Chapter Nineteen
The Search for the Land of Gold
Scene: – Daybreak on the unknown river. The stream is a good mile wide here; its banks are lined with a cloudland of green, the great trees trailing their branches in the water. A sand bar at one side, jutting far out into the river, tall crimson ibises standing thereon like a regiment of British soldiers. The mist of morning uprising everywhere off the woods and off the water. One long red cloud in the east heralding the approach of the god of day. Silence over all, except for the dip of the oars – they are muffled – as our adventurers’ boat rapidly nears the shore to seek the friendly shelter of the tree-fringe.
“So far on our way, thank heaven,” said Kenneth, as soon as the boat was hidden and the party had landed on a little bank deeply bedded with brown leaves.
“So far, and now for breakfast.”
Yes, now for breakfast, reader, and a very frugal one it was; some handfuls of boiled rice and a morsel of biscuit steeped in the water to make it go down.
This had been their fare for days and days, but added thereto was the fruit that Essequibo never failed to find.
Fish there were in this great river in abundance, fish that they had plenty of means of catching too, but none of cooking without danger; for smoke might betray their presence to an enemy more implacable and merciless than the wildest beast in the jungle.
The long hot day passed drearily away. They sat or reclined mostly in a circle, carrying on a conversation in voices but little over a whisper.
When the day was at its very hottest, when there was not a leaf stirring in the branches above, when the monkeys that more than once had visited them, creeping nearer and nearer with curious half-frightened gaze, had sought the darkest, coolest nooks of the forest, and the —
“Strange bright birds on starry wing – ”
had ceased their low plaintive songs, and sat open-mouthed and all a-gasp on the boughs, then sleep stole over every one, and it was far into the afternoon ere they awoke.
The sun went down at last, and darkness – a tropical darkness – very soon followed. Lights might now be seen flitting about among the trees; the fire-flies and curious creeping things went gliding hither and thither on the ground, all ablaze with phosphorescent light. Yonder knobs of fire that jump about so mysteriously are beetles; that long line of fire wriggling snake-like at the tree foot is the dreaded brown centipede, whose bite is death.
They must not leave their hiding-place yet though, for Logobo canoes are still on the river. They must wait and listen for hours to come. But they keep closer together now and grasp their arms sturdily, for lions have awakened and begun to yawn; there are terrible yells and shrieks, and coughing and groaning to be heard on every side, and many a plash alongside in the dark water. Sometimes a huge bat drives right against them, poisoning the air with pestiferous odour. Sometimes they see starry eyeballs glaring at them from under the plantain bushes, and hear the branches creak and crack, and the sound of stealthy footsteps near them. It is an eeriesome place this to spend even half-an-hour in after nightfall, but their only chance of safety lies in remaining perfectly still, perfectly mute. At long last light shimmers in through the leafy canopy above them, they know the moon has arisen, and it is time to be going.
Once more they are embarked, and once more stealing silently up the unknown river.
As the night advances, they are less cautious and talk more freely. Earlier in the evening they had heard the beating of the warlike tom-tom and the shouts of savage sentries, but now these are hushed and the beasts and birds of the night alone are left to rend the ear with their wild cries.
Hiding by day, and journeying silently onward and upward by night, our heroes are in less than a week far past the country of the dreaded Logobo men. Not that their dangers are over by any means, nor their trials. There are dangers from beasts, from lion or leopard, and from hideous reptiles, far more ugly than a nightmare, and these they must often face, for the rapids in the river have now become numerous, and they have to land and carry their light boat past them. But, on the whole, they were so happy now and light-hearted that they often laughed and joked and sang; and why not? Were they not marching on to fortune? They believed so, at all events.
In the long dark evenings, round the camp fire, they would lie on their blankets with their feet to the fire, and their guns not far off, you may be well sure, and sing songs and tell stories of their far-away native land. The flute, too, was put on duty, much to the delight of little Essequibo, the nigger boy. Essequibo, or Keebo as he was called for short, was at first inclined to be afraid of the flute; in fact, when first he heard it, he turned three somersaults backwards and disappeared in the jungle. He did not appear again for half-an-hour; then he came out, and gradually and slowly and wonderingly advanced to where Kenneth sat playing.
Keebo’s eyes were as big as half-crown pieces, now, and he walked on tip-toe, ready to bolt again at a moment’s notice.
“Massa Kennie,” he said plaintively, “Massa Kennie, what you raise inside dis poor chile wid dat tube you blows into? You raisee de good spirit or de ebil one? Tell me dat.”
“The good spirit, Keebo,” replied Kenneth; “listen.”
Then Kenneth played “The Land of the Leal.”
“I’se all of a shake, Massa Kennie,” said the poor boy; “de spirits, dey am all about here now, I knows. Dey not can touch poor Keebo? Tell me dat for true?”
Essequibo got more used to the flute before long, and at last he quite loved it.
Here is the story of Essequibo’s conversion. I give it briefly. It was one day when Kenneth and he were alone, all the rest being away in the bush in search of food and dry fuel.
Keebo squatted near Kenneth’s knees, leaning his hands thereon with child-like confidence, and gazing up into the young Scot’s face as he played low sweet Scottish airs. These plaintive airs took Kenneth away back in fancy to grand Glen Alva, and the tears rose to his eyes as he thought of his childhood’s days, of his simple happiness while herding sheep, of his dear mother, of Kooran and the fairy knoll.
And last but not least of the sweet child Jessie, and of that day among the Highland heather, when she gave him the flowers. He took the Bible from his bosom and opened it.
And there they were side by side. And they were near a chapter his mother used often to read to him. His mother? Heigho! he would never see her again in this world, but faith pointed upwards.
He took his flute more cheerfully now, and began to play that sweet melody “New London.” His whole soul was breathed into the instrument.
When he looked again at Keebo, why, there were tears rolling down the boy’s cheeks.
“You remember your mother, Keebo?”
“Ess, Massa Kennie, I ’member she. De cruel Arab men kill she wid one spear. Sometimes Keebo tink she speak to her boy yet in his dreams.”
“So she does, Keebo. So she does, dear child. She lives, Keebo.”
“She lib, sah! My moder lib?”
Then Kenneth told Essequibo the Bible tale and all the sweet story of Jesu’s love; and every word sank deep into Keebo’s heart, and was never, never forgotten.
When returning that day from the bush in Indian file, Archie, who was first, checked the others with uplifted hands, and pointed through the plantain bushes to the clearing where Kenneth knelt in prayer beside the boy Keebo.
Both Archie and Harvey doffed their caps, and stood reverently there, not daring to reveal their presence till Kenneth had arisen. The very sky above them seemed at that moment a holy sky.
Essequibo was a strange name to give this nigger boy. (The name of a river in South America.) It came by chance, and suited him well. He was clever, this lad; and proved a treasure to the little expedition in many a trial. His English was not of the purest, he had learnt it in Zanzibar; but he could talk the languages of the interior tribes and Arabic as well. It is truly wonderful how soon boys of this caste learn languages.
Zona was guide and chief of the party; he knew the land well, and he knew the river. He knew which way to go to avoid unfriendly Indians, and he knew also the shortest tracks. So you may fancy them going on and on day after day in their search for the land of gold, sometimes gliding along the silent and unknown river, sometimes plunging into deep, dark forests; at other times toiling over arid plains, round the spurs of lofty mountains, or wading deep through miry marsh lands, the home, par excellence, of the most loathsome of Saurian monsters; but journeying ever with light hearts, for hope still pointed onwards.
At night, by the camp fire, Archie and Kenneth used to build aerial castles, and plan out the kind of future that they should spend in Scotland when they had wealth. But never a night passed without a chapter being read, a psalm sung, and a prayer said. Zona used to retire to the bush, and it is but fair to say that, according to his lights, he was as good at heart as any of the others.
They had hired over a dozen sturdy Indians to carry boats and ammunition, but these men needed watching, both by night and by day. They were necessary evils, that is all. Not that negroes of this kind are not often faithful enough, but they need a master eye to guide them, else they soon lose heart and faint and fail – then fly.
More than once Keebo prevented these men from stampeding, for Keebo was ever watchful.
For many weeks our heroes kept on in the same slow course, defying every obstacle. They were now little more than fifty miles from the goal of their desires.
“If gold or diamonds,” said Kenneth to Archie, “be but half as plentiful as represented, we have only to collect and retire. We have overcome every danger, and avoided the greatest danger of all – the Logobo country. We will go more swiftly down stream than we came up.”
Archie was quite as hopeful as Kenneth.
Harvey hardly so much so.
“‘There is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,’” the latter would say.
Perhaps this was one of the happiest periods of the lives of either of our heroes. Indeed, their existence at present resembled nothing so much as one long picnic. They were like the wild creatures around them; they lived on the good things they found, and were contented and happy.
Kenneth, true lover of nature, could never have dreamt of scenery like that which he now gazed on daily. Oh the luxuriance of an African tropical woodland! what pen could describe, what pencil or brush portray it!
Yes, there were deadly things to be avoided, but one gets careless of even them, or, at least, used to them, so that in time not even a great snake dangling from a branch in front of him makes him shudder; nor is he greatly alarmed if he comes suddenly on the African “tiger,” as the leopard is called, enjoying a siesta at noon-tide under a tree.
The tribes they had hitherto encountered were non-warlike and quiet. One day, however, Essequibo, who had been scouting on ahead, came rushing back in a state of great alarm.
“Dey come, dey come!” he shouted; “plenty bad men. Plenty spear and shield. Dey kill and eat us all for true!”
The carrier negroes threw down their boat and packages and would have bolted en masse, had not our heroes stood by them with pistol and whip. The whip was, I believe, more dreaded than even the revolver.
In less time than it takes me to tell it, the little expedition, which was quickly formed into a solid square, was surrounded by a cloud of armed blacks.
To fight such a mob was out of the question; they used better tactics: they pretended to be overjoyed at meeting them. They were friends, Kenneth told the chief of these negroes, not foes, and wanted to see the king, and brought him presents from the far-off white man’s land.
Shouts of joy from those simple natives now rent the air, and rattling their spears against their shields they led the way towards the camp of the king, a village of adobe and grass huts, built round cocoa-nut palms, in the midst of a great and fertile plain. In the centre of the town, inside a compound, was the square bungalow of King ’Ntango.
’Ntango was in, but did not appear for hours. It would not be royal etiquette to show much curiosity. Meanwhile the native women brought milk and honey and baked plantains, and everything went as merry as a marriage bell.
The king, into whose presence they were ushered at last, was round and squat, very yellow and very fat.
He showered his questions on Kenneth through Essequibo as interpreter.
Where did they come from? What did they want? Were they Arab or foreign? Did they come to steal his wives and little ones? How long did they want to stop? For ever, of course. Where were the gifts? Guns? Yes. Beads? Good. Pistols? Good again. But was this all? Where was the rum? Arab men had been here before, they brought much good rum. What, no rum? Never a skin of rum? Ugh!
With this last ejaculation, which was almost a shriek, the king sprang from the mat on which he had squatted.
“They must die?” he shouted; “die every one of them. The Arab must first die, then the black men. Then the white men. Essequibo he would fatten and kill and eat. Bring chains; away with them! away! away! AWAY!”
The king’s eyes shot fire as he waved his arms aloft, and shouted, “Away, away!” and his lips were flecked with blood and foam.
He was a fearful being to behold, this irate African savage.
Almost at the same moment our heroes were seized rudely from behind, disarmed, and dragged off. They soon found themselves huddled together in one room, with stone walls, slimy, damp, and over-run with creeping things that made them shudder, albeit they were under the very shadow of death.
Towards evening the king sent to “comfort” them; it was very condescending of him. The “comfort” lay in the information that at sunrise next day they would be led out to die, by spear or by knife, as they might choose.
Meanwhile, poor Essequibo’s chains were knocked off, and he was led away to his fattening pen.
Such is life in Central Africa. But stranger things still befell our heroes.
Chapter Twenty
Land of Darkness
Scene: The interior of King ’Ntango’s palace. The king seated on a mat in the middle of the floor of the principal apartment – a large square room with walls of mud and grass. The only furniture, a tall tom-tom, a mat-covered dais, and a heap of empty stone bottles in a corner. Those bottles once contained gin.
It is near sunset, the king is alone. There is no sound to break the silence, except the tap, tap, tap the gecko lizards that crawl on the walls make, as they beat to death the moths they catch.
Yes, the king is alone in his glory, though his spear-armed attendants wait outside. He is quite a study, this savage potentate, to any one fond of an anthropology. Look at him now! he is leaning his fat face on his podgy fingers, his elbows are resting on his knees – he is thinking.
There are but two things in this world that this king dearly loves; one is to see human blood spilled, the other is to drink gin or rum. These last two words are the only English ones he can pronounce or understand. He learnt them from itinerant Arabs, unscrupulous scoundrels, who bought the youth and flower of his people for a bottle each.
The king is thinking; the question that exercises his mind at present is this, “Shall I kill these white men, and laugh to see the red blood flow; or keep two, and send the others back for rum?”
“Room,” this is how he pronounces the word “rum,” and “gin” he calls “geen.”
“Room, room, room,” he mutters to himself, “geen, geen, geen.”
He rises; a thought strikes him. May it not be possible that one, just one full bottle remains still among that heap of empty ones? He goes straight to the heap, and turns them over. No, not one. Still, he has a glimmering notion that in a dazed moment he hid one. Ha! he remembers all of a sudden. He seizes the stick with which he is wont to beat the tom-tom, and hies him to a corner, and speedily unearths, not one bottle, but two.
He is a joyful king now. He whacks the tom-tom, and summons two of his wives to squat beside him; not to help him to drink, but to see him drink.
Then he summons Essequibo, and launches questions at him. “How long will he take to fatten? How long before he be ready to kill? Do the white men tremble to die?”
“No,” Keebo tells him; “they rejoice to die because their spirits will go to a glorious land of flowers and sunshine.”
The king gets blue with rage. He whacks Keebo with the tom-tom stick, and he whacks his wives; then he declares that the white men shall not die, that their spirits shall not go to the glorious land of flowers and sunshine.
Then he drinks “geen,” and cools down.
But Keebo sees his advantage. He expatiates on the mechanical ability and cleverness of white men in general, and of Massa Kennie, Archie, and Harvey in particular, and so inflames the king’s cupidity, that he sends for the white men, and has their chains knocked off in his presence, and tells his sentries they are free, and any one who touches the hem of their garments shall be made food for the blue-bottle flies, and the long-legged “krachaw.” (A kind of carrion-eating heron.)
“Ha! ha! ha!” he yells, “the king will live for ever.”
Then he drinks again, yells again, whacks his wives with the tom-tom stick, and laughs to see them wince; and drinks, and drinks, and drinks, till he falls back asleep, and is borne away by the wives he whacked, and laid tenderly on the daïs.
“Well,” cried Harvey, “this is a queer ending to a day’s march.”
Zona shrugs his square thin shoulders, and Kenneth and Archie laugh.
“Ask those scoundrels,” says Kenneth to Essequibo, “what they have done with our arms and our boat.”
Very submissive are those spear-armed warriors now. They lead them to a wood, and there in the thicket they find everything intact.
“Now, lads, do as I tell you,” said Kenneth.
And here is what our heroes did at Kenneth’s advice. They rolled all their spare arms and ammunition in blankets, dug a hole, buried them, and turned the boat upside down on them. Next they tore up a lot of white and red rags, tied them to strings, and arranged these along, over, and around the boat, in precisely the way you would over a row of peas in the country to keep the sparrows away.
Funny though it may seem, this was quite enough to keep these savage negroes at bay. There was magic in it, they thought, and they gave that wood a wide berth.
Well, our heroes had, after a manner of speaking, to buy their lives.
The king had them before him at daybreak, not to order them to execution, but to give them his royal commands. They were to teach his people to do all the clever things that white men could do; if they failed, the king told them death would be the fate of their teachers.
“We do not fear to die, King ’Ntango,” said Kenneth.
The king looked at him with a merry twinkle in his eye; then he took a sip of “geen” and said, through the interpreter Keebo, —
“You do not fear death? No, you think you go straight to your glorious land of sunshine; but listen, you will not. I will arrange it differently. I will cut from you a leg, an arm, and an ear, – ha! ha! what think you? will the leg, and arm, and ear go first to the land of sunshine, and wait you? Take care, I am a great king, and I have twenty thousand ways to torture without killing.”
Poor Kenneth confessed to himself that the king had the best of the argument, but he replied, —
“If you cut from me an arm or leg, how then shall I teach your people?”
The king smiled grimly, and said, “Go.”
They must propitiate this king, that was evident, in order to gain his favour and their eventual liberty, for slaves they now undoubtedly were to all intents and purposes.
So they set themselves to teach his people to build boats, and sail on the great lake that occupied the centre of the plain; to make articles of furniture and household utility generally; to till the ground and to sow; and lastly, to cook the latter department belonged to Zona, and it greatly pleased the king. It pleased him also to see his men drilled, and to witness their deftness in rowing and sailing, but he saw not the sense of sowing.
“Has not the Great Spirit,” he said to Kenneth, “given us the fruits that grow aloft on the trees, the fish in the water, and the beasts of the field? what need we of more?”
But days rolled into weeks, and weeks into months. The prospect of getting out of this king’s country, either onward to the gold country, or back towards the coast, seemed to get less and less bright. ’Ntango’s men became good soldiers, adept spearsmen; formerly they could send an arrow with terrible precision through a kind of blow-pipe into the breast of a leopard or lion; now they were not afraid to attack these creatures with the spear alone.
But these better soldiers of the king’s were all the better able to watch their prisoners; there was no end to the king’s cunning. Many and many a plan did Kenneth and his brothers in affliction fall upon to try to effect their escape, but every one was frustrated.
“No,” said the king to Kenneth, – “I love you so much now I cannot part with you. You must live with me for ever and ever and ever.”
This was, indeed, a dark prospect.
A whole year passed away; the one comfort of their lives now rested in the fact that they were permitted to enjoy each other’s company. They had built quite a splendid bungalow for themselves, and surrounded it with a beautiful compound and gardens, in which the most delightful flowers bloomed, and where grew the most delicious fruit. Under other circumstances their lives would really have been enjoyable. Wild sports they had also in abundance, and fishing and boating both by lake and on the river, but on these excursions one hundred of the king’s trustiest spearmen always accompanied them, and their bungalow was surrounded by a palisade that they did not build, and for ever guarded by sentries they could not elude.
One good for these poor people Kenneth did effect; he had a meeting-house built, and therein, Sabbath after Sabbath, he taught them to read and to pray, just as he had taught good Essequibo.
It was not long before the king found out Kenneth’s powers as a musician, and at first it was hard on Kenneth, for he was kept playing from morning till night for weeks.
Music lost its power to some extent over the king at length, and latterly it was but rarely he sent for his musician to play. Nor had ’Ntango much of an ear for melody, for Kenneth manufactured a score of “chanters” out of pieces of cane, and taught a score of savages to make an unearthly kind of noise in all kinds of keys; and this pleased the king quite as much as the flute.
Archie thought of a plan at last to get a brief holiday. The first intimation of it was given the king by Essequibo. All the white men, he told him one morning, were ill and dying, and nothing would cure them but permission to explore the country to the nor’-west, the land where gold lay.
The king graciously gave his permission, and the expedition, well guarded, started to prospect for gold. After days and days of toil and travel they reached the El Dorado.
Disappointment and nothing else. Gold there was, but not for the gathering; it was deeply imbedded in veins of quartz, and the strongest machinery would be needed to work it.
Diamonds there were none.
Their gloom increased now. Their hopes of finding fortune had been but a youthful dream, and had ended in making them prisoners to a wild and despotic savage.
If there was any one ray now to illuminate their darkness and despair, it lay in the fact that their visit to the land of darkness had not been quite in vain; they had sowed the seeds of righteousness, and who could say what fruit these might not bear in after-times?
They tried now to make the best of their position, and take things as they came, determined, however, if a chance should arise, to seek safety in flight at all hazards. The river was not far away, and their boat and spare ammunition still lay intact and handy.
Nearly two years passed away.
One night they had retired to their bungalow early. It was Archie’s birthday, and they were going to have a big talk about home.
It was long past twelve o’clock before they thought of lying down. Ere they undressed they went for a walk as usual in their garden, to breathe the odour of the flowers, which the dews of evening never failed to draw out.
The moon was high in the heavens, looking like a little burnished shield in the blue sky, and dimming the light of the thousand twinkling stars. Suddenly from every direction there arose a muttering startled cry, which presently increased to a yell. Smoke, too, began to roll across the sky, increasing every moment, while tongues of flame leaped higher and higher.
They listened thunderstruck.
“Logobo – Logobo – Logobo!” That was the terrible cry.
“Heaven be praised!” cried Kenneth. “Now, boys, now, men, our time has come for freedom or for death. Follow me!”
He grasped his rifle as he spoke, and rushed out. The sentries had fled.
The whole village was in flames, and in the lurid glare, hand to hand in deathly combat, struggled two tribes of savages.
It was no business of our heroes, however. They rushed onwards through the melée, and in a very short time had reached and shouldered their boat.
One hour after, the din of the conflict was muffled in the distance, miles away, and Kenneth and his companions were safe on the river.
They were not free yet, however. Swiftly down the river they sped, racing onwards at all hazards. Daylight found them far away, but not safe. All the country they passed through gave token of the march into the interior of the Logobo men. The villages by the banks were fire-blackened ruins, swollen corpses floated here and there, and half-charred spars.
A week of fearful toil and anxiety, during which they had more adventures and hair-breadth escapes than I could describe in a goodly volume, brought them to the edge of the Logobo land. And here redoubled caution was needed. They could not rush it, as they had done the other part of the river. They must resort to their old tactics of hiding by day and pursuing their way adown the unknown river in the silence of night.
But three days of this work had almost set them free. It was the very last day of their hiding, and near sunset. They had determined to start early, and were longing for six o’clock and speedy darkness. Lower and lower went the sun. Already the gloom of the short twilight was settling down on the still forest, and beasts of prey were beginning to wake up, and yawn – and a fearful sound it is to listen to – when suddenly into the clearing where they stood strutted a Logobo savage in war array.
The yell he gave awakened a thousand others on every side. The whole forest was alive with savages apparently.
“Ping, ping,” from Archie’s revolver, and down dropped the Logobo warrior.
“Quick, men, quick,” cried Kenneth, “to boat, to boat!”
Ah! none too soon; hardly had they launched their frail craft and embarked, ere a flight of spears came from the bush, and poor Essequibo fell.
The gathering darkness favoured them, and they were soon beyond the reach of danger.
Two hours after, the moon had risen; its rays brightened the woods and rocks and sparkled on the river.
Poor Keebo lay in the bottom of the boat across Zona’s knee, his face upturned to the sky.
His life was ebbing fast away.
Near him knelt Kenneth, holding his cold hand.
“I’se goin’, good-bye,” murmured the dying lad. “I’se goin’ to de land – ob sunshine. I see poor mudder soon.”
“Keebo,” said Kenneth, “you know me?”
“Ess, dear Massa Kennie.”
“Now, say after me. O Lord!”
“‘O Lor’!’”
“Receive poor Keebo’s soul.”
“‘Poor Keebo’s soul.’”
“For the blessed Jesu’s sake.”
“‘De bressed Jesu’s sake.’”
There was just one little painful quiver of the limbs, then a gentle soughing sigh, and – Keebo was gone.