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delirium; but he nursed me well and I lived. As you see.
He was a scientific man, a student of Nature's ways, and a healer, though one
cure was beyond him.
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For, sick though I was, he was more ravaged by destructive illness than I. I
woke in a firelit hut with a rank poultice at my throat and a naked savage
daubing at my brow, and I was terrified; no, not of the native, but of the
awful cadaverous face, ghost-white, that frowned down at me from the shadows.
That was my first sight of Herr Faesch.
When, a day later, I came able to sit up and to talk, I found him a gentle and
brave man, whose
English was every bit as good as my own, whose knowledge surpassed that of any
human I met before or since. But the mark of death was on him. In that
equatorial jungle, his complexion was alabaster. Ruling the reckless black
warriors who served him, his strength yet was less than a child's. In those
steaming afternoons when I hardly dared stir from my cot for fear of stroke,
he wore gloves and a woollen scarf at his neck.
We had, in all, three days together. As I regained my health, his health
dwindled.
He introduced himself to me as a native of Geneva, that colorful city on the
finest lake of the
Alps. He listened courteously while I told him of my own errand and did me,
and the absent Miss
Cox, the courtesy of admiring the spirit which prompted it- though he was not
sanguine of my prospects of finding the empires.
He said nothing of what had brought him to this remote wilderness, but I
thought I knew. Surely gold. Perhaps diamonds or some other gem, but I thought
not; gold was much more plausible.
I had picked up enough of the native dialect to catch perhaps one word in
twenty of what he said to his natives and they to him-enough, at any rate, to
know that when he left me in their charge for some hours, that first day, he
was going to a hole hi the ground. It could only be a mine, and what, I asked
myself, would a European trouble to mine in the heart of unexplored Africa but
gold?
I was wrong, of course. It was not gold at all.
Wells says that they are doing astonishing things at the Cavendish Laboratory,
but I do think that
Herr Faesch might have astonished even Wells. Certainly he astonished me. On
the second day of my convalescence, I found myself strong enough to be up and
walking about.
Say that I was prying. Perhaps I was. It was oppressively hot-I dared not
venture outside-and yet
I was too restless to lie abed waiting for Herr Faesch's return. I found
myself examining the objects on his-camp table and there were, indeed,
nuggets. But the nuggets were not gold. They were a silvery metal, blackened
and discolored, but surely without gold's yellow hue; they were rather small,
like irregular lark's eggs, and yet they were queerly heavy. Perhaps there was
a score of them, aggregatng about a pound or two.
I rattled them thoughtfully in my hand, and then observed that across the
tent, in a laboratory jar with a glass stopper, there were perhaps a dozen
more-yes, and in yet another place in that tent, in a pottery dish, another
clutch of the things. I thought to bring them close together so that I might
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compare them. I fetched the jar and set it on the table; I went after the
pellets in the pottery dish.
Herr Faesch's voice, shaking with emotion, halted me. "Mr. Lewes!" he
whispered harshly. "Stop, sir!"
I turned, and there was the man, his eyes wide with horror, standing at the
flap of the tent. I
made my apologies, but he waved them aside.
"No, no," he croaked, "I know - you meant no harm. But I tell you, Mr. Lewes,
you were very near to death a moment ago."
I glanced at the pellets. "From these, Herr Faesch?"
"Yes, Mr. Lewes. From those." He tottered into the tent and retrieved the
pottery dish from my hands. Back to its corner it went; then the jar, back
across the tent again. "They must not come together. No, sir," he said,
nodding thoughtfully, though I had said nothing with which he might have been
agreeing, "they must not come together."
He sat down. "Mr. Lewes," he whispered, "have you ever heard of uranium?" I
had not. "Or of pitchblende? No? Well," he said earnestly, "I assure you that
you will. These ingots, Mr. Lewes, are uranium, but not the standard metal of
commerce. No, sir. They are a rare variant form, indistinguishable by the most
delicate of chemical tests from the ordinary metal, but possessed of
characteristics which 'are-I shall merely say 'wonderful,' Mr. Lewes, for I
dare not use the term which comes first to mind."
"Remarkable," said I, feeling that some such response was wanted.
He agreed. "Remarkable indeed, my dear Mr. Lewes! You really cannot imagine
how remarkable.
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