"Let each of us take the buck opposite to him.Aim well at the point of the shoulder,and high up,"said I;"and Umbopa,do you give the word,so that we may all fire together."Then came a pause,each man aiming his level best,as indeed one is likely to do when one knows that life itself depends upon the shot.
"Fire!"said Umbopa,in Zulu,and at almost the same instant the three rifles rang out loudly;three clouds of smoke hung for a moment before us,and a hundred echoes went flying away over the silent snow.Presently the smoke cleared,and revealed -oh,joy -a great buck lying on its back and kicking furiously in its death agony.We gave a yell of triumph;we were saved,we should not starve.Weak as we were,we rushed down the intervening slope of snow,and in ten minutes from the time of firing the animal's heart and liver were lying smoking before us.But now a new difficulty arose;we had no fuel,and therefore could make no fire to cook them at.
We gazed at each other in dismay.
"Starving men must not be fanciful,"said Good;"we must eat raw meat."There was no other way out of the dilemma,and our gnawing hunger made the proposition less distasteful than it would otherwise have been.
So we took the heart and liver and buried them for a few minutes in a patch of snow to cool them off.Then we washed them in the ice-cold water of the stream,and lastly ate them greedily.It sounds horrible enough,but,honestly,I never tasted anything so good as that raw meat.In a quarter of an hour we were changed men.Our life and our vigor came back to us,our feeble pulses grew strong again,and the blood went coursing through our veins.But,mindful of the results of over-feeding on starving stomachs,we were careful not to eat too much,stopping while we were still hungry.
"Thank God!"said Sir Henry;"that brute has saved our lives.
What is it,Quatermain ?"
I rose and went to look at the antelope,for I was not certain.
It was about the size of a donkey,with large,curved horns.I had never seen one like it before,the species was new to me.It was brown,with faint red stripes and a thick coat.I afterwards discovered that the natives of that wonderful country called the species "Inco."It was very rare,and only found at a great altitude,where no other game would live.The animal was fairly shot high up in the shoulder,though whose bullet it was that brought it down we could not,of course,discover.I believe that Good,mindful of his marvellous shot at the giraffe,secretly set it down to his own prowess,and we did not contradict him.
We had been so busy satisfying our starving stomachs that we had hitherto not found time to look about us.But now,having set Umbopa to cut off as much of the best meat as we were likely to be able to carry,we began to inspect our surroundings.The mist had now cleared away,for it was eight o'clock,and the sun had sucked it up,so we were able to take in all the country before us at a glance.I know not how to describe the glorious panorama which unfolded itself to our enraptured gaze.I have never seen anything like it before,nor shall,I suppose,again.
Behind and over us towered Sheba's snowy breasts,and below some five thousand feet beneath where we stood,lay league on league of the most lovely champaign country.Here were dense patches of lofty forest,there a great river wound its silvery way.To the left stretched a vast expanse of rich,undulating veldt or grass land,on which we could just make out countless herds of game or cattle,at that distance we could not tell which.This expanse appeared to be ringed in by a wall of distant mountains.To the right the country was more or less mountainous,that is,solitary hills stood up from its level,with stretches of cultivated lands between,among which we could distinctly see groups of dome-shaped huts.The landscape lay before us like a map,in which rivers flashed like silver snakes,and Alpine peaks crowned with wildly twisted snow-wreaths rose in solemn grandeur,while over all was the glad sunlight and the wide breath of Nature's happy life.
Two curious things struck us as we gazed.First,that the country before us must lie at least five thousand feet higher than the desert we had crossed,and,secondly,that all the rivers flowed from south to north.
As we had painful reason to know,there was no water at all on the southern side of the vast range on which we stood,but on the northern side were many streams,most of which appeared to.unite with the great river we could trace winding away farther than we could follow it.
We sat down for a while and gazed in silence at this wonderful view.Presently Sir Henry spoke.
"Isn't there something on the map about Solomon's Great Road?"he said.
I nodded,my eyes still looking out over the far country.
"Well,look;there it is!"and he pointed a little to our fight.
Good and I looked accordingly,and there,winding away towards the plain,was what appeared to be a wide turnpike road.We had not seen it at first because it,on reaching the plain,turned behind some broken country.We did not say anything,at least not much;we were beginning to lose the sense of wonder.Somehow it did not seem particularly unnatural that we should find a sort of Roman road in this strange land.We accepted the fact,that was all.
"Well,"said Good,"it must be quite near us if we cut off to the right.Hadn't we better be making a start?"This was sound advice,and so soon us we had washed our faces and hands in the stream we acted on it.For a mile or so we made our way over boulders and across patches of snow,till suddenly,on reaching the top of the little rise,there lay the road at our feet.It was a splendid road cut out of the solid rock,at least fifty feet wide,and apparently well kept;but the odd thing about it was that it seemed to begin there.
We walked down and stood on it,but one single hundred paces behind us,in the direction of Sheba's breasts,it vanished -the whole surface of the mountain being strewed with boulders interspersed with patches of snow.