第33章

The other alternative of going back empty handed was terribly ignominious. I had lectured the amiable young manhood of Seth so soundly on the subject of gallantry, and set them such a good example on two occasions, that it would be bathos to saunter back, hands in pockets, and con-fess I knew nothing of the lady's fate and had been daunted by the first night alone in the forest. Besides, how dull it would be in that beautiful, tumble-down old city without Heru, with no expectation day by day of seeing her sylph-like form and hearing the merry tinkle of her fairy laughter as she scoffed at the unknown learning col-lected by her ancestors in a thousand laborious years. No!

I would go on for certain. I was young, in love, and angry, and before those qualifications difficulties became light.

Meanwhile, the first essential was breakfast of some kind.

I arose, stretched, put on my half-dried clothes, and mount-ing a low hummock on the forest edge looked around.

The sun was riding up finely into the sky, and the sea to the eastward shone for leagues and leagues in the loveliest azure.

Where it rippled on my own beach and those of the low islands noted over night, a wonderful fire of blue and red played on the sands as though the broken water were full of living gems. The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green--like those of a grass-hopper--was flitting about picking up insect stragglers.

All this was very charming, but what I kept saying to myself was "Streaky rashers and hot coffee: rashers and coffee and rolls," and, indeed, had the gates of Paradise themselves opened at that moment I fear my first look down the celestial streets within would have been for a restaurant.

They did not, and I was just turning away disconsolate when my eye caught, ascending from behind the next bluff down the beach, a thin strand of smoke rising into the morning air.

It was nothing so much in itself--a thin spiral creeping upwards mast-high, then flattening out into a mushroom head--but it meant everything to me. Where there was fire there must be humanity, and where there was human-ity--ay, to the very outlayers of the universe--there must be breakfast. It was a splendid thought; I rushed down the hillock and went gaily for that blue thread amongst the reeds. It was not two hundred yards away, and soon below me was a tiny bay with bluest water frilling a silver beach, and in the midst of it a fire on a hearth dancing round a pot that simmered gloriously. But of an owner there was nothing to be seen. I peered here and there on the shore, but nothing moved, while out to sea the water was shining like molten metal with not a dot upon it!--what did it matter? I laughed as, pleased and hungry, I slipped down the bank and strode across the sands; it pleased Fate to play bandy with me, and if it sent me supperless to bed, why, here was restitution in the way of breakfast.

I took up a morsel of the stuff in the kettle on a handy stick and found it good--indeed, I knew it at once as a very dainty mess made from the roots of a herb the Martians great-ly liked; An had piled my platter with it when we supped that night in the market-place of Seth, and the sweet white stuff had melted into my corporal essence, it seemed, with-out any gross intermediate process of digestion. And here Iwas again, hungry, sniffing the fragrant breath of a full meal and not a soul in sight--I should have been a fool not to have eaten. So thinking, down I sat, taking the pot from its place, and when it was a little cool plunging my hands into it and feasting with as good an appetite as ever a man had before.

It was gloriously ambrosial, and deeper and deeper Iwent, with the tall stalk of the smoke in front growing from the hearth-stones like some strange new plant, the plea-sant sunshine on my back, and never a thought for any-thing but the task in hand. Deeper and deeper, oblivious of all else, until to get the very last drops I lifted the pipkin up and putting back my head drank in that fashion.