The Treasure of the Lake

THE TREASURE OF THE LAKE

“The Owl-Man is talking to his star, Baas; that bright one up there,” whispered Hans at my side, pointing to the planet Venus. “He does that every night, Baas, and it tells him what to do next day.”

“I am glad to hear it,” I answered, “for I am sure I do not know what we are to do.”

“Oh, just go on, Baas,” said Hans. “If you only go on long enough you always come out the other side,” a remark which I thought contained a deal of true philosophy, though it left the question of what one would find on the other side quite unsolved.

After this, having arranged that Hans and the two hunters were to keep watch alternately, which was unnecessary where Hans was concerned, seeing that he always slept with one eye open, I lay down in the tent, and having said a short prayer, as I am not ashamed to confess I have always done since boyhood, or at any rate nearly always, fell instantly into a profound slumber.

While it was still dark – although, as I could tell by the stars and the smell of the air, the night drew towards morning, I was awakened by Arkle creeping into the tent.

“Been to get a bathe in that spring,” he said, when he found that I was awake. “Needed it when one hasn’t washed for a week. I feel all right again now.”

I remarked that I was glad to hear it, and that he seemed to have had a squeak for his life.

“Yes,” he added thoughtfully, “it was a very close thing. Lucky that I am a good runner. I won the three-mile race two years in succession at the Oxford and Cambridge sports. Look

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here, Mr. Quatermain, you must be wondering who I am and how I came here. I will tell you while it’s quiet, if you care to listen.

“The Arkles, though that isn’t the name of the firm, for some generations have been in a big way of business in Manchester and London; colonial merchants they call themselves. They deal all over the world, with West Africa among other places. My father, who has been dead some years, struck out a line of his own, however. He was a dreamy kind of a man, a crank his relatives called him, who studied all sorts of odd subjects, astrology among them, as I think I told you. Also he refused to have anything to do with trade, and insisted upon becoming a doctor, or rather a surgeon. He met with great success in his profession, for notwithstanding his fads, he was a wonderful operator. Being well-off he took little private practice, but worked almost entirely at hospitals for nothing.

“When I left college, by his wish I became a doctor too, but shortly after I qualified at Bart’s my father, whose only child I was, died. Also my cousin, the only son of my uncle, Sir Thomas Arkle the baronet, was killed in an accident, and my uncle begged me to enter the business. In the end I did so, very unwillingly, to please my relations. To cut the story short, I did not care for business, and when there was so much property entailed upon me with the baronetcy, I could not see why it was necessary that I should remain in an office. On the other hand my uncle did not wish me to return to practice.

“So we compromised; I agreed to travel for some years in the interests of the firm, specially in West Africa, where they wanted to develop their trade, and incidentally in my own in-

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terest, because I wanted as a physician to observe man in his primitive state and to study his indigenous diseases. When the tour was finished I was to return and put up for Parliament and in due course inherit the Arkle fortunes, which are large, and advance the Arkle dignity, which is nothing in particular, by the judicious purchase of a peerage, for that is what it came to. That, more or less, was the arrangement.”

“Quite so,” I said, “or as much of it as you choose to tell me, though perhaps there is a good deal more behind which, quite properly, you prefer to keep to yourself.”

“Perfectly true, Mr. Quatermain. By the way, as I am telling you about myself, would you mind telling me who and what you are?”

“Not in the least. I was born in England of a good family, and received a decent education from my father, who was a scholar, a gentleman, and something of a saint. For the rest I am nobody and nothing in particular, only a hunter with some skill at his trade, an observer, like you, of mankind in the rough, and one cursed with a curiosity and a desire to learn new things which, in the end, will no doubt put a stop to all my foolishness.”

“Oh no, it won’t,” he answered cheerfully, “that is, not until the time appointed. I’ll cast your horoscope for you, if you like – my father taught me the trick – and tell you when it will happen.”

“No, you won’t,” I answered firmly.

At this moment Hans arrived with the coffee and informed me that Kaneke was anxious that we should march at sunrise, as here we were in danger.

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Then followed anxious consultations. Arkle had a coat, or rather a Norfolk jacket, but no shirt; and one of my spares, a flannel garment that had cost me fifteen shillings at Durban and had never been used, must be provided for him. Luckily it was over-size, so he managed to drag it on to his great frame. Then a hat must be found, and so forth. Lastly it was necessary to provide him with one of the spare Winchester rifles and some cartridges.

Even before we were ready Kaneke arrived, not a little agitated, as I could see, and prayed us to hasten.

“Where to, Kaneke?” I asked.

“Up the side of the mountain and over its lip, Lord, that we may take shelter among my people the Dabanda. For be sure that after what happened yesterday, the Abanda will kill us if they can. If this white wanderer whom your servants call RedBull cannot march, he must be left behind.”

Here Arkle, who it seemed understood and could speak Arabic perfectly, looked Kaneke up and down and replied that this was unnecessary, as he believed that he could get along.

So, having swallowed some food, presently off we went, guided by Kaneke up the steep mountain side.

“Did you call that man, Kaneke?” Arkle inquired when that worthy was out of earshot.

“Yes,” I answered; “but why do you ask?”

“Oh, only because of late I have heard a good deal of a person named Kaneke from a native I know. But perhaps there are two Kanekes. The one he spoke of was a young fellow who committed a great crime.”

Then rather abruptly he changed the subject, leaving me wondering.

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I will pass over my follies, of which I am ashamed, with the remark that they were such as are common to impetuous young men.

“In short, I lived fast, so fast that my uncle and connections – my mother, by the way, died when I was young – being nonconformist of that puritanical stamp which often combines piety with a continual thirst for worldly advancement, were quite properly scandalized, and remonstrated. They said that I must change my mode of life, and as a first step, get married. This my uncle desired above all things, for there was no other heir, and as he often used to remark in a solemn voice, life is uncertain.

“At length I gave way and became engaged to a lady very well born indeed and very handsome, but without means, which, as I would have plenty, did not matter. To be honest, I did not greatly care for this lady, nor did she care for me, being, as I discovered afterwards, in love with somebody else. In fact the marriage would have been one of mutual convenience, nothing more. Now I am going to make you laugh.

“Although no one knew it and I scarcely expect you to believe it, I, a man who, as I have said, could and did plunge into dissipations, have another side to my nature. At times, Mr. Quatermain, I am a dreamer and what is called a mystic. I suppose I inherited it from my father, at any rate there it is.”

“There is nothing wonderful in that,” I remarked; “the old story of the flesh and the spirit, nothing more.”

“Perhaps. At least I put faith in queer and unprovable things, for instance in what are called ‘soul affinities’, and even in the theory that we have lived before. Would you believe

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that the great lump of British flesh and blood which you see before you developed a ‘soul affinity’, if that is the right term, with someone I had never met?”

I looked at him doubtfully, reflecting that the hardships through which he had passed had probably touched his brain. He read my mind, for he went on:

“Sounds as though I were a bit cracked, doesn’t it? So I thought myself, and should still think, were it not for the fact that I have found this affinity in Africa.”

“Where?” I asked lightly. “At Lake Mone?”

“Yes,” he replied, “at Lake Mone, where I always expected that I should find her.”

I gasped, and felt as though I should like to sit down, which, owing to our hurry, was impossible. Evidently the poor man was rather mad.

“As I have begun it I had better go on with my story, taking things as they happened,” he continued in a matter-of-fact voice. “I tell you that in the midst of my wild and rather unedifying career I began to be haunted by visions which came upon me at night.”

“Dreams?” I suggested.

“No, always when I was awake and looking at the stars, and generally when I was in the open air. The first, I remember, developed in Trafalgar Square at three in the morning after I had been to a dance.”

“The wine is not always very good at those dances, I have been told, or if it is, sometimes one drinks too much of it,” I suggested again.

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“Quite true, but as it happened this one was given by a relative of mine who is a strict teetotaller and never allows anything spirituous in her house. I had to go to meet my fiancée; it was a terrible affair. When it was over I went for a walk and came to Trafalgar Square, which at that hour was very quiet and lonely. There I stood staring at the Nelson Column, or rather at the stars above it, for it was frosty and they were beautiful that night. Then the thing came. I saw a desolate sheet of water lit up by the moon, an eerie kind of a place. Presently a form, that of a woman draped in white, appeared gliding over the water towards me, floating, not walking. It reached the shore and advanced to where I stood, and I saw that this woman was young and very beautiful, with large, tender eyes.

“She stopped opposite to me, considering me, and a change came over her face as though after long search she had found that which she sought. Looking at her, I too seemed to have found that which I sought. She held out her arms, she spoke to me; distinctly I heard her words, not with my ears but through some inner sense. What is more, I understood one or two of them, though they were in Arabic.

“I have always had a taste for studying out-of-the-way subjects, and it happened that in my medical reading I had become interested in the works of some of the old Arabian physicians, and in order to understand them had found it necessary to master something of the language in which they were written. This was some years before, and I had forgotten most of what I had learned, but not everything. So it came about that I caught the meaning of a sentence here and there – such as these:

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“At last, O long sought. At last upon the earth.’ . . . ‘Not in dreams.’ . . . ‘Follow, follow.’ . . . ‘Far away you will find and remember.’ . . . ‘Yes, there the gates will be opened, the gates of the past and the future.’

“At this point the vision, or whatever you like to call it, came to a prosaic end, for a policeman arrived, eyed me suspiciously, and said:

“Move on, young gentleman. This ain’t no place for the likes of you on a cold night. Go home and sleep it off.’

“I remember that I burst out laughing; the contrast was so ridiculous. Then because my heart was full of a strange joy, such as is described by the old mystics who think that they have been in communication with things Divine, I presented that policeman with half a sovereign, wished him good night, walked away quietly to my rooms in St. James’s Place, and went to bed a changed man.”

“What do you mean by ‘a changed man’?” I asked.

“Oh, only that I seemed different in every way. It was as though something had been torn, or a veil had been lifted from my eyes, so that now I saw all sorts of new things; at least the old things took on new aspects. From that moment, for example, I hated the dissipations which had attracted me. I acquired different and higher objectives; I came to know, what doubtless is true, that here in the world we are but wanderers lost in a fog which shuts off glorious prospects, divine realities, so that we can see little except dank weeds hanging from the rocks by which we feel our way, and pebbles shining in the wet beneath our feet. We make crowns of the weeds and fight for the bright pebbles, but the weeds wither, and the pebbles

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when they are dry prove to be but common slate. The dream woman that I had seen in Trafalgar Square showed me all this, and a great deal more. I was changed! I who had been a greedy caterpillar, devouring all that I could find, in that half-hour in Trafalgar Square became a chrysalis, and then was transformed into a butterfly.”

“Most interesting!” I exclaimed, and with sincerity, for notwithstanding Arkle’s fine words and metaphors which I found rather difficult to follow, this story did interest me very much. I didn’t believe in the Trafalgar Square vision, but, as an American would say, I did hitch on to that transformation which, in our degree, most of us have experienced at one time or another, however impermanent its results may have proved. In some private Trafalgar Square of their own, nearly all have met the Ideal, or the Divine, and in its unearthly light have seen things high and strange; have seen also how petty and how foul are the objects of their temporal desire.

Half an hour later it is probable that they will have forgotten the former, and be hunting the latter even more fiercely than before. Still, they have had the vision, and those to whom such visions came may always hope. They have learned that there are gates in the gross wall that is built about their souls.

. . .

“Most interesting,” I repeated, “but how about the lady to whom you were engaged? Did you tell her what you had seen and heard in Trafalgar Square?”

“No, I didn’t, at least not all of it. The only difference was that whereas I had merely disliked her before, afterwards I detested her, that is, as a prospective matrimonial partner. How-

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