Page:Frank Owen - The Actress.djvu/30

18 it was not civilized and the city because it was civilized. You probably wonder at such a pessimistic attitude, and to-day I am surprised myself. But then the declaration seemed sane enough. For five months our little band of explorers had been seeking for a man named Warburton who had gone down into the Rana country and never returned. I could fill a book with the horrible tortures we endured on that journey. An epidemic of a particularly malignant native disease broke out among our carriers. For almost a week one was buried each morning just before sunrise. And yet, in spite of everything, we kept plodding steadily forward. As long as one man remained alive, he would see that expedition to completion. That is the law of the wild. Death alone can make a man give up the fight, not the death of others, but the death of himself. Thus, as I say, for five months we had lived like dogs. Nothing kept us alive but our own will power. It seemed as though all the horrors of earth were concentrated in that terrible march of death. And every morning a Somali uttered a sickening groan and pitched forward on his face, to rise no more. But finally a day came which marked the end of our quest. We found Warburton—a filthy, maudlin, drunken wreck—married to a native woman more beastlike than himself. And this was what my brave men had fought and died to save! Warburton refused to return with us, but he begged me to send a barrel of liquor to him as soon as I reached Nairobi. As I looked at the miserable, shaking, cringing derelict, my brain seemed on fire