The Sky And The Forest by C.S. Forester

motioned the waiting column to go on, and they splashed down across the ford, two by two, naked and sweating and burdened, their eyes cast down, all of them gasping with the heat and the effort.
    “Hang up the tusk again,” said the Arab.
    Loa struggled with the huge mud-daubed thing clasped in his arms.
    “Help me, Nessi,” he said. “Turn round.”
    “Hurry yourselves,” snapped the Arab.
    Within the triangle of fork and chain Nessi's neck was free to revolve, and she turned herself cautiously, so as to face Loa. Between them they were able with difficulty to replace the tusk in its slings of vine, and Nessi turned herself about again. The column had all gone by; two spearmen from the rear guard were waiting, at the Arab's orders, to herd them forward in the track of the column.
    “Hurry! Hurry!” said the Arab.
    The whip bit like fire in their flanks as they started forward again and re-entered the ford; at the first sign of their pace slackening the whip hissed in the air.
    They plunged on blindly through the sultry twilight of the forest. Soon they had proof enough that they were following the path of the column. A corpse sprawled beside the path, the head five feet away from the neck: a middle-aged woman's corpse, the breasts flaccid and empty. The tattooing on it was not that of anyone in Loa's town; one foot was bent strangely outwards and supplied the explanation of why the corpse lay there. When that ankle was broken there was no chance of keeping the woman on the march, and the quickest way of getting her out of the fork was to take off her head. The body already swarmed with ants. One of the spearmen walking behind them laughed and made some unintelligible remark, which probably did not refer to the dead woman. Loa knew already that dead bodies were far too common to excite a jest.
    And then, farther along the path, Loa caught sight of something else. So blurred was his vision with sweat and exhaustion that at first he did not believe that what he saw had a concrete existence. It might have been something real but with no place in this world, like what he used to see among the bones in that other life. A tree had fallen near the path, bringing down with it a tangle of vines, amid which glowed gaudy flowers, and at this point a shaft of sunshine reached down from the outer sky nearly to ground level. There was light and shadow and a screen of greenery. And from the edge of the screen a face looked momentarily out at Loa. It was Lanu, little Lanu, son of Loa and grandson of Nasa, once a god and a god to be. It was impossible that Lanu should be out here in the forest. Of course; now the face was gone. Loa had not really seen it. And then it came again, among the light and shade, indisputably Lanu, indisputably. The face split into a grin, with a flash of white teeth, and then it disappeared again. It was Lanu looking out at him from the cover of the vines. Loa was too miserable and too weary to think of all that implied. He had seen Lanu, and he was faintly cheered, but he had to go on plodding through the forest under the burden of the fork.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    Before sunset they emerged from the forest onto the bank of the big river. The light was still glaringly bright even though the sun was dipping towards the treetops on the other bank, and Loa, utterly worn out though he was, felt the old sensation of shrinking a little in the presence of the sky, the usual slight vertigo on looking out on those immense distances. The sky was his enemy as well as his brother, and he had always known it. It must be the sky that had dealt him this fatal blow, through the agency of the raiders. Here was the proof of it, this vast encampment surrounded by terrifying distances.
    They had reached the temporary base of the slave raiders, a central point where they had established themselves so as to be able to strike out in all directions and sweep up every community within thirty or forty miles. Here a long wide rocky beach