To Have Carried Her
Would Have Been Impossible, As We Should All Have Sunk Together Through
The Weeds.
I laid her under a tree and bathed her head and face with
water, as for the moment I thought she had fainted; but she lay
perfectly insensible, as though dead, with teeth and hands firmly
clinched, and her eyes open but fixed.
It was a coup de soleil - a
sun-stroke.
Many of the porters had gone on ahead with the baggage, and I started
off a man in haste to recall an angarep upon which to carry her and also
for a bag with a change of clothes, as we had dragged her through the
river. It was in vain that I rubbed her heart and the black women rubbed
her feet to restore animation. At length the litter came, and after
changing her clothes she was carried mournfully forward as a corpse.
Constantly we had to halt and support her head, as a painful rattling in
the throat betokened suffocation. At length we reached a village, and
halted for the night.
I laid her carefully in a miserable hut, and watched beside her. I
opened her clinched teeth with a small wooden wedge and inserted a wet
rag, upon which I dropped water to moisten her tongue, which was dry as
fur. The unfeeling brutes that composed the native escort were yelling
and dancing as though all were well, and I ordered their chief at once
to return with them to Kamrasi, as I would travel with them no longer.
At first they refused to return, until at length I vowed that I would
fire into them should they accompany us on the following morning.
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