The lightning, ever shooting athwart the sky, made him blink as if dazzled, but he looked upon it without emotion.
He knew that behind him he had left a greater danger than this, and he stretched out his limbs to the cleansing torrent with an exulting relief to be washed from the dread infection.

Small-pox had laid its hand on the camp at Msala: and from the curse of it Victor Durnovo was flying in a mad chattering panic through all the anger of the tropic elements, holding death over his half-stunned crew, not daring to look behind him or pause in his coward's flight.
It is still said on the Ogowe river that no man travels like Victor Durnovo.

Certain it is that, in twenty-seven hours from the time that he left Msala on the morning of the great storm, he presented himself before Maurice Gordon in his office at the factory at Loango.
"Ah!" cried Gordon, hardly noticing the washed-out, harassed appearance of the visitor; "here you are again.

I heard that the great expedition had started." "So it has, but I have come back to get one or two things we have forgotten.

Got any sherry handy ?" "Of course," replied Gordon, with perfect adhesion to the truth.
He laid aside his pen and, turning in his chair, drew a decanter from a small cupboard which stood on the ground at his side.
"Here you are," he continued, pouring out a full glass with practised, but slightly unsteady, hand.
Durnovo drank the wine at one gulp and set the glass down.
"Ah!" he said, "that does a chap good." "Does it now ?" exclaimed Maurice Gordon with mock surprise.