Upon waking, the German saw that they were still at sea in the night of rain, bobbing and straining, with groaning of ropes and shivering of canvas, but that there was a tallow candle, one of those he had been keeping for an emergency, set in the middle of the darkness. Le Mesurier evidently had lit the candle, and was now hoping to resist chaos. The cone of yellow light was the one reality.
‘Oh, I am sick, sir,’ he complained, when he realized he was being observed.
‘There is no need for you to tell me that, Frank,’ said Voss.
‘I do not know how to attend to myself. I have not the strength of a fly.’
In fact, he fell back then, to lie in his own misery.
Very soon Voss understood from the terrible stench that his companion had lost control of his bowels, and that, in the circumstances, he must turn to and clean the man. So he set about it, woodenly. Prospective saints, he decided, would have fought over such an opportunity, for green and brown, of mud, and slime, and uncontrolled faeces, and the bottomless stomach of nausea, are the true colours of hell.
When he was finished, and had set down the iron dish, he said:
‘But I am no saint, Frank, and am doing this for reasons of necessity and hygiene.’
Le Mesurier was shielding his eyes.
‘How you are in my debt! Do you hear?’ laughed the German.
The sick man, perceiving the vestige of a joke, did glimmer and murmur. He was grateful, too.
After Voss had thrown out the contents of the dish, he administered a little rhubarb and laudanum, with the result that the patient began to doze, but every now and then his mind would come forward out of the distance.
Once he sat up, and said:
‘I will repay you, I promise. I will not cheat you.’
And once:
‘I will let you count it over one day, perhaps, in advance, when we are together in the cave. Shall we boil the quart, Mr Voss?’
‘Not in this downpour,’ answered the German. ‘We would never succeed to coax the fire.’
‘But in this cave,’ persisted the sick man, who appeared incandescent, and added: ‘You must give it to me, though. I will put it under the blanket for safety’s sake.’
‘Give what?’ asked Voss, who was by this time drowsing again.
‘The book,’ said Le Mesurier. ‘It is in my saddle-bag. Give it to me, Mr Voss. It is the book with marbled edges.’
Like camellias, Voss remembered.
‘May I look in it?’ he asked, cautiously.
To read the past? Or was it the future?
‘No,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘It is too soon.’
Rummaging in the saddle-bag, amongst the dry crumbs of bread and splinters of petrified meat, Voss did find the book.
How powerful he was, he realized, as he knelt there holding it. Never before had he held a man’s soul in his hand.
‘Will you repay me with this, Frank?’ he asked.
‘I am not yet ready,’ Le Mesurier said. ‘Do you remember the other evening, under the trees in the Domain? I can only give you what you have given me. Eventually. But you do not know how it must be dragged up out of me, or you would not ask for it. Can you not see that it is bleeding at the roots?’
‘Go to sleep now,’ Voss advised. ‘We shall speak about it another time.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Le Mesurier, and did seem disposed to sleep, the notebook bundled for safety under the blanket.
But he sat up again, almost at once, and began to speak with comparative lucidity, wetting his feverish lips at first, for fear they might obstruct the words:
‘In the beginning I used to imagine that if I were to succeed in describing with any accuracy some thing, this little cone of light with the blurry edges, for instance, or this common pannikin, then I would be expressing all truth. But I could not. My whole life had been a failure, lived at a most humiliating level, always purposeless, frequently degrading. Until I became aware of my power. The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.’
Voss did not care to be told the secrets of others. He preferred to arrive at them by his own intuition, then to pounce. Now he did not have the advantage.
So he said:
‘You have developed a slight fever, you know. It is better that you should try to rest.’
Also he was trembling for those secrets of his own, of which it now seemed the young man might be possessed.
‘Rest!’ laughed Le Mesurier. ‘I must remind you again of the evening we spent together in the Domain, when we did more or less admit to our common daemon.’
The German was unable, then and there, to think of a means to stop the conflagration.
The sick man was burning on.
‘Of course, we are both failures,’ he said, and it could have been a confession of love.
They lay and listened to the long, slow rain, which did not quench.
‘If you were not sick, Frank,’ said Voss at last, ‘you would not believe your own ears.’
But now the young man’s eyes obviously saw.
‘It is the effect of the drug,’ explained Voss, who was himself fast succumbing.
‘You will not remember anything of what you have said. For that reason,’ he added, quite dryly, and wriggling his scraggy neck, ‘I will agree that it could be true.’
So that these two were united at last.
Le Mesurier, whose mission it was, he was convinced, to extract the last drop of blood out of their relationship, leaned forward, and asked:
‘Since I am invited to be present at the damnation of man, and to express faithfully all that I experience in my own mind, you will act out your part to the end?’
‘There is no alternative,’ Voss replied, addressing the grey-green body of his sleeping companion.
Not long afterwards the German, who had intended to examine the notebook, but refrained out of dislike, almost fear of reading his own thoughts, fell asleep, too, in the pewter-coloured light.
That morning the leader of the expedition resolved to take only the aboriginal boy and push on in search of a more suitable place in which to fortify themselves against the wet, and treat the sick. After only a couple of miles’ travel they were rewarded by sight of what appeared to be the entrance to some caves on the opposite bank of the river.
‘You go, Jackie,’ said Voss, ‘make sure this place good dry.’
But the black boy, whose naked body was shivering and chafing in a shroud of hard, wet canvas, immediately replied:
‘Too black. This feller lost inside.’
‘Dugald would not be frightened,’ said Voss.
‘Dugald no here,’ answered Jackie truthfully.
Voss cursed all black swine, but at once persuaded himself it was the rain that had made him lose his temper, for he clung to a belief that these subjects of his kingdom would continue to share his sufferings long after the white men had fallen away.
As there was no avoiding it, he spurred his unhappy horse down the yellow bank of the river, and into the flood, of which the breathtaking cold swallowed every thought and emotion. Otherwise, they were drifting deliciously. No dream could have been smoother, silenter, more inevitable. But the wretched horse, it appeared, was trampling the water, or swimming, for eventually he did scratch a foothold, heave himself up, and scramble out upon the opposite bank, there to shake his sides, until his bones and those of his rider were rattling together terribly. Jackie, who had followed, holding the tail of his brown gelding, soon stood there too, smiling and chattering with cold, his nakedness running with light and water, for he had lost his canvas cloak. Of bronze rather than the iron of most other blacks, fear and cold had refined him further into an imperial gold, so that Voss was reconciled to his slave, especially since the river had been negotiated by his own courage.