Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/436

 428 earth and began to satiate the darkness with light, and on the west with the waning and pale twilight extended the zodiacal luminosity. The air was transformed into a great luminous gulf. The ever-increasing luster submerged the region. The palanquin, which remained forgotten on the King's back, and the tents glistened, just as whitewashed houses glisten in a bright night. The world sank into silence and sleep encompassed the earth.

And in the presence of this stillness and this quiet of nature the people howled from pain and waited for death. On the silvery background of the darkness the gigantic black form of the elephant was strongly outlined. The moon's beams illuminated besides the tents, Stas' and Nell's dresses and, amid tufts of heather, the dark, shriveled bodies of the negroes and, scattered here and there, piles of packages. Before the children sat, propped on his fore legs, Saba, and, raising his head towards the moon's shield, he howled mournfully.

In Stas' soul oscillated only the remnants of thought, changed into a gloomy and despairing feeling that this time there was no help and that all those prodigious toils and efforts, those sufferings, those acts of will and courage, which he had performed during the terrible journey—from Medinet to Khartûm, from Khartûm to Fashoda, and from Fashoda to the unknown lake—would avail naught, and that an inexorable end of the struggle and of life was approaching. And this appeared to him all the more horrible because this end came during the time of the final journey, at the termination of which lay the ocean. Ah! He would not now conduct little Nell to the coast; he would not convey her by a steamer to Port Said, would not surrender her to Mr. Rawlinson; he himself would not fall into his father's arms and would