the edges of these seekers? A war arrow would speed desertions, and we might let the whites go on without boys until they flounder. After that…" The big Bantu did not bother to finish the sentence; in another sense, it had already been passed.

Kit shook his head.

"This safari is probably official," he said. "If we break it up, we'll give the whites every excuse they'd need for a punitive foray—soldiers, whippings, hands cut off, burning of villages, dynamite… all just as before. The English have subdued the Leopold devil, a little—do we want it back?"

"But if they find the valley, Ktendi, the same thing will happen. The bondele will pour in by tens and tens and tens, to shoot at the shapes. Or worse."

"True," Kit said, rising. "At best, they will turn the Gundu country into a reservation overnight. Or they might find a herd of the shapes, and scatter it—"

"Do you think there are herds?"

"Who knows? Do you think there are not?"

Tombu bent his head slightly; he knew a forensic point when he heard one; he was not a king for nothing.

"If there is such a nest in the valley," he said, "and the shapes are turned out of it, no man would set foot in the whole of Katanga again, no, not even his grandchildrens' grandchildren. I ask you again, Ktendi, what would you? If we may not stop this safari by war, with what are we left?"

"It may come to war in the end," Kit said soberly. "But we can't dare it yet. First, I think, I want to see Atumbi. I'll need you with me."

The African stared at Kit for a long moment. Kit could hardly fault him for his doubt. Atumbi was the wizard of the Wassabi; there was no love lost between him and Tombu, for here as among all the Congo peoples king and witch doctor were constant rivals for the ultimate power.

"Atumbi hates you, Ktendi," the king said at last. "And juju is a weak reed against whips and guns."

"My brother, whips and guns impress you overmuch; when did you and I last need either? As for juju, I've no use for Atumbi's kind. But look you, Tombu: you told me yourself that these whites are beginning to talk to shamans—as is only sensible, since it's the shapes they're hunting, and the shapes are of the devil kingdom. Hence what I want first from Atumbi is silence—and for that, I must have his king behind me."

"Lokuta te," Tombu said, showing all his teeth.

"Then quickly. We have little time."

Tombu surged to his feet without further question and went sprinting down the trail, Kit at his heels.

Behind Kit there was a sudden rustle of leaves and fronds: the sound of Manalendi alarmed. But when Kit cast over his shoulder to see what was the matter, the python was not in sight. There was nothing but a diminishing fall of dead vine leaves and detached orchid petals, sifting down to the turf before the lodge like a thin drizzle of broken oaths. The sound whispered away over his head. It might have been going north, but Kit could not be sure; the silence returned too quickly.

He looked up, but of course saw nothing. Manalendi was gone—but where and why could not be riddled. He might be back to the lodge before sunset. It might be that what had alarmed him was of no significance at all to men, no matter what their color.

Or it might be that he had at last started back to his home valley, where he had, a year ago, killed an ancient of his reptile tribe… and where, perhaps, others still churned the swamps of Paradise, plucked the white translucent fruits from the lianas, fought and mated titanically, or chewed their weeds over dim memories of things that had happened before there was such a creature as man.

With a scalp-prickling chill, Kit turned his face ahead, and discovered that Tombu too had disappeared around a sharp turn of the green-blue tunnel of the trail. Ducking his head and hunching his shoulders, Kit ran faster, listening to the thudding music of the drums.

 

 

In the hut of Atumbi there was a peculiar, ineradicable stench, compounded of smoke, blood, scorched flesh, orts, and a variety of aromatic herbs—the reek of the fetish. The hut was also very dark, but that was usual. The darkness was chinked with sunlight, sufficient to reveal the fat ugliness of Atumbi—fat with the kind of power which is never challenged to a trial of strength, ugly with fears and hatreds the truly strong never need to feel.

Kit made a slight, ceremonial bow and grinned tightly into the murk. He had no more than the usual number of enemies, but he was glad to number witch doctors among them. That juju existed was a matter he did not doubt, but in his experience few of the tribal devil dancers knew more about it than the rest of the tribesmen. They were simply parasites, preying upon the universal African belief that no man ever dies a natural death, but instead only of some application of malice and magic, brought about by a curse.

Kit had had deadly curses placed upon him by more of these leeches than he could remember, and had survived them without any more effort than might have been put into a shrug. It was simply a matter of keeping magic and power separate from each other—and bearing in mind that both were real, in their several universes. Not every shaman was a charlatan: there was an old man to the southwest, for example, who might make a bad enemy….

The tubby sorcerer apparently did not like Kit's grin. He bent a black look upon Tombu.

"Thine omens are evil, great chief," he said sonorously. He had a surprisingly deep voice, only a little spoiled by an asthmatic wheeze at the end of each speech. "This day have I read thy fate in the entrails of a pure-white rooster. Thou bringest thy people toward dire ends, through overmuch hearkening to strangers and devils."

"There are no messages writ in such messes," Tombu said, using the infinitely insulting dju, a grammatical construction ordinarily reserved for animals and children. "Thy chicken bespeaks thine own jealousy and nothing more. Ktendi is no stranger to any but thyself. Leave off thy prattling, Atumbi—there's kings' work afoot."

Atumbi grumbled and wheezed, but no words came through. Tombu was still his chief, whatever he might think about Kit. At last he said:

"You speak of the safari, that is easily read. Of this Atumbi was warned, long ago and long."

Kit stepped forward; it seemed to him that this duel had gone on long enough. Now that the tribal courtesies and insults had been rehearsed and satisfied, he might enter the ritual without an overt breach of custom.

"Then perhaps Atumbi can advise Ktendi," he said, "who must learn what little he knows from the drums. Did the spirits have to report to Atumbi that the safari is here to hunt night shapes?"

Judging by the way Atumbi's eyes bulged, the spirits hadn't thought that aspect of the matter important enough to mention; but the wizard made a quick recovery.

"Let them seek," he said. "If they should find the shapes, there would be none left to trouble the lands of the Wassabi."

"None of the shapes? Or of the Wassabi?"

Atumbi bristled. "None left of the whites, as Ktendi knows."

"No, I do not know. I think Atumbi dissembles. His people fear the shapes, as do we all. It is not good that the whites should hunt them. More: this country belongs to us; it is virtually unknown to the whites; and thus it should remain."

"That can be arranged," Atumbi said smugly.

"Thou art wrong, sorcerer. If this safari finds even one night shape, the Gundu lands will be overrun by whites before two years have passed. Expeditions will come by the handfuls to snare other such beasts, settlements will go up, there will be shootings and tramplings and spoilage, theft of women and corn and property, torture and death in abundance. Atumbi, I charge you, is this not only the truth?"

"It is a small truth," Atumbi said. "It is of no moment to the Wassabi. Ktendi hath forbidden that the Wassabi attack this safari, which is as white as he. Soon it will be known that he fears only for his own small life; and that his fine words mean only that his white brothers might steal his stolen Wassabi gold. All this we scorn, Ktendi. The Wassabi need not gold; they will protect their own bomas, and will know Ktendi's cravings for what they are. I have spoken. Enough."

"As have I," Kit said, rising. He stared down at the plump shaman. "And I have said: I will not have these whites here. Inevitably they will send runners to Atumbi and consult with him, since they will think that Atumbi knows better than we where the shapes might be found."

"That too is so," Atumbi said. "I see from your face, Ktendi, an arrogance that little becomes a white. Think you that the world contains only one valley where the shapes live, and there only two or three? I know one such valley that would affright you until you would pray for a taking from Father Death. There, there are tens and tens and tens of shapes. They all live there."

"And doubtless you also know where the elephants' graveyard is," Kit said, with a short bark of laughter. "Your threats are vile and horrid, fat man. Do you propose to tell these whites of this nest of shapes? Speak! What do you threaten? What spites do you affright us with?"

Atumbi spat disgustedly into the dust. Apparently he had nothing further to say.

"Hear ye, sorcerer," Tombu said in a low voice, like distant thunder. "If there exists another such valley, and you know better than we or the whites where it is, / tell you silence. Else I will send you into it naked of even a spear. I your king say this; is it not so?"

"It is so," the magician said, in a voice of grinding hatred. Tombu and Kit went out into the sunlight, leaving the shaman glumly regarding his piglet toes.

"Is there such a place?" Kit said, when they could breathe again.

"Atumbi is full of lies; yet there might be. And if there were, he might sell it. I do not see what we have gained, Ktendi."

"Nothing yet. Only keep a close eye on the tribes. Be sure that it is important to stop any attack upon the safari now. Until we know more, silence and stealth are our only hopes."

"Yes, bwana, but I cannot promise silence for Atumbi without killing him," Tombu said quietly. "Or else he will kill me, and return us to massacre and the cooking of the long pig. This affair will give him fuel and tinder among our people—and you leave me with nothing to say that befits a king."

"I understand that," Kit said gently. "I'll remedy it the moment I can. But I must leave it in your hands now; I have other spears to harden, in the south."

The warrior king nodded. "Life, bondele."

"A thousand years."

Kit strode to the thorn gate. A thousand years—it was a long time, the equivalent of an eternity for men; but now, men were pushing into the deep Congo to grapple with creatures which, they hoped, still lived after the groaning passage of thirty thousand of those terrible millenia. The Africans had better sense: they had no word for "millions," for "thousands," or even for "hundreds," for they knew that there were not so many things in the world that were alike—not even years.

The whites, on the other hand, had the words and the numbers. They also had the deaths that went with them.

 

 

At the beginning of the second day's travel to the south, Kit took to the trees; among other things, it kept his feet dry. He had a long distance to go, and no changes of boots to take with him; only his leathery, grasping feet and hands. A canteen slapped at his left hip as he climbed, containing a little water which was safe to drink. Food was no problem, unless you were squeamish—almost anything alive is good to eat, whether it tastes good or not.

The drums hammered their gorilla chests incessantly, keeping the province informed of the movements of the safari. Their sound was already becoming angry and warlike:

Ktendi hath forbidden that the whites be molested.

The safari is a stirrer-up of demons.

The whites approach—

Ktendi hath forbidden—

They are daily closer to the valley—

Kit kept moving, south and west, roughly in the direction of Lake Leopold. By nightfall the drums were very dim, and no new, nearby hides picked up their song-speech. Here what was urgent to the Gundu tribes was matter of no moment. The land which was the land of King Njona was no friend to Tombu and owed no allegiance or friendship to Ktendi; it was even under the thumb of Belgium only nominally, due to the good fortune—from Njona's point of view—which had vested most of the natural wealth of the Congo in the northern province of Katanga.

Kit waited until the jungle was blanketed in blackness, and then crept toward the boma within which Njona himself slept. Njona would be of no help, but that did not matter; he was not the one Kit was here to see. He waited again, until the cooking fires died, and the murmuring of voices dwindled and became blended with the whispering of the jungle.

Then he lifted his head and screamed.

It was a long, thin, rasping wail—a sound that should not have come from the throat of a man, or, better still, should never have been sounded at all. It was the mating scream of a panther.

And again, Kit waited. Through most of the village, Kit knew, Bantu women would be huddling their infants closer, and black warriors crouching tensely inside the woven mats which were the doors of their huts. That scream must have emptied the alleys and the big compound in a hurry—not so much as a precaution against the panther, a beast hated but not greatly feared in itself, as against any devil that might be choosing to use its voice as a mask.

And in one hut, a very old man would be waiting as Kit was waiting.

Kit found the hut without difficulty and scrambled at the reed mat, whining like a curious cat. A quavering voice said:

"Welcome."

It was pitch black inside, and there was no odor but the smell of earth, and a faint tang, half acrid, half musty, that suggested age. The quavering voice said:

"It is Ktendi, my sometime student. This matter of the valley is very serious, then."

"Deadly," Kit said. "Otherwise I would not trouble you, old one."

"I know that. Ktendi knows of the limits of my power. Within those limits, I may help; not beyond. What would he have me do?"

Kit squatted down and said tensely:

"First of all, there is a question of a second valley of which I have heard speech—a valley harboring night shapes in some numbers, not just one at a time. This is more reasonable on the face of it than that the creatures be solitary, and it will so seem to the white men when they too hear the tale."

"That is so."

"Then there is such a place, master?"

"Even so."

Paradoxically, Kit found himself breathing a little more easily. Up to now, he had been seriously in doubt of the wisdom of coming all this distance—and, in the process, turning his back upon an obviously explosive situation—on the strength of a threat from Atumbi, that fat liar.

"I am unable to order any attack on these whites," he said, "yet they cannot be allowed to reach this Valley. My desire that the safari be unmolested will quickly make me suspect among my own people; they may not do the important thing I must ask of them, when the time comes to ask it. I can see only one way."

"Speak."

"Njona hates you, but he fears more than he hates; it is widely known that you are a true sorcerer, and no leech. It must be said here in the village that Ktendi has deserted his people for the whites, and that the tribe of Tombu is weak and frightened."

The old voice said:

"Njona will make war on Tombu if this is said."

"Even so. That is what I wish. Within two days the people of Njona must go north, painted and armed, to war upon Tombu. The drums must cry war with great voices. Njona will ask omens of you; say him nay; he will be sure to go if you prophesy defeat." Kit paused, but the old shaman said nothing. Kit said, "This will be true prophesy, that you may make in all good faith."

"The word that Ktendi has betrayed Tombu will reach Tombu."

"No matter, Tombu will not believe it. Njona will, which will be all for the best. But there is more. There must be magic. This Ktendi cannot make."

"I make small magics. Speak."

Kit took a deep breath. "There must be a large magic. There must be lightnings in this Valley of Night Shapes. There must be lightnings—and fire."

For a long time it was silent in the stygian hut. For the first time since he had come to live in the jungle, Kit felt a nervous urge to make some useless motion-pull at his earlobe, shift his feet, anything to relieve the tension. If he had asked too much—

"That is great magic," the old man said. "Would Ktendi drive the beasts from their home? This must not be; the jungle would be very terrible if these grandfathers of serpents were abroad in it; more terrible if this were by our doing, since their home is their home and they have offered us no harm. Only to ask such a favor would not sweeten our names among the Powers. The whites would drive the shapes out; but we must not."

This was a virtual oration coming from the terse old sorcerer, and Kit knew that he had indeed overstepped the bounds of custom between master and student. Nevertheless, Kit drove forward.

"We must," he said, his voice deepening with conviction. "We must do more: we must drive the shapes directly over the camp of the whites, wherever that may be at the time. And then—we must drive them back into their Valley again."

The silence was eloquent.

"Look you, my master," Kit said. "We can bring no force to bear on the whites themselves, or we shall feel the whips on our backs before the year is out, the Gundu country will not be alone in ringing with gunfire, and the devil king in Belgium will be chopping off our hands like so many leaves. Our sole hope is to convince the safari that the great beasts have been driven out of their haunt and are scattered all over the face of Africa. There is no way to do that but to do it. And—of course the creatures must be driven back into the Valley again. Back, because, as you say, it is theirs; and driven, because they have not the cunning to find their own way."

"That is true. And so Ktendi means to muster the people of Njona and of Tombu at the rim of the fire, to herd the shapes to the Valley again, with the threat of war between the two tribes?"

"Yes," Kit said. "The flying things, if there are such, may return of their own accord when the fire is over; but the thunderers who walk must be herded. It will require us all to get them back, and there is no way but war to bring us together."

Once more there was a long silence. Then the old man said:

"You have the Sight, Ktendi, as once I foresaw you would. You say of the shapes words that are high secrets even among shamans; and well I know I never spoke them to you."

Kit permitted himself a brief sigh, and he hoped an inaudible one, of thanks for his past curious dips into Lyly's Geology.

"Then—can the lightnings be asked this favor?"

"The jungle is never dry; yet the season of rains is moons away. I will ask the favor, Ktendi—but it is a large magic for an old man. If I am refused, there will be slaughter between the tribes, and the whites will reach the Valley all the same."

"And Ktendi," Kit said wryly, "will go into the pot. My people have not forgotten the crisp crackle of long pig, for all that they have not tasted much of it since I came to them. It would be fitting if they broke my law with me."

"I will ask that there be a fire in the Valley, and say to you how to find it," the old voice said. "And ask also for a south wind to fan the fire. But this is a very large magic for such a man as I, Ktendi."

Kit stood up.

"I would not ask it," he said soberly, "of any other."

 

 

Two days gone by, and dusk again, and the trees purring and purling with an invisible river of wind. Kit paused in the crotch of a shea tree and listened. The safari had last been reported traveling the Ikatta, and he knew that it would have to leave that swampy river before it could get very deep into Gundu country.

A distant sound fought upward. Kit stiffened. Singing? For a moment he would not believe it. He wriggled higher in the tree suffering a sudden eruption of ants up one arm, and lay still along a thick, corded branch.

So the bearers still had spirit enough to sing? That didn't jibe with the stories of whippings and desertions….

The deep bass voices drew nearer, and after a while Kit could make out the language, and then—with great difficulty—the words:

 

"I die in the desert

a thing accursed

that saw thee,

yet never possessed thee…."

 

No such song had ever been sung before in the Congo, for there were no deserts anywhere in the immense Belgian protectorate; only a very few patches of grassy veldt in the northern highlands. Kit racked his memory. The dialect itself was utterly strange.

After a while he had the answer, supplied by the words themselves; the attitude toward women they expressed would have seemed ridiculous to any Bantu; but it was thoroughly Arabic—and the dialect fitted. The expedition was using Turkana boys from Upper Kenya, desert nomads who could never have heard any of the legends of the jungle; whose language was so heavily Semitic that they could talk to the Congo tribes only with the greatest difficulty; whose traditions were so fiercely individualistic that even in strange country they would be managed only under the whip, and even then would sing (though, to be sure, sad songs of exile and loss; but did desert nomads have any other kind of song?); and who could be depended upon not to desert. Only the local recruits to the poshi would be likely to drop out, and there could not have been very many of them even at the start.

That was bad. There was obviously both money and brains behind this raid on the jungle's oldest secret.

The rhythmic crashing of machetes had barely reached Kit's ears when it was cut off. There was shouting, and then a vicious crack! which almost made him wince. The headmen had whips, all right, and no reluctance about using them. Then a gleam of orange showed that fires were being lit, and camp made for the night.

Kit slithered forward, grasped the tough lianas, and wormed his way ungracefully but silently into the next tree. From here, he found that he could see a sizable part of the encampment. Almost directly below him, a tent was being pegged out, and before it three white men stood, arguing in subdued voices. One of them held the whip, doubled under his arm.

Off to one side, an incredibly thin, tall Negro was patiently allowing his back to be taped by another white: evidently the victim of the whip, getting a doctor's attention. The Negro confirmed Kit's guess. The man was obviously a Turkan, a member of that small, conflictless tribe which ranged the boundaries of the Kenya colony.

One of the white men raised his voice angrily.

"You're a fool," he said, in an Englishman's almost intolerable French. "They'll take it from one of their own kind, but from a white man it's another matter. Haven't we lost enough bearers already?"

"I know what I'm doing," the man with the whip growled. "France is full of niggers. If you allow them an inch, they take an ell."

He swung suddenly toward the doctor and the tribesman and shouted an injunction so idiomatic, and so transcendently obscene, that Kit was stunned that any white man could have composed it; it was certainly not anything he could ever have heard any Bantu say. The man was a positive virtuoso in Swahili, of the kind spoken by the Ubangi tribes; as for his French, it seemed to be out of Bordeaux. He must have spent many years in the south, in French Equatorial Africa, somewhere in the vicinity of Bangui. That would account for the form of address; and judging by the way he used the whip, he might have spent the time there managing a sisal-hemp plantation.

Regardless of the accuracy of these guesses, one thing was plain: he was no amateur.

The doctor finished hastily and gave the tall Turkan a slap on an unmarked shoulder. The boy went off with a kind of surly patience, and the fourth white man joined the group before the tent.

"At least," he said, betraying himself at once as a Belgian, "try to take it a little easy, des Grieux. A welt is one thing, that doesn't cripple; but if you keep losing your temper and flaying the men, they're useless for weeks. Sometimes, for good."

"All right," the one called des Grieux said in a sour voice. "But I'm tired of all this malingering."

"So am I," the Englishman agreed fervently. "Listen to those damned drums! By the time we find the Valley at this rate, the whole country'll be up in arms."

"Those aren't war drums," des Grieux said contemptuously. "Just the usual information bureau. Dunstan, I thought you knew this country; but you spend half your time in a panic. What good is that, may I ask?"

"I know something about this part of the Congo," the man called Dunstan said in his atrocious French. "Which is more than you do. To begin with, I know that there's no such thing as a war drum, not up here: drums carry messages, and that's all. If they start carrying the war call, des Grieux, you'll have whipped it into being."

Kit decided that it was time he took a part in this conversation. Swinging his canvas boots over the edge of the branch, he slid away into the dark air and plummeted.

The men were still arguing when he struck, and the trampled grasses took up most of the sound of his landing. After a moment, the little doctor turned in Kit's direction as if to take himself out of the conversation in disgust. Then he started, and froze.

"What—Who's there?"

The others spun. Kit kept his thumbs inside his belt. Even in the fitful firelight, it should not be hard to see that he carried neither rifle nor spear—but more difficult to be sure whether or not there was a pistol under one of those thumbs.

He said:

"Good evening, gentlemen."

"My goodness," the doctor said, gasping like an asthmatic. "A white man—what a turn you gave me! How on earth—did you spring up out of the ground?"

"No, doctor, not exactly. I'm sorry I startled you. But I've had word of your safari, and I came to see you as fast as I could. I've some advice for you, if you're interested."

"Advice?" des Grieux growled. "We've got more than we need. Nobody here asked for yours, whoever you are."

Dunstan took him by the elbow. Des Grieux shook the grip off angrily, but the Englishman would not be forestalled.

"Just a minute, des Grieux," he said doggedly. "Control your bloody temper for ten seconds, will you? The man is trying to do you a favor."

"What of it?"

"Nothing of it," Dunstan said, throwing up his hands. "You are impossible. Don't you even know who he is?"

Des Grieux looked Kit over, carefully, and then shrugged. "No. But I'll listen."

"Unless I'm sadly mistaken," Dunstan said with the utmost caution, like a philosopher trying to construct a logical proposition which might stand for all time, "we have here the legendary Ktendi—Son of Wisdom, King of the Wassabi, Master of Serpents, and half a dozen other titles."

He was interrupted by an infuriate chorus of screams from a galaxy of monkeys, disturbed in their beds by, perhaps, a marauding snake. He waited patiently until the noise died. Then he said: "Sir, is that true?"

"I'm Kit Kennedy," Kit said.

"A stray hunter," des Grieux said. "Dunstan, in God's name keep your head. There's no such thing as Ktendi, and no such thing as night shapes, either. What we're hunting is dinosaurs, will you bear that in mind?—dinosaurs, real objects, real animals! Keep your damn romanticism to yourself! And as for you, Mr. Kennedy, why don't you mind your own business?"

"It is my business," Kit said. "Mr. Dunstan is right. I'm sorry to disappoint you, M. des Grieux, but there is a Ktendi. That's what the Wassabi call me. Would you like to argue the matter with them?"

The Frenchman simply shrugged, after the briefest of hesitations.

"What for?" he said. "I'm not interested in operatic heroes. I'm here on business, myself. If you're Ktendi, m'sieu, would you please state your business, and then get on back to your savages? We have neither the time nor the facilities to nurse parasites."

"Thank you," Kit said, with a smile of admiration. "But I don't need nursing. I'm here on your behalf, with nothing more to say than this: this is dangerous country you're entering."

"We know that."

"You know less about it than you think. I'd advise you to turn back."

"Oh?" des Grieux said coldly. "That's a threat, I presume?"

"Not at all. You are in no danger yet. But the tribes fear juju more than they do guns or whips. The Valley that you seek is held in great dread by all the Gundu tribes, and many others as well. If you persist in searching for it, you'll have a full-fledged revolt on your hands."

Des Grieux sniffed. "A real pretext to come in and civilize this morass, I'd say."

"It isn't your morass, des Grieux," the fourth white man broke in. It was the first time that he had spoken; and he sounded squeaking-angry. "This is the Belgian Congo, I remind you."

"True," des Grieux said. "Mr. Kennedy, you're a white man, I notice. You don't believe these stories about spirits and devils."

"You're wrong. I do."

"Please. I am not an idiot. I'm trying to be reasonable; will you give me a chance? What, for instance, is your interest in the Valley?"

"Personal."

"Naturally," des Grieux said. "But what is it?"

Kit said, "It's personal. That's all."

There was a long, itchy silence. At last, Dunstan said nervously: "Des Grieux, why can't you leave well enough alone? As the story goes, this man's an American who's taken to jungle living. That's his privilege. Maybe he just doesn't want us trespassing on his territory. Is that right, Mr. Kennedy?"

"Yes, Mr. Dunstan. In part, anyhow."

"His territory?" des Grieux laughed harshly. He strode forward, and shoved his face to within six inches of Kit's. "Listen, m'sieu. This is the King's territory—Leopold's, not yours. The last I heard, he had no regard for savages, no matter what their color."

"He's mistaken," Kit said quietly. "But I don't see what you're getting at, anyhow. You're not a Belgian."

"No. But I'm a hard-headed man—hard-headed enough to believe the unbelievable when the evidence is good. There are dinosaurs in this country. A man named Stahl told me he had seen one, and he's a reliable observer. I want drawings and specimens. I mean to get them. If the niggers fear magic more than guns, that is a very sad error on their part, and I'll re-educate them. Do you understand me?"

Kit calmly took des Grieux's nose between steel-hard fingers, and brought the astonished man to his knees with a merciless wrench of his wrist. Des Grieux tried to grab at Kit's legs, and missed. The whip fell to the ground. Kit put a foot on it, and bowled the man away from him.

"Your manners," he said, "need improving. I don't like people who puff in my face."

He scooped up the whip. Des Grieux scrambled back to his feet, raging; but if he had had any intention of charging Kit, the sight of the lash under Kit's arm seemed to change his mind.

Kit's eyes flicked over the guarded faces of the other white men. They did not seem disposed to interfere. In that brief silence, the pounding of the drum suddenly came rolling down over the encampment like a flood.

Dunstan stiffened. "That's it," he said, white-lipped. "That's a war call, or I've never heard one. Isn't that true, Mr. Kennedy?"

Kit cocked his head. The wild throbbing came from the north, where the lands of Tombu lay. It was a little garbled, but quite readable.

Ktendi hath betrayed the folk of Tombu.

Ktendi hath given the Gundu lands to Njona.

Ktendi hath promised the Valley to the whites.

Ktendi hath betrayed—

A word lost here. Then:

Spears to the south, or death! Spears to the south!

"Yes, Mr. Dunstan," Kit said. "That's what it is. Take warning, gentlemen. The natives war among themselves, and they'll keep it to themselves as long as you don't break their taboos. That specifically means the Valley of the Night Shapes. If you turn back now, you'll probably be safe—otherwise, you'll probably die."

"I am going to the Valley," des Grieux said, nursing his nose, and glaring malevolently over it at Kit. "That is what I came here for, and that is what I am going to do. The niggers don't scare me—and neither do you."

"All right," Kit said. "But M. des Grieux, the Valley is not a zoological garden. It's a place where old and deadly animals still live, animals that your world couldn't even tolerate—and things that we know better than you do. I assure you, if you fight your way through the tribes to the Valley, you will wish you hadn't."

As the last word left Kit's lips, there was a flutter of movement over his head. Then three tough, massive coils of cold power lashed about his waist, tightened, and lifted—

Manalendi!

The foliage closed about him. Below, the four faces looked up after him, white as milk.

 

 

The campfires dwindled behind them and blinked out. Kit clung rigidly to the python's flexing steel side for a moment, then hit it twice with his knuckles.

The coils froze, and then loosed him delicately. Kit crawled free and swung away into the tree. Below, there was a sudden hysterical shouting, and then a volley of shots through the tree they had just quit, whipping the leaves like heavy rain.

Kit kept moving. Only when he was sure that the campers could not hit him from where they were, even by accident, did he stop and catch his breath. The python's head glided to a stop nearby, but higher; though the animal weighed far more than Kit did, its weight was so evenly distributed that it could use far smaller branches.

"You're a melodramatic old sinner," Kit murmured. "What was the big idea, anyhow?"

The snake stirred uneasily; the sound of Kit's voice seemed to disturb it.

"What's the matter? Fighting somewhere?"

"Tsssss," Manalendi said. He began to slide away. Kit waited curiously until the snake came back and drove a horny snout between his shoulder blades, nearly knocking him sprawling from the branch. Kit clutched at the vines and caught in a mouthful of air.

"All right, I'll come along. Don't be so damned persuasive."

"Tssssssss!" the snake said. It butted him urgently, and then began to travel again. Kit clambered after it as fast as he could. The drums boomed their war calls implacably; the very air seemed to shudder. After a while, Kit worked his way up to the top of a giant baobab to get a look at the stars. Manalendi traveled in a broad, impatient spiral of blackness around him, shaking the branches almost imperceptibly.

"We're going the wrong way," Kit muttered. "And it's clouding up. Look handsome, damned if I'll stop to steal you a shoat at this stage of the game. You'll get me lost, and I've got business at—oof!"

The snake's huge head had thudded into his ribs again. Kit decided to call a moratorium on his plans. Pythons normally sleep between meals—usually a week or more at a time. But Manalendi had something extraordinary on his cold little mind tonight, that was certain.

A distant flicker caught Kit's eye. For a moment he thought he had imagined it. Then it came again, unmistakably.

A chill went up Kit's backbone. It was several months too early for the rainy season, but that flash could mean only one thing: an old man in Njona's village had asked certain Powers a favor—and was going to get it, or at least some of it.

Well, that was how the Golden Rule went: Ukimfaa mwenzio kwa jua, naye atakufaa kwa mvua—Those who help in the wet season will have help in the dry. Still, it was eerie.

Kit clambered down and began to work south again. After a few moments, the snake followed. He was afraid that it would be disposed to interfere, but this time it made no protest.

This was doubly odd. Up to now, he had been being driven roughly in the direction of Balalondzy, toward that same valley which had once been Manalendi's home. It would have been impossible to reach it in anything under two weeks, but of course that was a notion impossible for Manalendi to entertain—as impossible as explaining to the python that everything of importance was now happening somewhere else. Now, however, the snake was letting Kit retrace his steps, which made no sense at all.

Or perhaps it was just as it should be. Basing one's plans on reading the mind of a python would not be very sensible, either.

He skirted des Grieux's camp, listening wryly to the sounds of frightened preparation that the drums had stirred up in it, and backtracked the safari. It seemed to be several hours later that he came upon the spoor of a large war party, but the stars were now completely overcast, and with them the passage of time; already Kit was beginning to wonder if the night would ever end.

The war party, when he reached it at last, was still on the move. They too were going south: therefore, probably Tombu's people, though Kit could not overhear enough talk to make sure. Not that it made much difference; Kit knew that neither side would be exactly glad to see him now. He passed on over them without making any sign, and when he was out of earshot, once more climbed to the top of a tall tree and looked north.

A dim haze of yellow and pink was glowing on the far, dark horizon. Whispers moved in the air above the tree tops—the flight of thousands of small, dark bodies. Most of them were birds. Kit had no desire to know what the others were.

He knew what he needed to know. The Valley was indeed on fire.

Kit descended to the middle reaches of the tree and waited. This was also as far as he intended to go, come what may. After a while, Manalendi butted him again—and then again, with pile-driver impatience.

"Cut that out," Kit growled. As the python's head wove toward him once more, Kit hammered it hard on the snout with the handle of his knife.

For once it was no trouble to reach Manalendi's mind. He was insulted. He swung away into the air, and came whistling back in a motion that would have been too fast to see even in bright daylight. Kit went sprawling off the branch like a rag doll. The universe spun once and disappeared.

Consciousness crept back, infinitely slowly, in a red haze of pain. Opening his eyes brought no change; it was still night. There was wet earth under him, and after a while he realized that he was wet all through. It was raining—not violently, indeed not hard enough to get through the treetop cover, but doggedly enough to fill the sable air with drippings from the leaves.

He moved tentatively, and had to bite his lips. Something was broken—a rib, at the least; perhaps two. Well, he had gotten off lightly. It had been a long fall—and Manalendi might just as well have killed him as knocked him down…

Speaking of that, where was the old sinner? Kit struggled to his feet, but it was impossible to see anything at all in the dripping blackness. Nor was he going to be able to do any more tree climbing, with his ribcage caved in like this; just breathing was painful.

The sky sheeted over briefly with lightning, showing as a stipple of blue-green mosaic pieces far aloft. The jungle was motionless in the brief, dubious light.

There was no sign of the python, which of course proved nothing. Kit wondered why it had suddenly decided that it wanted him to keep moving. Could it have been that he already sensed the fire? Naturally there was no way to find out—except, of course, to keep moving. He had expected Njona's party to pass him about here, but it was probable that the sudden storm had halted them; in which case he would have to go to them.

That could hardly have been Manalendi's reason for keeping in motion, but it was a good enough one for Kit. He started walking along the trail.

 

 

The encampment of Njona was not hard to find; with the ever-incredible Bantu failure to believe in the possibility of surprise attack, the warriors had lit fires.

Kit walked straight into it. Even a fallen king, he thought wryly, had a little prestige left—one can never tell when he might regain his throne. Besides, Manalendi might still be following him—a spectacle to give the most bloodthirsty enemy a sober second thought. Kit was not counting on that, however.

Njona came to meet him, tall and horrible in paint and feathers. His greeting was very simple. He said: "Go!"—two syllables in Swahili, and twice as unfriendly.

"I have grave news," Kit said, without giving any sign that he had heard the command. "Tombu's warriors are near."

Njona gestured imperiously with his spear. A Negro nearly as tall as himself stepped to his side.

"Make ready," Njona said. 'The Wassabi approach." Then to Kit again: "Go. You are not wanted here."

Kit stood his ground; he knew his man. Njona no longer knew whether Kit was on his side or not; he was unfriendly, but not yet positively hostile.

"That is not the only word I bring," Kit said evenly. "It is now far too late to make war upon the Wassabi. Do you not hear the jungle?"

Njona lifted his head. The jungle was rustling with more than rain—only slightly, but perceptibly to a trained ear, once attention was called to it. While the black king listened, a small, vivid green snake shot through the splattered slime at his feet and vanished again, leaving behind a zigzag trail.

"The small ones first," Kit said softly. "Then the big constrictors, like my friend Manalendi of the Rocks. The birds have already gone over; perhaps you heard them, flying by night. And then—"

The chiefs eyes bulged with realization. "The birds that fly by night" was a girot's drum-kenning for—

"Fire!" Njona said hoarsely. "Ktendi hath fired the jungle!"

"The fire began far from Ktendi," Kit said. "It began far beyond the villages of the Wassabi. It is—"

A medley of triumphant howls drowned him out. The underbrush shook, and erupted charging warriors. Njona's warriors snatched up their spears.

"The Wassabi!" Njona cried. He brushed past Kit. Arrows began to thrum from the trees around the clearing. On the north side, several men were already down, writhing. Shields thudded against each other.

At the same instant the trees were swarming with screaming monkeys, pushing at each other, biting, jumping wildly at branches they could not possibly make, dropping on the fighting men like the ripe baobab gourds that bore their name. The din was terrible; but above it a greater sound still came rolling in, a rising clamor of terror and death. The warriors hesitated, turning from each other, looking around and up—

A herd of wild beasts stampeded through the undergrowth, on hoofs as light as the footfalls of spirits. The glow on the sky was plainly visible now. The roaring and howling became still louder, and Kit thought he could hear the faint crackling of the flames themselves behind it; but it was hard to be sure.

The Africans forgot their war. "The trees!" Njona screamed. The ranks melted like clods in a flood, making for the thick trunks.

But it was already too late. There was terror up there among the leaves. A black and sinuous shape looked down at them from the nearest crotch, its eyes glowing green fury. Njona stabbed upward at it, and it responded with a sound like the death agonies of a devil. It was mad with fright and hatred, and sprang upon the instant, the sabers of its claws spread wide.

King and cat hit the ground simultaneously, but the panther did not stop to fight. It fled, a bolt of black lightning. In the tossing branches, more pairs of green slits flashed downward. The men slid back down the trunks again in a hurry.

"Tombu!" Kit shouted.

"Awa. Jambo, bwana."

The Wassabi chieftain, almost unrecognizable in his war clays, gestured from the other side of the clearing, but made no move to come closer. If he had, his own subjects would have put a spear in his back.

"The Valley has been burned out!" Kit proclaimed at the top of his voice. Even in the din he was sure that everyone could hear him. "The night shapes are coming this way!"

For an instant the shock froze them all. The sky was now bright enough to cast faint shadows. The ground shook with the passage of heavy bodies somewhere nearby—rhinos, possibly.

Then, slowly, Tombu approached. With him came two or three others, and Njona.

"Is this your doing, Ktendi?" Tombu said somberly.

"Yes, in part—but no matter. The great need now is to run ahead of the fire—it would be impossible to go against it anyhow—and herd the shapes directly over the camp of the whites."

"Herd the shapes?" Njona said, with the air of a man surprised for the first time in his life.

"Even so. It may not be needed, if the fire continues in that direction anyhow. That will show the whites what the shapes are like, enough to satisfy them all their lives long—if they live through it all. They will go home and report that the great things have been scattered beyond hope of capture. But they must not stay scattered."

Both chieftains nodded in unison. That went without question. Penned in the Valley, the night shapes lived out their immortal lives without much infringing upon the lands of men and beasts; but roaming abroad—no, that could not be suffered.

"I have three hundred men," Njona said.

Tombu grinned mirthlessly. "So many? It is well this war was stopped. I have half that many, Ktendi. It is enough?"

"It will have to be. We had better fan out. The forest folk won't molest us unless we try to halt them; let them by."

He moistened a finger. The fire seemed to be moving a little to the east of them, under the urging of a steady, inexplicably cold wind. When Njona's shaman, who made small magics, asked certain Powers a favor, he evidently was given it in brimming measure. Kit knew instinctively that was probably the first such favor the old man had ever asked—and certainly the last he would be granted.

"This is good. The shapes will go to the west. It would be impossible to make them go back into the blaze."

There was a new thunder, agitating the huge trees like the pebbles in a witch doctor's rattle. The night rang with the trumpeting of elephants.

The noise got louder. It was impossible, but it was so.

On the yellow-lit loam, the night shapes came lumbering. Branches snapped like sparks at their approach.

They were hard to see—and it was impossible to believe what one saw. The first to come through was a thirty-foot gray-green tower with a wide-fanged head, blundering like a kangaroo upon vast hind legs. It froze Kit to the ground, his muscles congealed with panic. Somehow he had never dreamed that these monsters might be five times as tall as he was.

Then the thing moved forward, and Kit forced himself to shout at it. It stopped, and glittering, mindless eyes looked down at the puny figure with the brand. The eyes, as big and muddy as oysters, blinked with mechanical regularity.

Brand. Fire.

The shape was stupid, however terrible. It could not differentiate between a torch and a conflagration. After a while its walnut-sized brain turned it away and sent it striding vastly, clumsily toward the west.

There were more. The world became an endless nightmare.

There were four-legged monsters twice the size of hippos, with ridges of flat spear-blades along their backs, like the river beast Manalendi had fought. There were screaming, eighty-foot nightmares with necks and tails as long each as Manalendi, legs like tree trunks, bodies that would have dwarfed a bull elephant. There were wide scarlet maws, lashing tails that bore batteries of spikes, great turtlelike carapaces, grasping four-fingered paws with thumbs as cruel as thorns, pads that mashed five inches into the mud at every step. Above, in the lurid light and the smoky columns of rain, wheeled shapes like bats—shapes with wings as big as sails—wheeling and calling to each other hoarsely, eagerly.

And there were shapes for which no words existed, shapes older than words, shapes older than the walking apes who had invented words. Among them, anonymous forever, mokele-mbemba.

The men were Johnny-come-latelies. They had nothing but spears, arrows, fire and courage.

Also, they had brains.

 

 

The nonstop, obscene nightmare lasted a week, and might well have lasted forever had not the eternally wet jungle been so intolerant of the fire. That was brought to an end by an early torrent of the rainy season—perhaps one last favor from the Powers.

Kit wasted no time speculating about that. He had had no sleep, except for minutes here and there. He was not thinking at all anymore—only reacting. Exactly as some girl or other had once told him he did usually.

Nothing could be done, it had turned out, to turn the shapes back toward their home Valley. They were too far from that home. But they had begun to bunch again near Balalondzy, and there seemed to catch a scent that they knew. From then on it was no longer a matter of herding them, but only of keeping up with them; they were going like so many scores of juggernauts toward that other valley where Kit had once danced on a drum.

This had been no part of Kit's plans, but he decided it suited him. There was only one way for the shapes to get into that valley, and that was by way of the river's mouth. By the same token, that was the only way they could get out of it, too—and that could be prevented.

He felt no particular concern for the village where he had danced. He rather doubted that it was even in existence anymore, after the battering it had taken and the rout of its slave masters. He did wonder, vaguely, whether or not there would be enough to eat in the valley for so many voracious reptiles; though their numbers had been much reduced, both by fire and by bullets—that almost unmanageable Special of des Grieux's had turned out to be able to fell them very well indeed, and the Belgian had stood his ground with it to the last—it struck him that just one such appetite per valley would be the soundest arrangement. Well, it couldn't be helped.

The party paused at the edge of the veldt. Though it was nearly nightfall, this was familiar territory; they had camped here before. It was time, at last, for a break. Tombu had already staked it out and gotten things organized.

"You do not want to keep following?" the chieftain said, motioning with his head out across the trampled grassland.

"No. We know where they've gone. If they decide to come out again, we'll hear it quickly enough. But I doubt that they will."

"Even so."

Kit sighed. Nearby, he heard the boys talking among themselves. They must be as tired as he, but the wonder and fear of what they had seen—and what they had managed to do—was still moving them.

"Munti nini abumi njoku oyo?"

"Mondele na yo te?"

"Seju."

And then, a fragment of another conversation:

"Wapi ye?"

"Ktendi alobi ye akuya te."

"Je nina akuya te?"

"Manalendi. Bango bandeko na Ktendi."

That would have been interesting, had Kit not been so tired. It was not very surprising that the Wassabi thought of the python as being, at least in a sense, one of the night shapes; but the last speaker had used the plural form—"They are the friends of Ktendi." How on earth could they have reached that conclusion?

It didn't matter. He turned toward his sleeping tree—the very same tree, in fact, in which he had first met Manalendi. Tombu was standing there, watching him and grinning. Kit felt vaguely alarmed; the things that amused the African had a tendency to be violent.

"What's the joke, Tombu?"

"Nothing, Ktendi. Ay-obwa. Baminga; nansima macamba yonso cakosilisa."

"Baminga," Kit said, and began to climb. The African's benediction—"Afterwards all the troubles will be over"—was only a piety, but it was a nice thought to go to sleep on.

The boys had, he discovered, built him a rude platform up here, and for once he felt that he needed it. There was even a lump of bedding, quite a sizable one by his standards. He seated himself on the edge of the boards, and in the fast-falling night, began to loosen his boots.

Behind him, a voice said quietly:

"Oyo esika biso tolalaki."

He turned, very slowly. It was not the words that stunned him, they were only simple observation. It was the voice.

Paula sat up. She said nothing further. Her face was very pale.

"Yes," Kit said, in French. He knew her Swahili was not good; in fact, she had once declared that she hated the language. "Yes, we have slept here before. But—how did you get here? What are you doing?"

"It was Tombu's idea of a joke. He kept me carefully hidden all this time, and spirited me up here about an hour ago. I'll go if you like, Kit."

"Where would you go?"

"Back where I came from."

Kit snorted. She made it sound like catching a trolley. His whole spirit was entirely too numb to cope with this problem. His opinion of Tombu's jokes fell still another notch.

"What do you mean by 'all this time'?" he demanded. "Since when? What are you up to?"

"Never mind." She threw the bedding off and swung her feet over the edge of the platform. It wasn't a far drop; she could jump it easily. "I didn't think it was a good idea, myself. Baminga, Ktendi."

"No, wait." He clutched desperately at his head. If only he could think! "Please, Paula. I'm sorry to be rude. I'm almost always rude, as you well know. I'll stop grilling you. I just want to know how this happened."

"Fair enough," she said; but she still had her back to him, and it was very straight. "I was in des Grieux's party. When all those—when the safari broke up, Tombu made a quick side trip around our camp to loot guns and medicines, and came across me. He thought springing me on you at the very last minute would be a great climax to the whole affair for his bondele. He gave me a special poshi that kept me trailing along behind until last night—then they rushed me up ahead of you, and here I am."

"I see," Kit said, but it was only an automatic noise. The whole thing was as total a mystery as before. "Well… I'm glad to see you."

"Thank you."

"Dammit, I mean it. But I'm still mystified. I never dreamed you'd come within an ocean of Africa again, let alone here."

"I couldn't help it," Paula said quietly. "You made a savage of me, Kit. I'm a pretty sorry sort of savage, and I know it, but that's what I am. I was no good for tea-and-crumpets at Whitehall any longer. And of course everyone knew the story, and they knew I was a savage, too. They knew it before I did."

Kit felt a dull ache, half sorrow, half guilt, spreading through him. "I'm sorry," he said. "The worst of it is, all along I had the feeling that it would be something like that."

She turned suddenly. "No, no! It's not your fault! You told me! That was what we were always quarreling about. It's that I wouldn't listen! I had to learn some other way. And after a while, I—I decided I had to come back. When des Grieux asked me to join the party, because he thought I knew where the Valley was, I said yes."

"Hmm. He was thinking of this valley, of course."

"Yes. But I could never have found even this one. It was just a pretext. I thought I could get away from him as soon as we got into your part of the country—but he knew I was up to something. I never had a chance… not until all those horrors came thundering over us, and Tombu found me."

She shuddered convulsively. Kit reached across the tiny square of boards and pulled her to him.

"It's all right. You're safe now. I just may clout Tombu one for this trick, but nothing will happen to you. I promise."

She sighed raggedly, and was silent for what seemed to be a long while. Then she said:

"I'm not afraid. Isn't that odd? But it's true, I'm not afraid. I made up my mind before I left that I didn't care how it came out, I was coming back to—here. It could take me in, or it could kill me. I knew that. I would have welcomed either."

"Hush." He kissed her. Below, the boys began to hum… a long, winding song in imitation of a drum message, which had no words because one could hear the words in the tune.

"Paula."

She stirred, and rested her forehead against his neck. "Yes."

"This isn't over yet. Will you stay in camp tomorrow, until I come back?"

"If you'll come back."

"Yes."

"Nansima macamba yonso cakosilisa."

"Where have you been picking up the language? You used to hate it."

"No, my dear," she said. "I didn't hate it. I hated you. Actually it's a beautiful language—I could hear that right away."

"Well," Kit said, ruefully, "one thing is still in character. Your accent is dreadful."

Paula tipped her head back and laughed at the stars. "Thank you," she said. "Now I know I'm home—the man's insulting me again."

Something stirred under the massive frown of the cliff. A huge, heavy head wove up over the treetops, which were low here because the ground was too soaked to allow enough roothold for a really big tree.

Nevertheless that head was far above them in the dawn sky. It bobbed from side to side restlessly, and then turned to look down at them.

Bowstrings twanged, and a black flight of arrows whined around the great snout. Kit held the Davidson aimed steadily at the beast's throat.

But it was not needed. The shape hissed, like a tea-kettle, an almost comically small sound, and went lumbering back upriver.

"That's the last," Kit said. His throat was still roughened with smoke and fatigue. "I hadn't counted on a latecomer."

"It is wounded," Tombu said.

"Yes. I'm sorry so many got killed. Well, the hyenas and the vultures will clean them up—in a while. And then we must bury the bones, or this whole tale will be told all over again. Who has a brand?"

There were several in the party. One was passed from hand to hand until it reached Kit. He took it and went forward into the pass, looking up at the great overhang, feeling a slow, solemn, almost inhuman regret for what had to be done.

The three white sticks slipped neatly into the crevice he had chosen. Kit wound the fuses together, lit the longest one and ran. At the count of eight he threw himself on his face.

The blast sent fragments of rock and green wood whoo-whooing wildly through the morning mist. The overhang tottered. Then, majestically, it came down, and an avalanche of rubble came after it. The sky was abruptly extinguished by a burgeoning cloud of rock dust.

The roar of that avalanche died at long last, leaving nothing behind in Kit's ears but the ringing howl of deafness. He got up, slowly, looking at the shambles. There was no longer even a river at his feet.

He was too stunned to realize what this meant, for long minutes. Then, as his hearing returned, he began to hear the sound of the water, circling and circling…

How long would the dam last? There was no way to tell. The river was big, and powerful—but it was swirling now against uncountable tons of stone. If it lasted only a year, the shapes would drown, all of them. If it did not stand that long, the shapes would be killed in the torrent when it broke. Knowing the power of water over stone, Kit was prepared to bet upon the torrent.

Either way, the world would never see the shapes again.

"Tombu," he said heavily, "let's go home."

 

 

Yet it had to be done; and it had been done. Kit clambered back into the tree with its small square of boards as to a haven; and indeed he felt oddly, almost disturbingly at peace with himself, as though he had suddenly grown old.

Paula was waiting; and after a while, Kit discovered that the peace was real.

"It's over," he said. "It's really over. There may be something else tomorrow, but this one is done."

Paula drew her breath in, tranquilly, to reply. At that very last of all the instants Kit had been waiting for, his whole body turned into a steel statue of itself.

"Kit! What's—"

"Listen."

It came closer, and passed at its leisure over their heads: a slow, leathery flapping of great wings.

"Kit—is that—"

"Yes. It's one of them."

The flapping diminished, going toward the valley.

"Kit, they're all coming here. Even the—ones that fly. Even those may never come out again. There are so few of them left… how can they last? We've killed them off—maybe not just now. But they can't last. They're too old, and too few."

"Yes," Kit said heavily. "I think that's right."

But she heard the tone rather than the words, and huddled against him. "Then—what's wrong?"

He cradled her, wondering how to say it, or whether to say it at all. But she was with him now. She would have to know.

"The beasts in the valley may die," he said in a remote voice. "I think they will. The night shapes are another story entirely. They can never die. The night shapes aren't animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They're the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They've always lived there. They always will."

The girl clung to him, unable to stop listening, unwilling to believe. After only a little while, he discovered that she was asleep, as sweetly as a child. He composed her gently, and lifted a heavy head to look at the star-bitten night.

Manalendi looked back at him.

Appendix