Prester John
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16 PRESTER JOHN
JOHN BUCHAN
TO
LIONEL PHILLIPS
Time, they say, must the best of us capture,
And travel and battle and gems and gold
No more can kindle the ancient rapture,
For even the youngest of hearts grows old.
But in you, I think, the boy is not over;
So take this medley of ways and wars
As the gift of a friend and a fellow-lover
Of the fairest country under the stars.
J. B.
CONTENTS
i. The Man on the Kirkcaple Shore
ii. Furth! Fortune!
iii. Blaauwildebeestefontein
iv. My Journey to the Winter-Veld
v. Mr Wardlaw Has a Premonition
vi. The Drums Beat at Sunset
vii. Captain Arcoll Tells a Tale
viii. I Fall in Again with the Reverend John Laputa
ix. The Store at Umvelos'
x. I Go Treasure-Hunting
xi. The Cave of the Rooirand
xii. Captain Arcoll Sends a Message
xiii. The Drift of the Letaba
xiv. I Carry the Collar of Prester John
xv. Morning in the Berg
xvi. Inanda's Kraal
xvii. A Deal and Its Consequences
xviii. How a Man May Sometimes Put His Trust in a Horse
xix. Arcoll's Shepherding
xx. My Last Sight of the Reverend John Laputa
xxi. I Climb the Crags a Second Time
xxii. A Great Peril and a Great Salvation
xxiii. My Uncle's Gift Is Many Times Multiplied
CHAPTER I
THE MAN ON THE KIRKCAPLE SHORE
I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little
I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or
how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt
my sleep and disturb my waking hours. But I mind yet the
cold grue of terror I got from it, a terror which was surely
more than the due of a few truant lads breaking the Sabbath
with their play.
The town of Kirkcaple, of which and its adjacent parish of
Portincross my father was the minister, lies on a hillside above
the little bay of Caple, and looks squarely out on the North
Sea. Round the horns of land which enclose the bay the coast
shows on either side a battlement of stark red cliffs through
which a burn or two makes a pass to the water's edge. The bay
itself is ringed with fine clean sands, where we lads of the
burgh school loved to bathe in the warm weather. But on
long holidays the sport was to go farther afield among the
cliffs; for there there were many deep caves and pools, where
podleys might be caught with the line, and hid treasures
sought for at the expense of the skin of the knees and the
buttons of the trousers. Many a long Saturday I have passed
in a crinkle of the cliffs, having lit a fire of driftwood, and
made believe that I was a smuggler or a Jacobite new landed
from France. There was a band of us in Kirkcaple, lads of my
own age, including Archie Leslie, the son of my father's
session-clerk, and Tam Dyke, the provost's nephew. We
were sealed to silence by the blood oath, and we bore each the
name of some historic pirate or sailorman. I was Paul Jones,
Tam was Captain Kidd, and Archie, need I say it, was Morgan
himself. Our tryst was a cave where a little water called the
Dyve Burn had cut its way through the cliffs to the sea. There
we forgathered in the summer evenings and of a Saturday
afternoon in winter, and told mighty tales of our prowess and
flattered our silly hearts. But the sober truth is that our deeds
were of the humblest, and a dozen of fish or a handful of
apples was all our booty, and our greatest exploit a fight with
the roughs at the Dyve tan-work.
My father's spring Communion fell on the last Sabbath of
April, and on the particular Sabbath of which I speak the
weather was mild and bright for the time of year. I had been
surfeited with the Thursday's and Saturday's services, and the
two long diets of worship on the Sabbath were hard for a lad
of twelve to bear with the spring in his bones and the sun
slanting through the gallery window. There still remained the
service on the Sabbath evening - a doleful prospect, for the
Rev. Mr Murdoch of Kilchristie, noted for the length of his
discourses, had exchanged pulpits with my father. So my mind
was ripe for the proposal of Archie Leslie, on our way home to
tea, that by a little skill we might give the kirk the slip. At our
Communion the pews were emptied of their regular occupants
and the congregation seated itself as it pleased. The manse seat
was full of the Kirkcaple relations of Mr Murdoch, who had
been invited there by my mother to hear him, and it was not
hard to obtain permission to sit with Archie and Tam Dyke in
the cock-loft in the gallery. Word was sent to Tam, and so it
happened that three abandoned lads duly passed the plate
and took their seats in the cock-loft. But when the bell had
done jowing, and we heard by the sounds of their feet that
the elders had gone in to the kirk, we slipped down the stairs
and out of the side door. We were through the churchyard in a
twinkling, and hot-foot on the road to the Dyve Burn.
It was the fashion of the genteel in Kirkcaple to put their
boys into what were known as Eton suits - long trousers, cut-
away jackets, and chimney-pot hats. I had been one of the
earliest victims, and well I remember how I fled home from
the Sabbath school with the snowballs of the town roughs
rattling off my chimney-pot. Archie had followed, his family
being in all things imitators of mine. We were now clothed in
this wearisome garb, so our first care was to secrete safely our
hats in a marked spot under some whin bushes on the links.
Tam was free from the bondage of fashion, and wore his
ordinary best knickerbockers. From inside his jacket he
unfolded his special treasure, which was to light us on our
expedition - an evil-smelling old tin lantern with a shutter.
Tam was of the Free Kirk persuasion, and as his Communion
fell on a different day from ours, he was spared the
bondage of church attendance from which Archie and I had
revolted. But notable events had happened that day in his
church. A black man, the Rev. John Something-or-other, had
been preaching. Tam was full of the portent. 'A nagger,' he
said, 'a great black chap as big as your father, Archie.' He
seemed to have banged the bookboard with some effect, and
had kept Tam, for once in his life, awake. He had preached
about the heathen in Africa, and how a black man was as good
as a white man in the sight of God, and he had forecast a day
when the negroes would have something to teach the British in
the way of civilization. So at any rate ran the account of Tam
Dyke, who did not share the preacher's views. 'It's all
nonsense, Davie. The Bible says that the children of Ham were
to be our servants. If I were the minister I wouldn't let a
nigger into the pulpit. I wouldn't let him farther than the
Sabbath school.'
Night fell as we came to the broomy spaces of the links, and
ere we had breasted the slope of the neck which separates
Kirkcaple Bay from the cliffs it was as dark as an April evening
with a full moon can be. Tam would have had it darker. He
got out his lantern, and after a prodigious waste of matches
kindled the candle-end inside, turned the dark shutter, and
trotted happily on. We had no need of his lighting till the Dyve
Burn was reached and the path began to descend steeply
through the rift in the crags.
It was here we found that some one had gone before us.
Archie was great in those days at tracking, his ambition
running in Indian paths. He would walk always with his head
bent and his eyes on the ground, whereby he several times
found lost coins and once a trinket dropped by the provost's
wife. At the edge of the burn, where the path turns downward,
there is a patch of shingle washed up by some spate. Archie
was on his knees in a second. 'Lads,' he cried, 'there's spoor
here;' and then after some nosing, 'it's a man's track, going
downward, a big man with flat feet. It's fresh, too, for it
crosses the damp bit of gravel, and the water has scarcely filled
the holes yet.'
We did not dare to question Archie's woodcraft, but it
puzzled us who the stranger could be. In summer weather you
might find a party of picnickers here, attracted by the fine hard
sands at the burn mouth. But at this time of night and season
of the year there was no call for any one to be trespassing on
our preserves. No fishermen came this way, the lobster-pots
being all to the east, and the stark headland of the Red Neb
made the road to them by the water's edge difficult. The tan-
work lads used to come now and then for a swim, but you
would not find a tan-work lad bathing on a chill April night.
Yet there was no question where our precursor had gone. He
was making for the shore. Tam unshuttered his lantern, and
the steps went clearly down the corkscrew path. 'Maybe he is
after our cave. We'd better go cannily.'
The glim was dowsed - the words were Archie's - and in
the best contraband manner we stole down the gully. The
business had suddenly taken an eerie turn, and I think in our
hearts we were all a little afraid. But Tam had a lantern, and it
would never do to turn back from an adventure which had all
the appearance of being the true sort. Half way down there is
a scrog of wood, dwarf alders and hawthorn, which makes an
arch over the path. I, for one, was glad when we got through
this with no worse mishap than a stumble from Tam which
caused the lantern door to fly open and the candle to go out.
We did not stop to relight it, but scrambled down the screes
till we came to the long slabs of reddish rock which abutted on
the beach. We could not see the track, so we gave up the
business of scouts, and dropped quietly over the big boulder
and into the crinkle of cliff which we called our cave.
There was nobody there, so we relit the lantern and examined
our properties. Two or three fishing-rods for the burn,
much damaged by weather; some sea-lines on a dry shelf of
rock; a couple of wooden boxes; a pile of driftwood for fires,
and a heap of quartz in which we thought we had found veins
of gold - such was the modest furnishing of our den. To this I
must add some broken clay pipes, with which we made believe
to imitate our elders, smoking a foul mixture of coltsfoot leaves
and brown paper. The band was in session, so following our
ritual we sent out a picket. Tam was deputed to go round the
edge of the cliff from which the shore was visible, and report
if the coast was clear.
He returned in three minutes, his eyes round with amazement
in the lantern light. 'There's a fire on the sands,' he
repeated, 'and a man beside it.'
Here was news indeed. Without a word we made for the
open, Archie first, and Tam, who had seized and shuttered his
lantern, coming last. We crawled to the edge of the cliff and
peered round, and there sure enough, on the hard bit of sand
which the tide had left by the burn mouth, was a twinkle of
light and a dark figure.
The moon was rising, and besides there was that curious
sheen from the sea which you will often notice in spring. The
glow was maybe a hundred yards distant, a little spark of fire I
could have put in my cap, and, from its crackling and smoke,
composed of dry seaweed and half-green branches from the
burnside thickets. A man's figure stood near it, and as we
looked it moved round and round the fire in circles which first
of all widened and then contracted.
The sight was so unexpected, so beyond the beat of our
experience, that we were all a little scared. What could this
strange being want with a fire at half-past eight of an April
Sabbath night on the Dyve Burn sands? We discussed the
thing in whispers behind a boulder, but none of us had any
solution. 'Belike he's come ashore in a boat,' said Archie. 'He's
maybe a foreigner.' But I pointed out that, from the tracks
which Archie himself had found, the man must have come
overland down the cliffs. Tam was clear he was a madman,
and was for withdrawing promptly from the whole business.
But some spell kept our feet tied there in that silent world of
sand and moon and sea. I remember looking back and seeing
the solemn, frowning faces of the cliffs, and feeling somehow
shut in with this unknown being in a strange union. What kind
of errand had brought this interloper into our territory? For a
wonder I was less afraid than curious. I wanted to get to the
heart of the matter, and to discover what the man was up to
with his fire and his circles.
The same thought must have been in Archie's head, for he
dropped on his belly and began to crawl softly seawards. I
followed, and Tam, with sundry complaints, crept after my
heels. Between the cliffs and the fire lay some sixty yards of
debris and boulders above the level of all but the high spring
tides. Beyond lay a string of seaweedy pools and then the hard
sands of the burnfoot. There was excellent cover among the
big stones, and apart from the distance and the dim light, the
man by the fire was too preoccupied in his task to keep much
look-out towards the land. I remember thinking he had chosen
his place well, for save from the sea he could not be seen. The
cliffs are so undercut that unless a watcher on the coast were
on their extreme edge he would not see the burnfoot sands.
Archie, the skilled tracker, was the one who all but betrayed
us. His knee slipped on the seaweed, and he rolled off a
boulder, bringing down with him a clatter of small stones. We
lay as still as mice, in terror lest the man should have heard the
noise and have come to look for the cause. By-and-by when I
ventured to raise my head above a flat-topped stone I saw that
he was undisturbed. The fire still burned, and he was pacing
round it.
On the edge of the pools was an outcrop of red sandstone
much fissured by the sea. Here was an excellent vantage-
ground, and all three of us curled behind it, with our eyes just
over the edge. The man was not twenty yards off, and I could
see clearly what manner of fellow he was. For one thing he was
huge of size, or so he seemed to me in the half-light. He wore
nothing but a shirt and trousers, and I could hear by the flap
of his feet on the sand that he was barefoot.
Suddenly Tam Dyke gave a gasp of astonishment. 'Gosh,
it's the black minister!' he said.
It was indeed a black man, as we saw when the moon came
out of a cloud. His head was on his breast, and he walked
round the fire with measured, regular steps. At intervals he
would stop and raise both hands to the sky, and bend his
body in the direction of the moon. But he never uttered a word.
'It's magic,' said Archie. 'He's going to raise Satan. We must
bide here and see what happens, for he'll grip us if we try to
go back. The moon's ower high.'
The procession continued as if to some slow music. I had
been in no fear of the adventure back there by our cave; but
now that I saw the thing from close at hand, my courage began
to ebb. There was something desperately uncanny about this
great negro, who had shed his clerical garments, and was now
practising some strange magic alone by the sea. I had no doubt
it was the black art, for there was that in the air and the scene
which spelled the unlawful. As we watched, the circles
stopped, and the man threw something on the fire. A thick
smoke rose of which we could feel the aromatic scent, and
when it was gone the flame burned with a silvery blueness like
moonlight. Still no sound came from the minister, but he took
something from his belt, and began to make odd markings in
the sand between the inner circle and the fire. As he turned, the
moon gleamed on the implement, and we saw it was a great knife.
We were now scared in real earnest. Here were we, three boys,
at night in a lonely place a few yards from a savage with a knife.
The adventure was far past my liking, and even the intrepid
Archie was having qualms, if I could judge from his set face.
As for Tam, his teeth were chattering like a threshing-mill.
Suddenly I felt something soft and warm on the rock at my
right hand. I felt again, and, lo! it was the man's clothes.
There were his boots and socks, his minister's coat and his
minister's hat.
This made the predicament worse, for if we waited till he
finished his rites we should for certain be found by him. At
the same time, to return over the boulders in the bright
moonlight seemed an equally sure way to discovery. I whispered
to Archie, who was for waiting a little longer. 'Something
may turn up,' he said. It was always his way.
I do not know what would have turned up, for we had no
chance of testing it. The situation had proved too much for
the nerves of Tam Dyke. As the man turned towards us in his
bowings and bendings, Tam suddenly sprang to his feet and
shouted at him a piece of schoolboy rudeness then fashionable
in Kirkcaple.
'Wha called ye partan-face, my bonny man?' Then, clutching
his lantern, he ran for dear life, while Archie and I raced
at his heels. As I turned I had a glimpse of a huge figure, knife
in hand, bounding towards us.
Though I only saw it in the turn of a head, the face stamped
itself indelibly upon my mind. It was black, black as ebony,
but it was different from the ordinary negro. There were no
thick lips and flat nostrils; rather, if I could trust my eyes, the
nose was high-bridged, and the lines of the mouth sharp and
firm. But it was distorted into an expression of such a devilish
fury and amazement that my heart became like water.
We had a start, as I have said, of some twenty or thirty
yards. Among the boulders we were not at a great disadvantage,
for a boy can flit quickly over them, while a grown man
must pick his way. Archie, as ever, kept his wits the best of us.
'Make straight for the burn,' he shouted in a hoarse whisper;
we'll beat him on the slope.'
We passed the boulders and slithered over the outcrop of
red rock and the patches of sea-pink till we reached the
channel of the Dyve water, which flows gently among pebbles
after leaving the gully. Here for the first time I looked back
and saw nothing. I stopped involuntarily, and that halt was
nearly my undoing. For our pursuer had reached the burn
before us, but lower down, and was coming up its bank to cut
us off.
At most times I am a notable coward, and in these days I
was still more of one, owing to a quick and easily-heated
imagination. But now I think I did a brave thing, though more
by instinct than resolution. Archie was running first, and had
already splashed through the burn; Tam came next, just about
to cross, and the black man was almost at his elbow. Another
second and Tam would have been in his clutches had I not
yelled out a warning and made straight up the bank of the
burn. Tam fell into the pool - I could hear his spluttering
cry - but he got across; for I heard Archie call to him, and the
two vanished into the thicket which clothes all the left bank of
the gully. The pursuer, seeing me on his own side of the water,
followed straight on; and before I knew it had become a race
between the two of us.
I was hideously frightened, but not without hope, for the
screes and shelves of this right side of the gully were known to
me from many a day's exploring. I was light on my feet and
uncommonly sound in wind, being by far the best long-
distance runner in Kirkcaple. If I could only keep my lead till
I reached a certain corner I knew of, I could outwit my enemy;
for it was possible from that place to make a detour behind a
waterfall and get into a secret path of ours among the bushes.
I flew up the steep screes, not daring to look round; but at the
top, where the rocks begin, I had a glimpse of my pursuer.
The man could run. Heavy in build though he was he was not
six yards behind me, and I could see the white of his eyes and
the red of his gums. I saw something else - a glint of white
metal in his hand. He still had his knife.
Fear sent me up the rocks like a seagull, and I scrambled
and leaped, making for the corner I knew of. Something told
me that the pursuit was slackening, and for a moment I halted
to look round. A second time a halt was nearly the end of me.
A great stone flew through the air, and took the cliff an inch
from my head, half-blinding me with splinters. And now I
began to get angry. I pulled myself into cover, skirted a rock
till I came to my corner, and looked back for the enemy. There
he was scrambling by the way I had come, and making a
prodigious clatter among the stones. I picked up a loose bit of
rock and hurled it with all my force in his direction. It broke
before it reached him, but a considerable lump, to my joy,
took him full in the face. Then my terrors revived. I slipped
behind the waterfall and was soon in the thicket, and toiling
towards the top.
I think this last bit was the worst in the race, for my strength
was failing, and I seemed to hear those horrid steps at my
heels. My heart was in my mouth as, careless of my best
clothes, I tore through the hawthorn bushes. Then I struck
the path and, to my relief, came on Archie and Tam, who
were running slowly in desperate anxiety about my fate. We
then took hands and soon reached the top of the gully.
For a second we looked back. The pursuit had ceased, and
far down the burn we could hear the sounds as of some one
going back to the sands.
'Your face is bleeding, Davie. Did he get near enough to hit
you?' Archie asked.
'He hit me with a stone. But I gave him better. He's got a
bleeding nose to remember this night by.'
We did not dare take the road by the links, but made for
the nearest human habitation. This was a farm about half a
mile inland, and when we reached it we lay down by the stack-
yard gate and panted.
'I've lost my lantern,' said Tam. 'The big black brute! See if
I don't tell my father.'
'Ye'll do nothing of the kind,' said Archie fiercely. 'He knows
nothing about us and can't do us any harm. But if the story
got out and he found out who we were, he'd murder the lot of US.'
He made us swear secrecy, which we were willing enough to
do, seeing very clearly the sense in his argument. Then we
struck the highroad and trotted back at our best pace to
Kirkcaple, fear of our families gradually ousting fear of pursuit.
In our excitement Archie and I forgot about our Sabbath
hats, reposing quietly below a whin bush on the links.
We were not destined to escape without detection. As ill
luck would have it, Mr Murdoch had been taken ill with the
stomach-ache after the second psalm, and the congregation
had been abruptly dispersed. My mother had waited for me at
the church door, and, seeing no signs of her son, had searched
the gallery. Then the truth came out, and, had I been only for
a mild walk on the links, retribution would have overtaken my
truantry. But to add to this I arrived home with a scratched
face, no hat, and several rents in my best trousers. I was well
cuffed and sent to bed, with the promise of full-dress chastisement
when my father should come home in the morning.
My father arrived before breakfast next day, and I was duly
and soundly whipped. I set out for school with aching bones
to add to the usual depression of Monday morning. At the
corner of the Nethergate I fell in with Archie, who was staring
at a trap carrying two men which was coming down the street.
It was the Free Church minister - he had married a rich wife
and kept a horse - driving the preacher of yesterday to the
railway station. Archie and I were in behind a doorpost in a
twinkling, so that we could see in safety the last of our enemy.
He was dressed in minister's clothes, with a heavy fur-coat and
a brand new yellow-leather Gladstone bag. He was talking
loudly as he passed, and the Free Church minister seemed to
be listening attentively. I heard his deep voice saying something
about the 'work of God in this place.' But what I noticed
specially - and the sight made me forget my aching hinder
parts - was that he had a swollen eye, and two strips of
sticking-plaster on his cheek.
CHAPTER II
FURTH! FORTUNE!
In this plain story of mine there will be so many wild doings
ere the end is reached, that I beg my reader's assent to a
prosaic digression. I will tell briefly the things which happened
between my sight of the man on the Kirkcaple sands and my
voyage to Africa.
I continued for three years at the burgh school, where my
progress was less notable in my studies than in my sports. One
by one I saw my companions pass out of idle boyhood and be
set to professions. Tam Dyke on two occasions ran off to sea
in the Dutch schooners which used to load with coal in our
port; and finally his father gave him his will, and he was
apprenticed to the merchant service. Archie Leslie, who was a
year my elder, was destined for the law, so he left Kirkcaple
for an Edinburgh office, where he was also to take out classes
at the college. I remained on at school till I sat alone by myself
in the highest class - a position of little dignity and deep
loneliness. I had grown a tall, square-set lad, and my prowess
at Rugby football was renowned beyond the parishes of
Kirkcaple and Portincross. To my father I fear I was a
disappointment. He had hoped for something in his son more
bookish and sedentary, more like his gentle, studious self.
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