The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
screeched the madman. “Yi! I saw six devils with fire in their mouths — death to you, Elebi! Dog—” He said other things which were not clean.
“If there were water here,” mused Elebi, “we might drown him; since there is only the forest and the earth, carry him away from the camp, and I will make him silent.” So they carried the lunatic away, eight strong men swaying through the forest, and they came back, leaving Elebi alone with his patient. The cries ceased suddenly and Elebi returned, wiping his hands on his leopard skin.
“Let us sleep,” said Elebi, and lay down.
Before the dawn came up the party were on the move.
They marched less than a mile from their camping ground and then faltered and stopped.
“There is no sign, lord,” the leader reported, and Elebi called him a fool and went to investigate.
But there was no red flannel, not a sign of it. They went on another mile without success.
“We have taken the wrong path, let us return,” said Elebi, and the party retraced its steps to the camp they had abandoned. That day was spent in exploring the country for three miles on either side, but there was no welcome blaze to show the trail.
“We are all N’Gombi men,” said Elebi, “let us tomorrow go forward, keeping the sun at our back; the forest has no terrors for the N’Gombi folk — yet I cannot understand why the white man’s magic failed.”
“Devils!” muttered his lieutenant sullenly.
Elebi eyed him thoughtfully.
“Devils sometimes desire sacrifices,” he said with significance, “the wise goat does not bleat when the priest approaches the herd.” In the morning a great discovery was made. A crumpled piece of flannel was found on the outskirts of the camp. It lay in the very centre of a path, and Elebi shouted in his joy.
Again the caravan started on the path. A mile farther along another little red patch caught his eye, half a mile beyond, another.
Yet none of these were where he had placed them, and they all bore evidence of rude handling, which puzzled the lay brother sorely. Sometimes the little rags would be missing altogether, but a search party would come upon one some distance off the track, and the march would go on.
Near sunset Elebi halted suddenly and pondered. Before him ran his long shadow; the sun was behind him when it ought to have been in front.
“We are going in the wrong direction,” he said, and the men dropped their loads and stared at him. “Beyond any doubt,” said Elebi after a pause, “this is the work of devils — let us pray.” He prayed aloud earnestly for twenty minutes, and darkness had fallen before he had finished.
They camped that night on the spot where the last red guide was, and in the morning they returned the way they had come. There was plenty of provision, but water was hard to come by, and therein lay the danger. Less than a mile they had gone before the red rags had vanished completely, and they wandered helplessly in a circle.
“This is evidently a matter not for prayer, but for sacrifice,” concluded Elebi, so they slew one of the guides.
Three nights later, O’Sako, the friend of Elebi, crawled stealthily to the place where Elebi was sleeping, and settled the dispute which had arisen during the day as to who was in command of the expedition.
*
“Master,” said Bosambo of Monrovia, “all that you ordered me to do, that I did.” Sanders sat before the chief’s hut in his camp chair and nodded.
“When your word came that I should find Elebi — he being an enemy of the Government and disobeying your word — I took fifty of my young men and followed on his tracks. At first the way was easy, because he had tied strips of cloth to the trees to guide him on the backward journey, but afterwards it was hard, for the N’Kema that live in the wood—”
“Monkeys?” Sanders raised his eyebrows.
“Monkeys, master,” Bosambo nodded his head, “the little black monkeys of the forest who love bright colours — they had come down from their trees and torn away the cloths and taken them to their houses after the fashion of the monkey people. Thus Elebi lost himself and with him his men, for I found their bones, knowing the way of the forest.”
“What else did you find?” asked Sanders.
“Nothing, master,” said Bosambo, looking him straight in the eye.
“That is probably a lie!” said Sanders.
Bosambo thought of the ivory buried beneath the floor of his hut and did not contradict him.
X. The Loves of M’lino
When a man loves one woman, whether she be alive or dead, a deep and fragrant memory or a very pleasant reality, he is apt to earn the appellation of “woman hater,” a hasty judgment which the loose-minded pass upon any man whose loves lack promiscuity, and who does not diffuse his passions. Sanders was described as a woman-hater by such men who knew him sufficiently little to analyse his character, but Sanders was not a woman-hater in any sense of the word, for he bore no ill will toward woman kind, and certainly was innocent of any secret love.
There was a young man named Ludley who had been assistant to Sanders for three months, at the end of which time Sanders sent for him — he was stationed at Isisi City.
“I think you can go home,” said Sanders.
The young man opened his eyes in astonishment.
“Why?” he said.
Sanders made no reply, but stared through the open doorway at the distant village.
“Why?” demanded the young man again.
“I’ve heard things,” said Sanders shortly — he was rather uncomfortable, but did not show it.
“Things — like what?”
Sanders shifted uneasily in his chair. “Oh — things,” he said vaguely, and added; “You go home and marry that nice girl you used to rave about when you first came out.”
Young Ludley went red under his tan. “Look here, chief!” he said, half angrily, half apologetically, “you’re surely not going to take any notice — you know It’s the sort of thing that’s done in black countries — oh, damn it all, you’re not going to act as censor over my morals, are you?”
Sanders looked at the youth coldly.
“Your morals aren’t worth worrying about,” he said truthfully. “You could be the most depraved devil in the world — which I’ll admit you aren’t — and I should not trouble to reform you. No. It’s the morals of my cannibals that worry me. Home you go, my son; get married, crescit sub pandere virtus — you’ll find the translation in the foreign phrase department of any respectable dictionary. As to the sort of things that are done in black countries, they don’t do them in our black countries — monkey tricks of that sort are good enough for the Belgian Congo, or for Togoland, but they aren’t good enough for this little strip of wilderness.”
Ludley went home. He did not tell anybody the real reason why he had come home, because it would not have sounded nice. He was a fairly decent boy, as boys of his type go, and he said nothing worse about Sanders than that he was a woman-hater.
The scene that followed his departure shows how little the white mind differs from the black in its process of working. For, after seeing his assistant safely embarked on a homeward-bound boat. Sanders went up the river to Isisi, and there saw a woman who was called M’Lino.
The average black woman is ugly of face, but beautiful of figure, but M’Lino