Part 6 (2/2)
Sitting in the Village of Irons, in that portion reserved for the women who had worked evilly against the Government, M'mina often said to her fellows in durance: ”Sandi has taken my man, but my soul and spirit and ghost is with him always, and my devil shall whisper in his ear: 'M'mina waits for you in the Forest of Dreams.'”
Which in a sense was perfectly true, though Terence Doughty would have been shocked if he could have identified the woman who flitted through his thoughts and was the foundation of many dreams...
Once he woke with a cry, and his wife asked him if he was ill.
”No, no... I was thinking...a nice gel... I wonder who she was?”
His wife smiled. She was wise enough never to probe into the past, but sometimes she wondered who that nice gel was.
THE BRa.s.s BEDSTEAD.
There is no tribe on the river that has not its most secret mystery. In the course of the years, Mr Commissioner Sanders had acquired a working knowledge of hundreds, yet was well aware that he had but touched the fringe of mult.i.tudes. For within every mystery is yet another. He knew that within the pods of a specie of wild pea there dwelt a beneficent spirit called ”Cha”, that brought luck and prosperity, but that if the pea was split into four and given to four people, one would die within a moon, but he did not learn for years that if one of the four quarters remained green, there would be no fish in the river for the s.p.a.ce of nine moons.
Every plant and flowering tree had its peculiar familiar, good or bad, and once he had been brought a hundred and fifty miles to a great palaver, and all because a mealy stalk had produced only one cob which was a sign of coming pestilence. Sometimes a peculiar potent would not appear at all and a hundred thousand men and women would sit and s.h.i.+ver their apprehension, whilst search parties would go forth and seek it.
In the end Sanders evolved a formula. At headquarters was a squat concrete house, built at the time of a serious war to store ammunition. The magazine was still employed for that purpose, but Sanders found it a new use. It became a repository of ju-jus. When M's.h.i.+mba M'shamba (which is another name for a small typhoon) did not put in an appearance, and the Isisi and N'gombi people met in solemn conclave to discuss what evil had been done that the great green spirit did not walk abroad, Sanders came.
”Have no fear, for M's.h.i.+mba stays with me in my Ghost House, being very weary.”
When the famous Tree of the World was uprooted in a storm and swept out of sight down the river, Sanders could rea.s.sure a trembling people.
”This great tree Is. It lives in my strange House of Ghosts, and none other shall see it. There it sits making good magic for the Isisi.”
Bones came to be custodian of the Ghost House by natural processes. Finding that certain credit attached to the position, he claimed it for his own, and when the lower river folk lost their ju-ju (maliciously conveyed on to the Zaire Zaire by a native workman and concealed in the engine furnace) Bones a.s.sumed responsibility. by a native workman and concealed in the engine furnace) Bones a.s.sumed responsibility.
”This fine ju-ju came to my Ghost House, and there he lives, and every morning I speak to him and he speaks to me.”
”Lord, we should like to see our beautiful ju-ju, for he was made wonderfully out of a magic tree by our fathers,” said one of the troubled elders.
”Him you may see,” said Bones significantly, ”but if you look upon the other ghosts who live with him, your eyes will fall out.”
They decided to leave the ju-ju to his tender care.
The plan worked exceedingly well until Bosambo fell out with the Akasava.
Bosambo, Paramount Chief of the Ochori, best-eared of all chiefs, had an elementary but effective system of justice. For him no frontiers existed, no sovereignty was sacred, though he rigidly enforced the restrictions of frontier and the holiness of the Ochori territory upon others. There came into the forest land at the extreme southern edge of his land a party of Akasava huntsmen in search of game, and these with a lordly indifference to the inviolability of his territority, speared and shot without so much as ”by your leave.”
They were in search of the small monkeys with white whiskers, which are considered a delicacy by the epicureans of the Akasava, and are found nowhere else than in the southern Ochori. They are killed with arrows, to the heads of which a yard of native rope is attached. When the monkey is. .h.i.t, the barbed arrowhead falls off, and the rope and shaft becoming entangled in the small branches of the trees in which the little people live, they are easily caught and despatched.
Now the people of the Ochori do not eat monkeys. They capture them and train them into domestic pets, so that you cannot pa.s.s through an Ochori village without seeing little white-whiskered figures squatting contentedly on the roof of the huts, engaged mainly in an everlasting hunt for fleas.
Messengers brought news of the invasion, and Bosambo left hurriedly for the south, taking with him fifty spearmen. They came upon the Akasava hunting party sitting about a fire over which shrivelled monkey-meat was roasting.
What followed need not be described in these pure pages; Bosambo had no right to brand the poachers with red-hot spear blades, and certainly his treatment did not err on the side of delicacy.
Ten days later, the weary hunting party came to the Akasava city and carried their grievances.
”Lord king, this Bosambo beat us and put hot irons upon us, so that we must sleep on our faces and cannot sit because of the cruel pain. And when we spoke of our king, he made horrible faces.”
Here was a cause for war, but the crops were not in, so the king sent his eldest men to Sanders. There was a palaver, and Sandi gave judgment.
”If a man walks into the lair of a leopard, shall he come to me and say, 'I am scratched'? For the leopards have their place, and the hunter has his. And if a man put his hand into a cooking-pot, shall he kill the woman at the fire because his hand is burnt? There is a place for the hand and a place for the boiling meat. Now, I give you this riddle. How can a man be burnt if he does not go to the fire? Let no man of the Akasava hunt in the forests of the Ochori. As to the lord chief Bosambo, I will make a palaver with him.”
”Lord,” said one of the injured hunters, ”we are shamed before our wives, and we cannot sit down.”
”Stand,” said Sanders laconically; ”and as to your wives, this is a wise saying of the Akasava: 'No man turns his face to the sun or his back to his wife.' The palaver is finished.”
He saw Bosambo in the privacy of his hut, and the interview was brief.
”Bosambo, you shall neither maim nor kill, nor shall you put other people to shame. If these men hunt in your forest, do you not fish in their waters? They tell me, too, that you take your spears to the Akasava country and clear their woods of meat. This is my word, that you shall not again go into their hunting-grounds, until they come to yours.”
”Oh ko!” said Bosambo in dismay; for the taboo which had been put upon him was the last he desired.
Bosambo had an affection for a kind of wild duck that could only be trapped in the Akasava marshes, and the deprivation was a serious one.
”Lord,” he said, ”I have repented in my heart, being a Christian, the same as you, and being well acquainted with Marki, Luki and Johnny, and other English lords. Let the Akasava come to my forest, and I will go to their lands to catch little birds. For, lord, I did not hurt these Akasava men, merely burning them in play, thinking they would laugh.”
Sanders did not smile. ”Men do not laugh when they are so burnt,” he said, and refused to lift the embargo.
”If they come to you, you may go to them,” he said at parting.
For the greater part of three months Bosambo was Tempter. He withdrew his spies from the forest, he sent secret word to the Akasava king, inviting him to great hunts; he conveyed taunts and threats calculated to arouse all that was warlike in his bosom, but the Akasava king rejected the overtures and returned insult for insult. And Bosambo brooded on roast duck and grew morose.
Then on a day Sanders had a message from one of his spies who kept a watchful eye upon the people of the Akasava. And there was need for watchfulness, apart from the trouble with Bosambo, for it had been a year of record crops, and when the crops are plentiful and goats multiply in the Akasava country, and men grow rich in a season, and are relieved for the moment of the strain which judiciously applied taxation and the stubbornness of the soil impose, their minds turn to spears, and to the ancient stories of Akasava valour which the old men tell and the young maidens sing. And they are apt, in their pride, to look around for new enemies, or to furbish old grievances. For this is the way of all peoples, primitive or civilised, that prosperity and idleness are the foundations of all mischief.
Cala cala, which means long ago, the N'gombi people, who were wonderful workers of iron, had stolen a bedstead of solid bra.s.s, bequeathed to the king of the Akasava by a misguided missionary, who in turn had received it from as misguided a patron. And this bedstead of bra.s.s was an object of veneration and awe for twenty years; and then, in a little war which raged for the s.p.a.ce of three moons between the Akasava and the N'gombi, the Akasava city had been taken and sacked, and the bed of bra.s.s had gone across the river into the depths of the forest, and there, by cunning N'gombi hands, had reappeared in the shape of bowls and rings and fine-drawn wire of fabulous value. For any object of metal is an irresistible attraction to the craftsmen of the forest did not Sanders himself lose a steel anvil from the lower deck of the Zaire Zaire? The story of how ten men swam across the river, carrying that weight of metal, is a legend of N'gombi.
The true city of these people is situated two days' march in the forest; and hither, one fine morning, came messengers from the king of the Akasava four haughty men, wearing feathers in their hair and leopard skins about their middle, and each man carrying a new s.h.i.+eld and a bunch of bright killing spears, which the N'gombi eyed with professional interest.
”O king, I see you,” said the chief envoy, one M'guru. ”I am from your master, the king and lord of the Akasava, who, as you know, are the greatest people in these lands, being feared even by Sandi because of their valour and wonderful courage.”
”I have heard of such people,” said the king of the N'gombi, ”though I have never seen them, except the spearers of fish who live by the riverside.”
This was designed and accepted as a deadly insult, for the Akasava are great fish-eaters, and the N'gombi do not eat fish at all, preferring frogs and snakes (as the slander goes).
”My king will bring his people to see you,” said the envoy significantly. ”And this he will do soon, if you do not return to us the bedstead you stole cala cala cala cala, and which my king desires.”
The king of the N'gombi was smoking a long-stemmed pipe with a tiny bowl, and the rancid scent of the native tobacco was an offence to the nose of the Akasava messenger.
”Am I M's.h.i.+mba M'shamba, that I can bring from nothing something?” he asked. ”As to your bedstead, it is not! Nor will it ever be again. Take this word to the little king of the Akasava, that I am M'shulu-M'shulu, son of B'faro, son of M'labo, son of E'goro, who put the Akasava city to the flames and carried away the bedstead which was his by right. That I, this man who speaks, will meet the Akasava, and many will run quickly home, and they will run with the happiest, for they will be alive. This palaver is finished.”
All this the emba.s.sy carried back to the Akasava, and the lokalis lokalis beat, the young men danced joyously, as young men will when the madness of war comes to a people: and then, when secret preparations had been completed, and all was in readiness, an Akasava man, walking through the forest by the river, saw a foreigner throw a pigeon into the air, and the man was brought to the king of the Akasava, and a council of war was held. The prisoner was brought, bound, before the king. beat, the young men danced joyously, as young men will when the madness of war comes to a people: and then, when secret preparations had been completed, and all was in readiness, an Akasava man, walking through the forest by the river, saw a foreigner throw a pigeon into the air, and the man was brought to the king of the Akasava, and a council of war was held. The prisoner was brought, bound, before the king.
”O man,” said he, ”you are a spy of Sandi's, and I think you have been speaking evilly of my people. Therefore you must die.”
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