The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
at the best of times, being but an Isisi girl whose mental equipment found no other stimulus than the thought of lovers and their possibilities. Her breath came quickly in little sobs as she plied her paddles. She skirted the grass until she reached the second headland — the horn of the bay in which the marsh stands.
Clear of this she paddled boldly into midstream. Looking behind her she saw nothing, yet there were vague, indefinite shadows which might have been anything.
Her nerve had gone; she was on the point of collapse, when suddenly ahead of her she saw something and dropped her paddles.
A steamer was coming toward her, its funnel belching sparks, and ahead, as though to feel its way through the darkness, a broad beam of light, a dazzling whiteness.
She sat spellbound, breathing quickly, until the current carried her into the range of the searchlight.
She heard the voice of Sanders in the black darkness behind the light, and the tinkle of the engine telegraph as he put the Zaire astern.
*
Likilivi believed in the impenetrability of the Marsh as wholeheartedly as he believed in M’shimba-M’shamba and other strange gods.
“The woman is dead,” he said to his son, “and your brother Okora also, for M’ciba was a wicked woman and very strong.”
He did not doubt that somewhere in the depths of the lagoon the two lay locked in the grip of death.
The villagers accepted the drowning of M’dba philosophically and made no inquiries.
“I will report this matter to Sandi,” said Likilivi.
“Father,” said his son, “Sandi passed on the night of the killing, which was six nights ago, for men who were fishing saw his devil light.”
“So much the better,” said Likilivi.
There had been other deaths in the Marsh, for sickness readily attacks slaves who are chained by the leg and beaten, and who moreover do their work by night, lest the smoke of their fires invites suspicion.
Likilivi, his two remaining sons and two cousins, set themselves to recruit new labour.
Three nights they waited on the edge of the Marsh, and on the fourth they were rewarded, for two men came paddling carelessly with trailing fish lines.
They sang together a N’Gombi song about a hunter who had trusted an Akasava spear and had died from overconfidence.
Listening in the darkness Likilivi cursed them silently.
The canoe was close in shore when the elder of the chief’s sons threw the grapnel, and the canoe was drawn into the rushes.
Two canoes closed in upon it.
“You come with us or you die,” said Likilivi.
“Lord, we go with you,” said the N’Gombi promptly.
They were transferred to the chief’s canoe carrying their blankets, and their boat was taken by the other canoe, turned bottom upwards, and allowed to drift.
The chief waited until the canoe returned, then the two boats made for the heart of the Marsh.
For an hour they twisted and turned along the meandering fairway until at length the nose of the foremost canoe grounded gently on a sandy beach.
They were on the island. The pungent smell of smoke was in the air — Likilivi had wood to spare — and to the ears of the captives came a monotonous “clank, clank, clank,” of steel against steel.
Likilivi hurried them along a narrow path which ended abruptly in a clearing.
By the light of many fires the prisoners saw. There were two big huts — long and low roofed. They were solidly built on stout, heavy stakes, and to each stake a man was fastened. A long chain clamped about his legs gave him liberty to sleep on the inside of the hut and work at the fire outside.
There they sat, twelve men without hope, hammering spear heads for Likilivi, and each man was a skilled N’Gombi workman, artistically “drowned” for Likilivi’s profit.
“Here shall you sit,” said Likilivi to the two silent watchers, “and if you work you shall be fed, and if you do not work you shall be beaten.”
“I see,” said one of the captured.
There was something strange in his tone, something dry and menacing, and Likilivi stepped back showing his teeth like an angry dog.
“Put the chain upon them,” he commanded, but his relatives did not move, for the prisoner had dropped his blanket from his arm, and his revolver was plain to be seen.
Likilivi saw it too and made a recovery.
“You are one of Sandi’s spies,” he said thickly. “Now I swear to you that if you say nothing of this I will make you rich with ivory and many precious things.”
“That I cannot do,” said the man, and Likilivi, peering at the brown face closely, saw that this N’Gombi man had grey eyes, and that he was smiling unpleasantly, just as Sanders smiled before he sent men to the Village of Irons to work in bondage for their crimes.
XIV. The Praying Moor
Abiboo told Sanders that an Arabi had come to see him, and Arabs are rare on the coast, though certain dark men of Semitic origin have that honorary title.
Sanders came out to his stoep expecting to find a Kano, and was surprised to see, squatting by the edge of the raised verandah, a man of true Moorish type. He sat with his hands about his knees wrapped in a spotless white djellab.
“You are from Morocco,”* said Sanders in Arabic, “or from Dacca?” The man nodded.
“The people of Dacca are dogs,” he said, in the singsong voice of a professional storyteller. “One man, who is a cousin of my mother’s, stole twenty douros from my house and went back to Dacca by a coast boat before I could catch him and beat him. I hope he is killed and all his family also. Bismallah. God is good!”
Sanders listened, for he knew the Tangier people for great talkers.
The man went on. “Whether a man be of the Ali or Sufi sect, I do not care. There are thieves of both kinds.”
“Why do you come here?” asked Sanders.
“Once I knew a man who sat in the great sok.” (Sanders let him tell his story in his own way.) “And all the country people who brought vegetables and charcoal to the market would kiss the edge of his djellab and give him a penny.
“He was an old man with a long white beard, and he sat with his beads in his lap reciting the Suras of the Koran.
“There was not a man in Tangier who had not kissed the edge of his djellab, and given him five centimes except me.”
“When the people from faraway villages came, I used to go to a place near the door of his little white house and watch the money coming to him.
“One day when the sun was very hot, and I had lingered long after the last visitor had gone, the Haj beckoned me and I went nearer to him and sat on the ground before him.
“He looked at me, saying no word, only stroking his long white beard slowly. For a long time he sat like this, his eyes searching my soul.
“‘My son,’ he said at last, ‘how are you called?’
“‘Abdul az Izrael,’ I replied.
“‘Abdul,’ he said, ‘many come to me bringing me presents, yet you never come.’
“‘Before God and His prophet,’ I swore,