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Title: The Sky and the Forest
Author: Forester, C. S. [Cecil Scott]
   [Smith, Cecil Louis Troughton] (1899-1966]
Date of first publication: 1948
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948
Date first posted: 22 August 2018
Date last updated: 22 August 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1560

This ebook was produced by Al Haines, Cindy Beyer,
Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading
Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






THE SKY AND THE FOREST

by C. S. Forester




CHAPTER I


There had been much rain during the night, and the morning air was still
saturated with moisture, heavy and oppressive, and yet with a suspicion
of chill about it, enough to make flies sluggish and men and women slow
in their movements. But now the sun was able to look over the tops of
the trees into the town, calling out the wreaths of steam from the
puddles, and shining down upon Loa's woolly head as he walked out into
the west end of the street. Four women, not yet gone to the banana
groves, ceased their chattering at his appearance and fell on their
knees and elbows, pressing their noses against the muddy soil. Loa ran
his eye over them as he walked past them; he was more used to seeing the
backs of men and of women than to looking into their faces. A little boy
came running round the corner of a house--he was of an age when running
was still something of a new experience for him--and stopped at sight of
the crouching women and of Loa's passing majesty. His finger went to his
mouth, but it had hardly reached it when his mother put out her arm,
without lifting her face from the earth, and seized him and flung him
down, face downwards as was proper, holding him there despite his
struggles, and when he had recovered from his surprise sufficiently to
wail in protest she managed to get her hand over his mouth and moderate
the noise. That was right.

The distraction was sufficient to turn Loa from continuing his way down
the street. He stood and looked idly along to the far end. The crouching
women, conscious that he was remaining near them, writhed in troubled
ecstasy, the bunched muscles along their backs standing out tensely,
while their concern communicated itself to the little boy so that he
ceased to struggle and wail, and instead lay limp and submissive. The
sun was shining brightly into Loa's eyes, but the sun was Loa's brother
and did not need to avert his face and grovel in his presence. Loa
raised his left hand--the one that held his leafy fan--to shade his eyes
as he gazed down the street. He did not know what he was looking for nor
why he was doing this, and the realization did not come to him even when
he had made certain that nothing was different from usual; actually it
was an unrecognized feeling of unrest which had stirred a faint desire
that today something should be different. Loa could not analyze nor
recognize his emotions. He was a god and always had been.

His brother the sun had now come tardily to recognize the fact, as he
sometimes did, and had drawn a veil of dilatory cloud over his face. The
tribute was gratifying, and Loa did not need to shade his eyes any
longer.

"Ha!" he said, pleased with his power; and he turned, immense in his
dignity, and walked back to his house at the end of the street.

Indeharu and Vira made a half-circle so as to keep behind him and
followed him back, as they had followed him out. Indeharu's back was
bent with age, but even if it had not been he would have bent it and
walked with a stoop, just as did young Vira; it was right and proper to
walk with humility when attending upon the god. Loa was free for the
moment of the unrest which had manifested itself earlier. His right hand
swung his iron battle-ax, and his iron collars and bracelets jangled as
he strode along, his naked toes gripping the thin and drying mud of the
street. Lanu was playing in the small open space in front of Loa's house
and came running up with a smile; Lanu could face the god, for Lanu was
a god too, Loa's child. There were other children, with their mothers in
the banana groves or behind the house, but they were not gods. Lanu was
the first-born. Although that was not why he was a god it was probably
the reason why Loa had been fond of him at his birth, before the birth
of children became a commonplace, and had played with him and petted him
and treated him with so much condescension and fondness that clearly he
could not be a mortal who must abase himself in the god's presence, and
consequently he had never been trained into abasement.

Loa dropped his battle-ax and fan, and caught Lanu under the armpits and
swung him up into the air kicking and squealing with delight, holding
him there for long pleasurable seconds before setting him on his feet
again. Loa unclasped his leopardskin from about his throat and put it
over the boy's shoulders, to Lanu's immense pleasure. The boy clasped
the forelegs round his neck with the brooch, draped the skin over his
left shoulder, and strutted off, very pleased with himself, while Loa
followed him fondly with his gaze. Even a god could love his son.

Loa picked up his battle-ax and fan, and seated himself on his stool;
the latter was made merely of three curving branches, polished, and
bound together with cane fiber into a distorted tripod. To sit on it at
all called for a careful placing of the fleshy parts; to sit on it for
long called for constant shifting of them; but it was more dignified
than squatting on one's heels--that was what men and women did--and the
stool by raising the body above the ground kept it out of the way of
ants and other creeping creatures. Indeharu and Vira squatted before
him, and Loa swept the flies from himself with his fan and prepared
himself to listen to their morning report.

"Uledi dies," said Vira; as much the younger man it was his place to
speak first.

"She dies?" asked Loa.

"She does indeed. Now her head is drawn back. There is foam on her lips.
Every hour the poison shakes her. Her arms and legs go stiff as she
struggles with it, stiff like tree trunks although she tosses about in
her battle with the poison, and she cries out with words that mean
nothing. Then once more she ceases to struggle, and lies sleeping again.
She has slept since last there was yellow water in the river."

"I know that," said Loa.

"There is no flesh on her bones, and now there are sores on her skin."

"Yes," said Loa, rubbing his chin.

This trouble was not infrequent in the town. For no apparent reason some
individual, man, woman, or child, would suddenly become somnolent,
sleeping continuously except when roused to take food. Sometimes they
slept themselves straight into death; sometimes, as in Uledi's case,
they died more violently, but whichever way it was they died once they
began to sleep, sometimes in a short time, sometimes in a long time.

"It is a deadly poison," commented Indeharu.

"Yes," said Loa again.

Life could not end except by human agency. Somebody must be poisoning
Uledi, and Loa's heavy face was contorted into a frown as he wrestled
with the problem. Face after face flitted across the field of his mental
vision, but not one seemed to be connected with the poisoning of Uledi.
Soon he abandoned his review of the population of the town. Seven
hundred people lived in it; he did not know how many, nor did his
language contain words for the numeral, but he knew it would take too
long to think about every one of them. The bones, the five slender rib
bones which lay in his house, would tell him if he asked them.

"Soli is her mother's brother's son," said Vira.

That was a very special relationship, conferring particular privileges
in the matter of inheritance, and might supply a motive. Loa for a
moment thought the problem solved, but Vira and Indeharu were not
looking at each other, and his instincts, the sensitive instincts of an
uneducated man, told him there was something suspicious in the
atmosphere. He did not have to follow along the path of deduction and
logic, from the fact that Indeharu and Vira were carefully refraining
from exchanging glances, to the fact that their expressions were
unnaturally composed, and then on to the fact that Vira bore an old
grudge against Soli--something to do with a haunch of goat over which
they had quarreled--and from that to his knowledge of Indeharu's enmity
towards Soli. It had never even occurred to him that this enmity issued
from the old man's fear of a possible young rival. Loa's instincts
leaped all the gaps, without any painful building of bridges, and warned
him that he--he, the god--was being subjected to influence, an indirect
influence and therefore one to be suspected.

"Soli is Uledi's mother's brother's son," he said, his voice as
expressionless as the others' features. "We know that, then."

The slight discomposure apparent in the faces of his two councillors
told him that his instincts had been right; Indeharu and Vira were
disappointed. He was confirmed in his decision to take no immediate
action against Soli.

"The men are felling more trees," said Indeharu, changing the subject,
and pointing into the forest towards the area where the tree-felling was
in progress.

"They may do so," said Loa. As far back as his memory could go--Loa had
been king and god since he was a little boy younger than Lanu--Indeharu
had managed the economic details of the town's life satisfactorily. A
forest tract had to be cleared two years in advance of the time when the
plantain crop sown in the clearing began to fruit, and it was a
prodigious effort to make such plans. Loa never troubled himself with
them. Yet thinking about the plantain crop reminded him he was hungry,
and he raised his voice.

"Musini!" he called. "Bring me food."

"I hear you," replied Musini from behind the house; she had a shrill
voice with an edge to it.

"When the trees are down," went on Indeharu, "Tolo will build a house.
His father Linisinu and his father's brothers will help him."

"Where will the house be?" asked Loa, and as Indeharu began to reply
Musini came with the wooden bowl of food.

Loa looked at the contents with disappointment.

"Baked plantain!" he said, disgustedly.

"Baked plantain with oil. Precious oil," said Musini, sharply. There was
never enough oil in the town, the oil palms being too sparing of their
produce. "I have eaten no oil since the moon was full last. The oil is
all for you."

Loa put down his battle-ax and fan, took the bowl, and transferred a
handful of the plantain soaked in oil to his mouth.

"Is it not good?" demanded Musini, aggressively. "What better food can I
provide for you than baked plantain and oil? Is it the heart of an
elephant you would like? Or a savory dish of the tripe of a young goat?
When last was an elephant killed? No goat has borne a kid for two
months."

"Say no more," said Loa, irritated. He had eaten elephant only three or
four times in his twenty-five years of life; goat's tripe was perhaps
his favorite dish, and Musini touched him on the raw by mentioning
it--which was what she planned to do, being a bad-tempered shrew.

"Say no more!" she quoted at him. "Say no more! Then say no more when I
bring you rich red oil upon your baked plantains. Say no more until an
antelope is caught and we eat the roast flesh!"

"Be silent, woman!" shouted Loa, beside himself with rage. The thought
of roast antelope was almost more than he could bear. He was on his feet
now, brandishing the wooden bowl and actually dancing with passion.
Musini saw the look in his face and was frightened.

"Your servant is silent," she said hastily, and turned to go. Yet even
then before she was out of earshot she was grumbling again.

Musini was Lanu's mother, Loa's first and chief wife, and had been
associated with Loa since his childhood. She did not prostrate herself
before him except on occasions of high ceremonial, because little by
little through the years ceremony between the two of them had lapsed as
a matter of practical convenience. But her habit of scolding at Loa, of
goading him to exasperation, had another origin. She wanted to assert
herself, and she felt as if she did not want to live if she did not. She
infuriated Loa as a means of self-expression, as an artist paints or a
musician composes. Besides, she was drawn to this course of action by a
subtle lure, by the indescribable temptation of danger. She risked her
life every time she angered Loa. There was a fearful pleasure in coming
as near to destruction as possible and then withdrawing just in time.
Shuddering fear tempted her like a drug.

Loa took another mouthful of baked plantain with growing distaste, his
mind running on devious tracks. That unrest which had set him gazing
down the street, which had brought him to his feet at Musini's gibes,
was a symptom--although he did not express it so to himself--of his
hunger for meat, rich meat, full of proteins and fats and mineral salts.
The African forest was niggardly of its meat supply; of all the animals
domesticated by man the goat was the only one able to live there, and
even the goat did not thrive; a high mortality among the town's herd
made goat's flesh a rarity. The plantain was the stable food, which
ironically the forest allowed to be produced in utter abundance with
almost no effort. A space had only to be cleared in the forest, the
suckers planted, and eighteen months later there was a dense grove of
plantain trees, each bearing its huge hand of fruit. The crop was never
known to fail and there was no known limit to its production. Manioc was
almost as easily grown; the work of clearing had to be rather more
thorough, the planting was rather more arduous, but with ample virgin
soil for the growth a crop was assured in return for small labor. Manioc
and plantains; the forest gave these generously, so that there were
always bananas and tapioca, tapioca and bananas, on which a man could
live. Tapioca and bananas meant a continuous diet of starch; the oil
palm lived only scantily and precariously here on the verge of the inner
plateau of Africa, and its rich orange-colored oil, so generous of fat,
was almost as great a rarity as goat's flesh.

The forest provided almost no meat. The rare forest antelope sometimes
fell into a pitfall or succumbed to a fortunate arrow to provide an
ounce or two for each of those entitled to a share; at intervals of
years an elephant fell into a similar trap. That was an occasion always
to be remembered, when every man, woman and child in the town would have
five or ten pounds of meat apiece, to be eaten in a wild orgy that same
day before corruption could set in. Monkeys lived in the treetops two
hundred feet overhead; it was more unusual to hit a monkey with an arrow
than an antelope, and it was just as rare for an arrow to find its way
through the tangled branches and creepers to hit a parrot. The leopard
lived among the treetops and was almost as exclusively arboreal as the
monkeys which were its prey; its meat had an unpleasant taste even for a
meat-starved man, and it was so ferocious a fighter when wounded that
its skin was the one fit garment for Loa the god. Snakes could be eaten,
and frogs could sometimes be caught in the streams, but never in
sufficient quantity to be taken into consideration in the problem of
meat supply. The best meat the forest afforded walked on two legs; the
African forest was one of the few places in the world where cannibalism
was an economic necessity, where it was indulged in to appease an
irresistible, an insatiable hunger for meat.

Loa was thinking that his late father, Nasa (whose name, seeing that he
was dead, could be pronounced by Loa alone) was in need of a new
attendant. It was some considerable time since anyone had been sent to
serve Nasa, and it might be fitting that Musini the mother of Lanu
should be dispatched on that mission; certainly it would convey honor to
Nasa. Musini could be put in a wooden pen for three days; inactivity for
that length of time was desirable to make sure that the meat would be in
good condition. Then she could be sent to attend upon Nasa, either by
quiet strangulation or by a more ceremonial beheading with Loa's
battle-ax--either way would do for it was not a point of great
importance--and then there would be smoking joints to eat, meat in which
a man could set his teeth, meat to distend a belly that starved on
bananas and tapioca. And the irritation of Musini's constant scolding
would cease then, too.

Loa was not thinking about this logically for two very good reasons. He
had never been under the necessity of thinking logically, and he was
handicapped by his language, which, with its clumsy complexities of
construction and its total want of abstract terms, was not an instrument
adapted to argument or for the conveyance of more than the simplest
ideas. His mind was much more a meeting ground for converging impulses,
which were checked just then by what Indeharu had to say.

"Last night the moon was dark," said Indeharu. "The river waits for
you."

Loa stuffed the last handful of baked plantain into his mouth and
swallowed it down. He put the bowl to his lips and tilted it to allow
the last of the rich oil to trickle between them. He set down the bowl
and called to Lanu, who came running from behind the house, trailing the
leopardskin behind him.

"Will you come to the river?" asked Loa.

"The river! The river!" said Lanu, delighted.

He was ready to start at once, with all the eager impetuosity of
childhood, but first there were preparations to be made. Indeharu and
Vira turned to shout down the street, proclaiming the fact that Loa was
about to go to the river. A few people came out from the houses, women
with children dragging at them, Litti the worker in iron, an old man or
two, some marriageable girls. Indeharu counted them on his fingers.
There had to be four hands of people present for the ceremony to be
valid, and it took a few moments to complete the necessary total as some
young men came in from the outskirts of the town, while Loa coaxed Lanu
into returning the leopardskin cloak and clasped it about his neck
again. Indeharu counted up on his fingers again, and shot a significant
look at Loa.

"We go," said Loa.

Towards the river lay the abandoned clearings of the past centuries; at
the present time the manioc and banana gardens of the town lay on the
side of the town away from the river. So at first the path lay through a
thick belt of felled trees, only now beginning to crumble into their
native earth again. In the forest there was always going on a silent
life-and-death struggle for light and air, even for rain. Every plant
dependent on these three--as was every one, except the funguses--pushed
and aspired and strove to outtop its neighbors, to gain elbowroom where
it could spread out in the life-giving light and air. In the virgin
forest the victors in the struggle were the trees, the vast kings of the
vegetable kingdom, two hundred feet tall, each ruling the little area
around it so completely that nothing could grow beneath save the
funguses which flourished in the deep bed of rotting vegetable matter
out of which it rose. The kings had their hangers-on, their parasites,
the creepers and vines which the trees themselves lifted towards the
sky. These shamelessly made use of the trees in their dignity; rooted in
the earth below they swarmed up the unresisting trunks in long slender
ropes, up to the topmost branches, by which they leaped from tree to
tree, renewing with each other at this height the same struggle for
light and air; the successful ones, hundreds of yards long, intertwining
in a wild cat's-cradle of loops and festoons which bound the tallest
trees together and repressed the aspirations of the smaller trees
striving to push through.

But where there was a clearing the scene changed. If a big tree paid the
penalty for its very success by being selected to be struck by
lightning, or if it had died of old age, or if a forest fire had killed
trees over a larger area--and more especially where man had cut down
trees for his own purposes--light and air could penetrate to earth
level; and the lowly plants had their opportunity, which they grasped
with feverish abandon. The clearing became a battleground of vegetation,
a free-for-all wherein every green thing competed for the sunlight;
until in a short time, measured in days rather than in weeks, the earth
was covered shoulder-high by a tangle of vegetation through which no man
could force his way without cutting a path with ax or sword. For months,
for years, the lowly plants had their way, dominating the clearing; but
steadily the sapling trees forced their way through, to climb above and
to pre-empt for themselves the vital light. It would be a long struggle,
but as the years passed the trees would assert their mastery more and
more forcibly; the undergrowth would die away, the fallen trees would
rot to powder, and in the end the clearing would be indistinguishable
from the rest of the forest, silent and dark.

The abandoned clearings through which led the path to the river were
some years old now in their present existence, and at their densest in
consequence. The felled trees lay in a frightful tangle, and over them
and about them grew the undergrowth; in the four weeks since last that
path had been trodden the feverish growth had covered it completely, so
that Vira and the young men had to hack and slash their way through.
Sometimes the path lay along fallen tree trunks, slippery with lichens;
it wound about between jagged branches whose solidity was disguised by
greenery as a trap for an unwary person who might try to push through.
Old Indeharu toiled and stumbled along on his stiff legs behind the
advanced party, and immediately in front of Loa; his whitening head was
on a level with Loa's chin. On the dark bronze of his back the sweat ran
in great drops like a small cascade of those incredibly rare and
precious glass beads of which the town possessed a dozen or two. The
sweat-drops coursed down Indeharu's bony back until they lost themselves
in his loin girdle; the latter was of bark cloth and was as wet as if it
had been dipped in water, so that what with the sweat and Indeharu's
exertions it bade fair to disintegrate. Loa himself, half Indeharu's age
and twice his strength, felt the burden of his leopardskin cloak; in
this undergrowth, with the sun blazing down upon it, the heat and the
humidity were intensified, and the flies bit and annoyed with unusual
vigor, while bare feet, however horny and insensitive, were inevitably
scratched and cut as they were dragged through the tangled vegetation.

Loa was conscious of all these irritations--no one could not be--but he
endured them without debate, for debate was something he was unused to.
This was the world as it had always been and as it always would be. His
erring sister was wandering again, and when she wandered she had to be
recalled, just as an itch had to be scratched.

Now they were through the overgrown clearing, and into the forest, the
undisturbed forest, into the twilight and the silence. Huge tree trunks
emerged from the spongy leafmold, spaced out with almost mathematical
regularity by the relentless laws of nature. They soared upwards without
change or relief (save for the leafless stems of the vines) until two
hundred feet overhead they burst suddenly into branches and foliage
making a thick roof through which no direct light could penetrate. Up
there lived the monkeys and the birds, and the sun shone, and the rain
fell. To be down here in the darkness--for inevitably here it was too
dark for any vegetation to grow--was to be inside the crust of the
world, cut off from the exterior. Yet within the forest Loa could relax
and feel at home. The forest was his brother, just as the sun was his
brother and the moon was his sister, and Loa had a feeling that the
forest was a kindly, friendly brother. The forest suited his temperament
or his physique, and he lengthened his stride until he trod on the heels
of Indeharu hobbling along in front of him. Loa poked him in the ribs
with the end of his battle-ax as a further reminder to quicken his step.
Indeharu was very old, with stores of knowledge as a representative of
an almost obliterated generation, but he was just an old man and Loa had
no regard for his feelings.

In the forest here there was no hindrance to travel save for the
bogginess underfoot; the broad spaces between the tree trunks allowed of
easy walking in any direction. So much so that it was the easiest thing
in the world to lose oneself in the forest. Without any landmarks,
without any sight of the sun, the moment a man lost his sense of
direction in the forest he lost everything. He might wander for days,
for weeks and months, seeing nothing but tree trunks around him and the
somber green roof overhead. There were one or two people in the town who
had actually had this experience, and who had been guided home again
after a vast passage of time by blind chance and great good fortune.
There had been plenty of others who had gone forth on some trifling
expedition and who had never returned. They had been lost in the forest.
Or they had been trapped by the little men.

This route to the river was as clearly defined as anything could be in
the forest. Through the soggy leafmold there wound a faint depression,
which a keen eye could detect as a footpath, and the trees on either
side displayed frequent cuts and wounds--Loa made a few new ones himself
as he walked along, casual chops with his battle-ax that sliced into the
bark of the trees, making a mark that would endure for several months
until the insects altered its shape so that it did not reveal the human
agency that caused it, and until the moss and lichens grew over it and
concealed it again.

The disadvantage about a well-marked path was that the little men would
make use of it for their own purposes. They would place poisoned skewers
of wood under the leafmold, on which a man might tread; if he did, then
very probably he would be dead in half an hour for the little men to
feast on him. And they would dig pits and place poisoned stakes in them,
roofing the pits over with a frail covering disguised by leafmold, which
would give way under the foot of either an antelope or a man. Vira and
the young men ahead were scanning carefully every yard of the path, and
two of them had strung their bows and fitted broad-headed arrows to the
strings, ready to draw and loose at a moment's notice should a little
man or a little woman, or any other game, expose itself within range.

And now the trees suddenly began to be farther apart, the leafmold
underfoot suddenly became firmer, and the path took a sharp upward
slope. For a few moments it was a steep climb. The forest ended abruptly
here, where the soil changed to naked rock on which even in that lush
atmosphere nothing could grow. They were out of the forest and under the
sky, and a few more strides took them to the top of the rock, looking
over the vast river. Loa did not like this. He was inclined to flinch a
little as he emerged from the forest. The sky was his brother, just as
was the forest, but an unfriendly brother, a frightening brother. He did
not like great spaces; they affected him as some people are affected by
great heights. Except here on the riverbank he never looked out over
great distances. The town street was less than a hundred yards long, and
that was the next widest horizon he knew; in the forest the trees were
close on every hand, and that was where he felt at home. Here on this
pinnacle of rock the sky was enormous and incredibly distant.

And the river! A full mile it stretched from bank to bank; the pinnacle
of rock, constituting the bluff at the outside curve of a shallow beach,
commanded views of five and ten miles upstream and down--terrifying
distances. Except at this outcrop of rock, the forest came to the
water's very edge; indeed so great was the pressure for light and air
that on the riverbanks the trees grew out almost horizontally, straining
out over the water to escape from the shadow of their mightier
neighbors, leading a brief precarious life until flood and erosion cut
the soil from their roots and they fell into the water. One could never
look at the river for long without seeing some great tree come floating
down on the turbulent current, turning and rolling in torment, lifting
its arms in mute appeal to the pitiless sky as it rolled.

In the distance the river looked blue and silver, but when one looked
down into it from the bank it was muddy and brown, although the time of
the real "brown water," when the level rose a foot or two and the river
took on a more definite color, was still a month or two off. The surface
of the river was never still; a storm would work it up into great
rollers, and on a calm day like this, when at first sight the surface
seemed almost oily, closer observation would reveal great swirls and
motiveless crinklings, sinister, ugly movements as the broad water went
sliding along, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, hateful and fearsome
in its majesty. Loa watched Lanu pick up a fragment of rock and hurl it
into the river with delight in the splash and the ring. Behavior like
that made Loa a trifle uncomfortable, for it savored of
unconventionality, but it was not quite bad enough for Loa to check
Lanu--nothing ever was.

Indeharu was waiting for the ceremony to begin. Loa stood forward.

"Sister," he said, looking down the river to the distant reach whither
his erring sister had strayed. "Come back from under the water. Come
back into the sky. The--the--"

"The nights are dark," prompted Indeharu, as he always had to do.

"The nights are dark, and your sons and daughters cannot fill the sky.
Come back. Grow bigger, for the nights are very dark. Come back, my
sister."

Somewhere under the surface of the river his sister was hiding; everyone
knew of the liking she had for the big yellow river. A few people who
had been caught by darkness away from the town and who had been forced
to spend the night beside the river had told him of how she stretched
her arms out over the water and how her spirit danced on its surface.
Every month she wandered back to it and hid herself in its depths, and
had to be recalled by her brother.

A cloud of butterflies was flying along the river in a vast bank,
reaching from the surface nearly up to the level of Loa's face, more
than a hundred feet; stretching nearly half a mile across the river, and
a quarter of a mile down it. With the wind behind them they passed
rapidly downstream, a lavender-tinted cloudbank. Flaws of wind recoiling
from the bank whirled parts of it into little eddies, and the sun
shining down caught the millions of wings and was reflected back in a
constant succession of rosy highlights. Lanu clapped his hands at the
sight of them.

"What are they?" he asked, excitedly.

"They come from the sky," answered Loa, heavily.

No doubt they were beautiful, but Loa was too disturbed mentally by the
vast distances to experience more than mixed emotions regarding them.
His brother the sky was looking down at him from all directions, and he
did not like that; it was like having an enemy at his back. Across the
river the forest was dwindled to a mere strip of blue in the steamy
atmosphere. It was frightening to see the forest so insignificant, the
sky so big. It gave Loa no doubts regarding his own status as a god--the
first among equals, among sky and forest and river and sun--but it
disturbed him violently by its disruption of the usual state of affairs.
It was not respectable, it was not usual, it chafed him and irritated
him.

"Look! Look!" said Lanu, pointing.

Far up the river there was a dark speck to be seen. It moved upon the
surface, and as it moved reflected sunshine winked from it. A boat, with
the sunshine gleaming on the wet paddles. That was a phenomenon to be
regarded with a dull lack of interest. There were other men in the
world, Loa knew, besides the people of the town and the little men. Some
of them went about on the river in canoes. In the days of Nasa, Loa's
father, there had been another town near, here by the water's edge; but
Nasa and his people had fallen upon it one night and killed everybody in
it and had feasted lavishly in consequence for days afterwards. The men
of that town had used canoes, so Indeharu said. So other men existed,
and some of them used canoes on the river. And rain fell from the sky;
there was no need to think farther about either matter. The young women
and the young men were gazing up the river at the canoe, and talking
excitedly about it, their excitement mingled with some trepidation
because they knew so little about other people. But Loa knew no fear;
there was no reason why he should fear anything in the world.

"I go," he said to Indeharu, for he wanted to free himself from the
irritation of thus being exposed to the sky.

"Loa goes back!" proclaimed Indeharu.

Vira hustled the young men off along the path to make the way safe, and
Indeharu followed them. As Loa left the high point to descend again to
the forest the remainder flung themselves on their faces, their noses to
the ground, for him to walk past them, but Loa hardly spared a glance
for the row of glistening dark brown backs. He walked on along the path,
and breathed more freely and gratefully as he left the sky behind him
and entered into the steamy twilight of the forest. Before him Lanu
capered along, full of the joy of living. Lanu had devised a new way of
walking. Instead of taking strides with alternate feet he was trying to
step twice with each foot in turn. He poised on one foot and skipped,
and then poised on the other foot and skipped, his arms held high as he
balanced. So they went back into the forest, Loa swinging his battle-ax
and Lanu skipping in front of him.




CHAPTER II


Some young men of the town hunting in the forest had captured a strange
woman. They brought her back with them, and everyone assembled to look
at her and to listen to her absurd speech. Delli, her ridiculous name
was, she said--in itself that was enough to make people laugh and clap
their thighs. All her words were comical like that, with l where r
should be, and the strangest turns of speech. Everybody in the town knew
there were many ways of addressing people; one spoke differently, with
different words, if one were addressing one person, or two persons, or
many persons, or if the persons addressed were old or young, male or
female, married or single, important or unimportant. But this woman
muddled it all up, and spoke (when it was possible to disentangle her
curious pronunciation) to the crowd as if it were made up of three
little children. Everyone laughed uproariously at that.

They brought her to Loa where he sat on his tripod stool with Indeharu
and Vira standing behind him, and they swarmed close round her to hear
the quaint things she said.

"Who are you?" asked Loa.

"Delli," she said.

That ridiculous name again! Everyone laughed.

"Where do you come from?"

"I come from the town."

That was just as ridiculous as her name. _This_ was the town, and
everyone knew it. She rolled her eyes from side to side at the crowd, a
very frightened woman. She held her hand over her heart as she looked
about her, naked save for a wisp of bark cloth. She was a very puzzled
woman as well, quite unable to understand why the simple things she said
should occasion so much merriment.

"She was in the forest eating amoma fruits," interposed Ura, one of the
young men, explaining with the proper gestures how they came to catch
her. "She did not hear us. Maketu went over that way. Huva went over
there. We went silently forward through the trees. Then she saw Maketu
and ran. Then she saw Huva and ran the other way, towards me. I was
behind a tree, and I sprang out and I caught her. She hit me, here, on
my shoulder, and she scratched with her nails. But still I held her. She
could not escape from Ura."

"She was eating amoma fruits?" asked Loa.

"Yes."

Amoma fruits were not good eating; their watery acid pulp could not
deceive a healthy stomach for a moment. Children ate them during their
games, but no sensible person ever did. Loa stared harder at the strange
woman. The scar-tattooing on her cheeks and upper lip was of an odd
pattern. She was terribly thin, like a skeleton, her bones standing out
through her skin, and her breasts fallen away to empty bags although she
was a young woman, not yet the mother of more than two children or so.
And her body and legs and arms were covered with scratches, some of them
several days old, some of them fresh, but altogether making a complete
network over her. She was calmer now, but Loa's next question threw her
into a worse panic than ever.

"Why were you in the forest?" asked Loa.

Her face distorted itself with fear.

"Bang bang," she said, and repeated herself. "Bang bang."

That was almost too funny to bear, to see this amusing woman shaking
with fright and to hear her say "bang bang!" She goggled round at the
laughing throng and took a grip of herself. When she spoke again the
intensity of her emotion made her voice a hoarse whisper, but silence
fell on the crowd and every word could be heard.

"Men came," she said. "Many men, at night. We were all asleep. Bang
bang. Bang bang. Men were killed, women were killed. My man was sleeping
beside me, and he woke up and took his spear. Everyone was shouting.
Other men of the town came running into the house. Some were wounded. We
stood by the door with spears and we would not come out although they
shouted to us to come out. Houses were burning so that we could see out.
Bang bang. Bang bang. Fire in the night, like red lightning. My man fell
down and he was dead. Still we would not come out. Then our house
burned. They were waiting for us outside the door so I would not go out
when the men did. I jumped up and caught the roof beams of the house.
Not all the thatch was burning so I pulled the thatch aside and climbed
through the roof. I stood there and all the town was burning. Bang bang.
Bang Bang. The thatch was burning beside me and so I jumped. I jumped
far, very far. The old clearing was beside our house and I jumped into
it, right into the bushes. I tried to run through the bushes, but I
could not go far, not in the dark. I lay there and saw the flames and
heard them shouting. My baby--I think I heard her cry too."

Delli stopped speaking, her hand to her heart again. A babble of talk
rose from the crowd the moment it ceased to be repressed by the dramatic
nature of Delli's utterance. The fantastic tale must be discussed. Loa
waved his arm for silence.

"What did you do?" he asked.

"I lay there," said Delli, "and daylight came while the flames were
still burning. I climbed an old tree trunk and looked into the town. The
people were gathered at one end, with the strange men round them. Some
of them were pale men."

"Pale men?" demanded Loa.

"They had not faces like ours," said Delli, struggling wildly to explain
something beyond all experience.

Her hands went up to her own face in feverish gestures trying to convey
an impression of features quite different from the broad nostrils and
heavy jaws which characterized the only human faces she knew.

"They wore clothes--so."

Delli flung one arm across her breast and her hands fluttered as she
tried to give a mental picture of an ample cloak.

"And they were pale men?" asked Loa. Clothes were something he knew
something about, for he wore a leopardskin himself and women often wore
bark-cloth gowns, but pale faces were something else. "Were they like
the little men?"

"No! Oh no!" said Delli.

The forest pygmies were often of a far lighter shade than the
village-dwelling natives, inclining to pale bronze, but they had the
same kind of features as the rest of Delli's world and Loa's world.

"They were big men. Tall men," said Delli, "with thin noses; and their
faces were--gray."

Loa shook his head in admission that this was more than he could
understand.

"What did these men do?" he asked.

"They tied the people together. With poles. They tied one end of a pole
to someone's neck, and the other end of the pole to someone else's
neck."

Loa had never heard of such a thing being done. The whole story was of
something beyond his experience, beyond his scanty traditions.

"What did they do next?" he asked.

"They came to the banana groves to cut fruit. And in the old clearings
there were many people hidden besides me, people who had run into the
clearings when the town burned. They saw us, and they came after us.
They had axes and swords, and I think they caught all the other people."

That was quite probable; a man with a sword to cut a path for himself
would easily overtake an unarmed fugitive trying to make his way through
the tangled undergrowth of an overgrown clearing.

"And you?"

"I went right through the clearing. A man was chasing me but he did not
catch me. I came into the forest and I ran from him and then he did not
chase me any more. But still I ran, and when I stopped I did not know
where I was."

This was something everyone could understand; there was a murmur of
agreement in the listening throng. To lose one's way in the forest was
very easy indeed; to be fifty yards from the nearest known landmark was
the same as being fifty miles from it if once the sense of direction was
lost. Loa knew now the explanation of Delli's network of old scars.
Plunging through an abandoned clearing to escape pursuit would tear her
skin to ribbons. She must have been streaming with blood by the time she
reached the forest. The newer scratches must have been acquired in the
ordinary course of life in the forest, searching for food.

"Where was your town?" he asked.

Bewilderment showed itself in Delli's face again.

"Many days. Many days away. I do not know. I looked for it."

There was a puzzled murmur from the crowd. It was hard enough for anyone
there to realize even that other towns existed. But everyone in the
crowd knew his town so intimately and well. Despite their knowledge of
the ease with which one could lose oneself in the forest, it was
impossible for them to sympathize with someone who simply could not say
where her town was. They could not put themselves in her mental
situation; a woman might as well say she did not know where her own body
was. Delli's face did not lose its look of bewilderment; her expression
was fixed and she was staring at something far away.

"I cannot stand," she said faintly, and with that she abruptly sat down.

Still bewildered in appearance, puzzled by the strange new feelings
within her, she swayed for a moment, and then her head came forward to
her knees, and next she toppled over on one side and lay limp and
unconscious. Musini came forward and knelt over her, and prodded the
bony back and the skinny loins. She raised one of the skeleton arms and
shook her head over it with distaste.

"Nothing there now," she said, letting the limp arm drop to the ground.
"She has long been hungry."

"In a pen she will grow fat," said Loa, looking round at Vira, who
nodded. It was Vira who attended to the temporal business of Loa's rule,
as Indeharu attended to the spiritual. Loa had to say nothing more about
the pen; Vira would attend to that. Loa looked down at the skinny limbs;
plenty of food, and some days of idleness in a pen, would fill them out
again. Even a healthy well fed human was all the better for three or
four days in a pen; idleness improved the quality of the meat. Moreover
this stranger with the queer speech and the odd experiences might be a
more welcome visitor to his father Nasa than some ordinary man or woman
of the town--Musini for instance--as she would bring with her an element
of novelty. She might amuse Nasa while she served him.

"See that she has food, plenty of food," said Loa to Musini.

It was hot here in the sun, and Loa had been attending to business for
more than an hour, quite long enough for him to feel restless and in
need of a change of occupation. He rose to his feet, and the assembled
crowd instantly fell forward on their faces; they had been close-packed
standing up, and now they carpeted the ground two or more deep. He
turned and walked back to the narrow strip of shade cast by the eaves of
his house. There he would doze for a while; as the village became aware
that he had retired they began to withdraw, in proper humility. Silent
at first, and moving with constraint, they soon began to elbow each
other and to chatter as they streamed off down the street.

A few idlers dallied to watch Musini and a subordinate wife revive Delli
with food and drink, but Vira interrupted that pastime by setting them
to work on constructing a pen; cutting stakes, pointing them, and
driving them deep into the earth with heavy mauls, and connecting them
together with many strands of creeper. Everyone else was all agog with
the fantastic story Delli had told; they were busy discussing the gray
men who wore clothes and had faces different from ordinary people, who
killed people with a noise and a flash, and who tied their captives
together with poles. Loa's lethargic brain was idly turning over the
same matters as he lay in the shade--later Indeharu and Vira would tell
him what they thought about it all. And even perhaps at some time he
would hear about it from Musini or other women.

****

For the stagnation of a thousand years--of two thousand years, of three
thousand years--was coming to an end. Invaders were entering into
Central Africa, the first since Loa's forebears had infiltrated into the
forest among their pygmy predecessors, all those many centuries ago.
Strangely enough, it was not the European, restless and enterprising
though he might be, who was penetrating into these forest fastnesses.
The European was still confined to the coastal strip, although European
culture and influence was slowly percolating inland. It was an Asiatic
culture which was at last reaching out to Central Africa, all the way
across the huge continent from the east. Mohammedanism had taken no more
than a hundred years after Mohammed's death to flood along the
Mediterranean coast of North Africa, to engulf Spain, and even to cross
the Pyrenees; but it took twelve hundred years of slow advance for it to
creep up the Nile valley, to circle around the Sahara Desert, and now to
penetrate into the equatorial forest.

In twelve hundred years the original Arab stock had become vastly
attenuated; the invaders were often hardly lighter in color, thanks to
continual miscegenation, than the black peoples they conquered. But most
of them still showed the aquiline profile that distinguished them from
the pure Negro, and many of them bore proof of their Arab blood in their
swarthy complexions--the "gray" color that Delli had noticed. Yet they
were marked out far more plainly in other ways from the people they were
attacking. Besides their guns, and their clothes, and their material
possessions, they had a religion that demanded converts, a social
organization that made movement possible, and a tradition of activity
more important than all.

More than one culture contributed to that tradition. In the Eastern
Mediterranean, Greek civilization had profoundly influenced Arab
thought. The tiny arable plains of Greece and the Greek islands were no
more conducive to stagnation than the deserts of Arabia. It was a world
where men went--were driven--from one place to another, where it was of
the first necessity to inquire, to seek out, to make contact with other
peoples who might supply some of life's necessities. The skeptical, the
inquiring turn of mind was the natural one, and the geniuses who arose
through the centuries found themselves in a civilization ripe for them;
they had available to them languages admirably suitable for argument and
discussion, and the invention of writing which would perpetuate their
thoughts and enable them to influence the thinking of future
generations. It may be strange, but it is true that Plato and Aristotle
as well as Mohammed had something to do with the raiding of Delli's
village by swarthy halfcastes bent merely on acquiring slaves and ivory.

Loa and his people were the product of an entirely different set of
circumstances. They never knew what famine was, for the plantain and the
manioc provided an unfailing source of food in return for very little
effort. Sleeping sickness and malaria and cannibalism combined to keep
the population small. The forest made migration--even minor
movements--almost impossible, restricting the spread of ideas and the
diffusion of inventions. The absence of writing made progress difficult,
for each generation was dependent on the scanty information conveyed by
word of mouth, and even if the forest people had learned to write, their
language--the clumsy, complicated, unimproved language of the
barbarian--was enough to hamper thought and impede its diffusion.
Thought is based on words, and Loa's words were few and simple yet
linked together--tangled together would be a better term--by a grammar
of unbelievable clumsiness. And Loa lived in a climate where there were
no seasons, where the nights were hardly less warm than the days, where
it was easy to do nothing--as Loa was doing now; where there was no need
to take thought for the morrow--and Loa was taking none.




CHAPTER III


Delli lived in her little pen a full week. She was not actively unhappy
in it, not even actively uncomfortable, for they made it six feet long
and three feet wide, so that she could lie at full length, and three
feet high so that she could sit up in it. They thatched it roughly with
big leaves so that the rain hardly came through at all, and Musini
herself gave her another couple of armfuls of leaves on which to lie,
which was a sensible precaution, as someone as thin as Delli was at the
start, and as scratched, might have broken out into sores had she been
compelled to lie on the undisguised earth. They interwove the palisades,
and the beams of the roof, with tough creeper stems, so that there was
hardly a place wide enough to pass through the bowls of food which
Musini saw to it were continually being provided for her.

So for some days Delli was content to lie in her pen recovering from the
hardships of her wanderings in the forest. To lie still, to sleep, to
fill her belly all through the day with good food; that was all Delli
wanted at first, and a few days of it made a great difference to her
condition. The bones of her skinny limbs were soon less apparent; her
ribs disappeared under a layer of fat, and her previously
lifeless-looking skin took on a healthy gloss. It was gratifying to Loa,
when he walked past her pen, to see how she was responding to treatment.
It boded well for the future; his meat hunger was a perfect obsession
now, and all his dreams were positive torment, full of tantalizing
visions of meat. In his dreams he could even smell the delicious stuff,
and he would wake up with the saliva running from his mouth.

It was only natural, then, that he should be moved to wild rage when
Vira pointed out to him one morning that Delli had been trying to
escape. She had gnawed through a full dozen of the tough dried vines,
and in a purposeful manner, too.

"See," said Vira. "These she has bitten through."

He pointed to the chewed ends, all between one pair of palisades. Then
he went on:

"Soon she would chew these, where the wall meets the roof. She would
bite through this knot, and this one. And then..."

Vira made a gesture to show how, then, Delli would have been able to
force the two palisades apart a little way, just wide enough,
presumably, for her to slip through. And then in the darkness she would
make her way out of the village into the forest, where she would be as
inaccessible as if she were already serving Nasa. Anger at the thought
of losing her made Loa quite frantic.

"She is a wicked woman," raved Loa. "She is a thief, an adultress."

Loa's language contained some twenty synonyms for "adultress," each
expressing a different aspect from which the act was regarded; each word
was liable to be used as a term of opprobrium, and Loa used them all.
His heavy features were drawn together in a scowl of rage.

"She is a devil, an ape," said Loa.

Delli was looking up at him as she crouched in her pen; her eyes were
unwinking and her face expressionless.

"Bring me that stick!" roared Loa, and someone ran and obsequiously
fetched it.

Loa snatched it from him and rushed at the pen. He could not beat her or
strike her with any advantage, thanks to the stout palisades which
surrounded her. He could only prod her with the stick, but his prods
were dangerous and painful, delivered as they were with his full
strength. Delli screamed and rolled over, trying to protect her more
vulnerable parts; Loa might have killed her then and there had his rage
lasted longer. But sanity came back to him, and he let the stick fall,
and wiped the sweat from his face with his hands.

"Bring more vines!" he ordered. "Tough ones. Hard ones. Stringy ones.
Mend that hole! Put more vines all round the pen and over the roof, and
see that the knots are tight."

A fresh idea struck him, a really important one.

"What old women are there?" he asked. "Ah! There is Nari. Come here,
Nari. Vira, tie her legs with vines. Tether her to the pen. Nari, you
will watch over Delli. You cannot go away. You will stay here all
through the day and the night. If ever Delli tries to bite through the
vines you will cry out. Loudly. Have you heard me?"

The old woman stood on her feeble legs with the sun in her eyes.
Oppressed at the same time by the majesty of Loa and by the sunlight she
blinked and squirmed.

"Have you heard me?" shouted Loa.

"I have heard you," she piped at last.

"See that it is done," said Loa to Vira. "Musini, see that Nari is fed
as well."

He glowered round at them all; he was still too moved and excited at the
moment to consider relapsing again into torpor, and he strode off
aimlessly at first. It was only when he was on the way down the street
that he remembered a reason for going this way. From the farthest end of
the street came the regular tapping of a drum; Tali, one of the sons of
Litti, the worker in iron, was beating out a new rhythm. He was always
experimenting with such things, perhaps to the detriment of his real
work. But a good drummer made an important contribution to the life of
the town, and if his father would buy him a wife or two whether Tali
worked in iron or not that was all to the good.

This end of the street was not nearly as quiet or as clean as the other
end where Loa's house stood. Here ran the little swampy stream,
tributary to the great river two miles away, which supplied the town's
drinking water and carried away its trash. The stink of the rotting
piles of refuse was perceptible to Loa's nose where he stood, but refuse
piles always stank. Where the forest came right to the edge of the town
stood Litti's ironworks, in the shade of a group of large trees. On the
flat tops of two rocks glowed charcoal fires, blown to a fierce heat by
bellows worked by small children. Litti was squatting beside them with
his eldest son; a short distance away Tali was tapping on his drum while
round him a little group of idlers made tentative attempts to adapt a
dance step to the rhythm. Litti and his family did not prostrate
themselves before Loa; when they were actually engaged in the working of
iron there was no need.

"What of my son's ax?" asked Loa.

"It will be made," said Litti tranquilly.

He raised his white head to see where the sun stood.

"Now?" asked his son.

"No, not now," answered Litti.

Loa squatted down on his heels to wait; there was a deep fascination
about watching the waves of heat play over the surface of the glowing
charcoal as the bellows worked. Charcoal burned without a flame; Litti
had the secret of preparing it. He would go into the forest and cut a
great heap of wood, set fire to it, and bank earth upon it. After a time
the wood would lose its fiery spirit, and change itself into a
coal-black reproduction of itself, which, when ignited, needed the
spirit of the air blown into it by bellows to make it burn well.

Those rhythms Tali was tapping out were quite captivating; time passed
unnoticed.

"Now," said Litti at length.

"Hey!" called Litti's eldest son, rising to his feet, and one of his
brothers detached himself from the group of dancers and came to help.
With a pair of tongs they opened the larger of the fires, revealing in
its heart a glowing lump of material, so hot that it was white and
brilliant. They swept the little fire from the other rock (it was only
there to make that rock hot) and, seizing the glowing lump in the tongs,
transferred it to the hot surface. Then they took heavy iron hammers
that stood near by, and began to pound it. At every blow a fountain of
sparks shot from the incandescent lump, clearly visible in the deep
shade. They struck and they struck, turning the lump with the tongs,
until its white heat died away and it glowed only sullenly red and it
ceased to give off sparks under the blows. Litti got stiffly to his feet
and peered down at the red mass.

"It is iron," he decided. "Soon we will make the ax."

His sons lifted the lump back into the fire, piled more charcoal upon
it, and the waiting child set to work again with the bellows. The young
men's brown skins glistened with sweat.

"It takes many days for an ax to be made," grumbled Loa. "And after that
I shall need a collar and bracelets for my son like these."

He fingered his own ornaments, spirals of wrought iron round his neck
and arms.

"That will take longer yet," said Litti. "For that I shall need a wife
for my son Tali."

"Let him tell me which girl it is he wants," said Loa, "and I will see."

His bare toes were playing gratefully in the thick bed of dead sparks
which covered the soil for yards round, the accumulation of a thousand
years, of the labor of fifty generations of Litti's predecessors. Out in
the forest, beyond the swampy stream, was an outcrop of reddish rock--it
had once been an outcrop, but now it was a basin, for so much of it had
been dug away. Within this rock lay the spirit of the iron. When a lump
of it was heated to a white glow and then pounded with hammers, the
devils that enchained the iron flew off as sparks. Three or four such
poundings freed the iron completely, so that it lay in a dark hard lump.
Under the influence of fire it softened, and with hammers it could be
beaten into any shape desired, and given an edge which would cut wood.
But with fire and water the iron could be made better yet. It was a
tricky thing to do--even old Litti often made mistakes. But an axhead,
or a billhook, or a sword, heated in the glowing charcoal and then
cooled in water, grew hard and glittering; and, when ground upon a
smooth rock, became so sharp that even the hardest woods to be found in
the forest could be cut by it.

The economy of the town was built up round the iron axheads made by
Litti and his predecessors. They had enabled the forest to be cleared
and crops of manioc and banana to be grown, thereby distinguishing Loa's
people from the little men and women who wandered in the forest living
on what they could catch, and on what they could steal from the
cultivated plots. Probably in the first place the town had come to be
situated where it was because of its proximity to the outcrop of iron
ore. Yet iron was still a valuable and scarce commodity; an axhead
represented several weeks of labor on the part of several men, so that
the small axhead Loa was having made for Lanu was an extravagant gift;
while the set of ornaments for which Loa was now negotiating was worth a
wife--was worth a pension for life, in other words. Litti's iron tools
represented a prodigious capital investment. The few iron cooking pots
in the town were precious heirlooms, and no one ever dreamed of using
iron in arrowheads; sharpened points of hard wood were always used for
those. In fact these dwellers among the trees naturally made use of wood
for as many purposes as possible, and iron was mostly used for the
cutting of wood.

Tali had now perfected the rhythm he had been striving for. There was a
neat series of beats, and then a hesitation, like a man stumbling, a
recovery, and then another stumble. A man could hardly keep from
laughing when he heard that rhythm. It was a good joke, something really
funny, catching and captivating. The dancers were grinning with pleasure
and excitement. They had formed round Tali in a semicircle, and the
dance to suit that rhythm rapidly evolved itself. They closed slowly in
on him with mock tenseness and dignity. Then a sudden sideways shuffle,
half in one direction and half in the other. A quick interchange of
places, a backward swirl, and they were ready in the nick of time to
begin the cycle again. It was an exciting and stimulating dance, amusing
and yet at the same time intensely gratifying artistically. People came
swarming from all points to join in, and the semicircle grew wider and
wider. Soli, mother's brother's son of the dying Uledi, leaped into the
center.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Hey hey hey!"

He was up on his toes, posturing picturesquely. He reeled to one side,
he reeled to the other side, while behind him the crowd neatly shifted
in time with him, interchanging in a geometrical pattern vastly
gratifying. Tali thumped and thundered on his drum. His eyes were
staring into vacancy over the heads of the dancers. He touched the side
of the drum with his elbow to mute it, and its tone changed from loud
mirth to subtle mockery.

"Hey!" shouted the crowd.

Tali introduced a new inflection into the rhythm. He made no break in
it; perhaps not even a metronome could have measured the subtle
variation of time. But now the drumbeat told of high tragedy, of vivid
drama. Soli in the center caught the change of mood, and found words for
it.

"The tall tree totters!" he intoned. "Run, men, run!"

The drum thundered, the dancers interchanged.

"Run, men, run!" roared the crowd, catching the final beats.

"It hangs upon the creepers," sang Soli in his nasal monotone. "Down it
falls!"

Beat--beat--shuffle--shuffle.

"Down it falls!" roared the crowd.

Tali remembered the shrieking monkey which a few months back had been
brought down entangled in the vines when a tree had been felled. He
muted the drum again, and Soli followed his line of thought.

"Silly little monkey!" wailed Soli. "How he cries!"

The drum fell almost silent, so that the united tread of bare feet could
be plainly heard in the dust.

"How he cries!" mocked the crowd.

Now the drum changed to a savage mood.

"Watch him as he struggles!" sang Soli.

He allowed a whole cycle of the rhythm to go by to allow the tension to
build up. The drum roared savagely.

"Watch him as he struggles," sang Soli. "Cut his throat!"

Beat--beat--shuffle--shuffle.

"Cut his throat!" shrieked the crowd.

Practically everybody in the town had come to join in the dancing now.
On one wing Indeharu's gray head was conspicuous, bobbing about as he
capered on his skinny legs amid a group of excited girls. Loa stood
alone behind Tali; he might perhaps have capered with the crowd, for his
divinity was such that he need never fear for his dignity, but the
habits of a lifetime kept him by himself. Alone behind Tali he leaped
and bounded to the intoxicating rhythm. Strange feelings were stirred up
within him by it. Inwardly he was seething; he was bursting with
inexpressible emotions. He sprang into the air and shook his battle-ax
at the sky above the forest, the distant, unfriendly sky, usually so
contemptuous. He felt no awe for the sky now. He waved his battle-ax and
by his actions he challenged the sky to come down and fight it out with
him, and he exulted when the sky shrank away from him in fear.

Still the drum beat on with its maddening rhythm. Soli or some other had
introduced a variation into the dancing; after the crossing over step
everybody whirled twice round now in wild abandon. The pace had
increased slightly, too; the mocking beat of the drum had perceptibly
accelerated. Tali was working on his drum as though possessed of a
devil, and the people were leaping and whirling and shouting in time to
it. Carried away by the wave of excitement Loa came bounding into the
semicircle. Every leap took him a yard into the air; he swung the heavy
battle-ax round his head in a wide circle. Soli met him in front of the
crowd, and pranced to join him. The ax came whistling through the air,
and Soli saw it just in time. If he had not, he would have gone to serve
Loa's ancestors at that very moment. But Soli had the quickness of
thought that made him such a good extempore singer, and the deftness of
balance that made him a good dancer. He ducked under the sweep of the
glittering edge. The unexpended force of the blow carried Loa right
round, and Soli took advantage of that to bolt into the crowd and make
himself inconspicuous there.

Loa made no attempt to pursue him; indeed, he was hardly conscious that
he had struck at anyone and he could not have named the man who had had
such a narrow escape. The blow was the merest gesture. There would have
been gratification in the feeling of the ax cleaving flesh and bone, but
there was no sense of disappointment in its absence. Loa forgot the
incident immediately. He swung his ax, rejoicing in the whistle it made
as it parted the air. He whirled faster and faster, carried round by the
weight of the blade. Tali at the drum worked up to a climax, writhing in
ecstasy as he pounded out the accelerating rhythm. Faster and faster; no
living creature could stand that pace for long. Indeharu over at one
side fell almost fainting to the ground, and the girls among whom he was
dancing stopped, gasping. As one tree brings down another, or as fire
spreads from trunk to trunk, so the halt spread through the crowd. Men
and women fell, sobbing for breath, and yet laughing with pleasure. Tali
gave a final thump to his drum and allowed himself to fall limp on top
of it, as exhausted as the others. The cessation of the music found Loa
alone on his feet; the sudden ending of it all struck him rigid, so that
for a moment he stood like an ebony statue, the ax held above his head.
Then his knees sagged and he sank to the ground as well.

It had been a good dance, deriving additional zest from the fact that it
had been entirely spontaneous, without any planning at all. Whatever
might be Tali's failings as a worker in iron, he certainly made up for
them by his merits as a drummer. He deserved a wife, even though that
meant withdrawing the labors of a young woman from the communal
activities of the town for Tali's personal benefit. Loa felt full of
gratitude towards Tali. He might even in a prodigal gesture have given
him a wife for nothing, but he remembered how much he wanted those iron
ornaments for Lanu. Tali would have to wait until Lanu's little ax was
finished and the iron ornaments well on the way towards completion. It
was highly convenient that Litti was willing to put in so much labor to
buy a wife for his son.

Over at the place where iron was made, the charcoal fires had burned
down to a mere heap of white ashes. Lying within the heap presumably was
the lump of iron that Litti would fashion into an axhead for Lanu. The
dance had delayed its completion--even old Litti and the children at the
bellows must have been drawn into the dance--but that was the way things
happened. When Loa walked back to his house he saw Delli lying in her
pen, deep in conversation with Nari, the old woman who had been left to
guard her. They were the only human beings left at this end of the town
when the dance had been in progress. They had fallen into talk, the way
women will, despite the difficulties of the strange jargon Delli spoke;
despite the fact that Delli had not long to live.




CHAPTER IV


Loa squatted in his house close to the open door. It was a dark night,
and the darkness inside the house was hardly relieved at all by the glow
of the fire which his women had, at his command, lighted outside the
door. Uledi was dead of the sleeping sickness, and Loa had to determine
who it was had ended her life. For this purpose darkness was necessary,
darkness and flickering firelight. Loa had taken the bones--the
half-dozen slender ribs--from their usual resting place at the base of
the grotesquely carved wooden figure that stood against the far wall. He
had set a rough hewn table, of dark wood and with short legs, in front
of him so that the firelight flickered over it, and he had laid the
bones upon it. All round him there was a hushed silence, for the women
knew what he was doing. They were frightened as well as awed. In one of
the huts close by, a child began to cry in the night, but the wailing
was instantly stilled as the child's mother caught her infant to her
breast.

Loa looked up at the dark sky, and at the same time laid the bones in a
bundle across his palm. Without looking down, he put the ends of the
bones on the table and withdrew his hand so that they fell with a
clatter on the wood--some woman within earshot, crouching in her house,
heard that clatter and moaned softly with fear and apprehension. Still
without looking down Loa put his forefinger among the bones and stirred
them gently, just a little. Then at last he looked down at the pattern
the bones had made. In the flickering firelight the bones were faintly
visible against the dark wood. The pattern told him nothing at first,
not even when he rested his forearms on his knees and his brow on his
hands and peered down at them for a long time. Loa remembered Vira's
hint that Soli was Uledi's mother's brother's son. Uledi had owned a
knob of pure iron which hung on a string round her neck. She was the
principal shareholder in an iron cooking pot with tripod legs--a miracle
of workmanship and convenience. Such things might well tempt her
principal heir, and yet there was no hint of Soli's features in the
pattern the bones had assumed. It reminded him more of the gable end of
Huva's house, and yet there was no conviction about the likeness. He
pressed his brow against his hands unavailingly; the bones lay
uncommunicative, nor could he feel any stirrings of his spirit.

Having sat for so long he raised his eyes again to the dark sky, as
black as the black treetops that ringed the town so closely. He gathered
the bones up into his hand again, laid them on the table with his palm
flat upon them, and then spread them by a twist of his hand. He stirred
them again with his finger and then slowly transferred his gaze to them.
The fire was glowing red, and the white bones reflected the color. Then
one of the logs in the fire fell down, and a little flame sprang up,
dancing among the embers. Now the bones began to move, shifting on the
table, and Loa felt his knowledge and his power surging up within him.
That was a serpent undulating in the shadow, a little venomous snake
with red eyes. And these were the rocks at the river's edge, and there
was the broad river. The lowering sun was reflected in red from its
whole surface. There! Someone had thrown an immense stone into the
river, breaking the reflection into a thousand concentric rings. First
they spread, and then they contracted and were swallowed up in a dark
spot in the middle. The dark spot opened. Was that a flower expanding in
the center of it? A flower? A flower, perhaps, but that was Uledi
herself within the opening petals--Uledi in her convulsions with the
foam on her lips. She turned over on her side and reached out
frantically to the full extent of her right arm. She was reaching
for--what was that? What was that which evaded her grasp? Something
which scuttled for concealment among the shadows over there. Was it
Soli, running as he had run for the protection of the crowd before Loa's
ax? Loa groaned with the anguished effort of trying to see. Somebody
looked back at him over his shoulder for a moment from the shadows;
white teeth and white eyeballs. That flashing grin was like Lanu's. It
could not be Lanu, not his little son. No, it was a devil's face, now
that it showed more clearly, a devil's face, frantic with malignant
rage. The most frightful passions played over it, the way waves of
combustion played over the glowing charcoal of Litti's furnace fire. The
bared teeth champed, the eyeballs filled with blood. It was utterly
terrifying. Loa swayed as he squatted. The flame died abruptly in the
fire, and as darkness leaped at him he was momentarily conscious of the
cold chill of the sweat in which he was bathed. Then his head sank onto
the table.

It was several minutes before he roused himself, cramped and almost
shivering. There was a foul taste in his mouth, and his legs were weak
as he stood up. The bones, when he gathered them together, were cold and
lifeless to his touch. And yet he had only to close his eyes to see
again that frightful face. Somebody inhuman, of supreme malignancy, had
poisoned Uledi. Loa's simple theology recognized the possibility of the
existence of devils, but there was no profound lore about them. The
major catastrophes of nature passed his world by; his people never knew
famine, or droughts, or frost, or earthquake. There was no need in
consequence to postulate the existence of evil forces in the world,
working against the happiness of mankind. The little people in the
forest, with their poisoned arrows and their pitfalls, were human
enough; no man could attribute supernatural qualities to men and women
whom he not infrequently killed and ate. And disease--sleeping sickness,
malaria, typhoid, smallpox and all the other plagues that kept the
population constant and stagnant--was simply not recognized as such. Loa
knew of no dread Four Horsemen, and his complex language with its
limited vocabulary effectively restrained him from ever venturing into
theological speculations. Besides, he knew himself to be god; it was not
a question of belief or conviction, but one of simple knowledge. He
called his wayward sister the moon out of the river every month, and she
came. The sky and the forest and the river were his brothers. Nasa his
father had been a god before him, and still was a god, leading somewhere
else the same life he had led here, attended by his wives, regulating
when necessary the simple affairs of his people, and possibly--no one
could be quite sure--eating meat rather more often than he had down
here.

But there were devils in the world, as Loa vaguely knew. He had heard a
story of some, a family of three devils, like men but covered with hair
like monkeys, who had once come to the town, before even the time of his
father Nasa, and who had torn men and women into fragments before
succumbing to the rain of poisoned arrows directed at them. It was a
devil something like this, judging by what he had seen among the bones,
who had been responsible for the poisoning of Uledi. The little that Loa
knew about devils chiefly concerned their aimless ferocity, so there was
nothing surprising in the fact that one of them should have poisoned
Uledi, who had never done him any harm or even set eyes on him as far as
Loa knew. The matter was satisfactorily settled, then, and Loa could
announce on the morrow how Uledi had come to die. If he had seen
anything else among the bones--if the gable end of Huva's house had
stood out more clearly and for a longer time, if he had seen Soli's
face, or if the bones had arranged themselves in the pattern of
somebody's scar-tattooing, it would have been different. There would
have been a human miscreant to denounce. The circumstances of the moment
would dictate the procedure to follow after that; if the accused were
not well liked, or if his (or her) motive were at all obvious, he would
be instantly speared or strangled or clubbed or beheaded, but if he
protested with sufficient vehemence or eloquence he might be given a
further chance. There were beans that grew in the forest; Indeharu knew
about them. They would be steeped in water, and the accused would have
to drink the water. Usually he suffered pains and sickness, and
frequently he died. If he lived, it was a proof that he had not really
intended to kill his victim, but on the contrary had done it by accident
or without the intention of actually causing death. The ordeal would be
considered a sufficient lesson to him and the case could be dismissed
with a caution.

Loa's strength was coming back to him. His legs could carry him easily
now. He walked into the darkness of his house, finding his way with the
ease of a lifetime's experience, and set the bones back in their proper
place beside the wooden figure which symbolized something a little vague
in Loa's existence. The half-dozen skulls nailed to the wall--relics of
bygone days and of distinguished individuals--showed up faintly white,
just sufficiently to permit him to see where he stood. The elephants'
tusks, treasured mementoes of the few occasions when elephants had
fallen into the town's pitfalls, stood in the farther corner, beyond the
bed. A whole precious leopardskin had been consumed to provide the
leather strips that crisscrossed the bed's framework, and another skin
lay on it. No other bed like it existed in the town; it raised the
occupant above the earth and the myriad insect plagues to be found
there, it was cool and springy and comfortable. That was the whole
furniture of the house except for the few other symbols that hung on the
walls--even Loa was not quite sure what most of them implied. The dried
snakeskins, the bunch of feathers, had something to do with his royal
divinity. Because of that, he thought little about them, although they
struck terror into mere humans.

Loa came back to the doorway of his house.

"Musini!" he called. "Bring the girl to me."

He had a new wife whom he had only acquired that day: Pinga, daughter of
Gumi. Loa heard a low wail of terror, cut short by Musini's urgent
whispering. Musini as an old woman of twenty-five had small patience for
the whims of a girl of fourteen.

"I bring her, Loa," said Musini, loudly.

Two dark figures appeared in the faint glow of the dying fire; Loa could
just distinguish the girl's slight form as Musini pushed her forward
with her hand on her shoulder. The girl hung back and wailed again.

"Go on, you little fool," said Musini brusquely, giving her a final
shove.

Pinga's timid steps brought her within Loa's reach as he stood in the
shadow of the doorway. He reached out and took her wrist, but at his
touch she cried out and tried to pull away from him.

"Idiot!" said Musini's disgusted voice from outside by the fire, but
after her first startled movement Pinga stood still except for the
tremblings that shook her. Loa, his hand still grasping her wrist, could
feel her quivering. He displayed remarkable patience.

"Why not come to me?" he asked.

"I am frightened."

"You are frightened of me?"

"Of you, Lord, of course. But it is not that. I am frightened of this
house--of this house."

The terrors of the god's house presented themselves to her more
violently as she thought of them, and she began to drag back from his
grasp again.

"Do not be frightened," said Loa. "There is nothing here to hurt you."

"And it is what you have been doing, Lord. What you have been doing this
short time past."

Loa was at a loss for a moment. It was very hard for him to realize the
effect of the abject terror which lay over the town when it was known
that he was at work identifying a criminal; it was something he was
aware of theoretically, but he had never known terror himself and was no
judge in consequence of what it did to other people. And his house, the
house with the skulls, and snakeskins, and the bunch of feathers, and
the carved idol, was his home as he had always known it. He could have
small sympathy for those of his people who would, literally, rather die
than cross its awful threshold.

"That should not frighten you," he said.

"But it does, Lord. My belly tells me I am afraid. You have been here
with the dead. You have been finding out about things, and--and--I do
not want to go in there."

That thoroughly nettled Loa.

"You are a little fool, as Musini said," he declared, testily.

It irritated him that someone should display such marked antipathy
because he had been divining--divination was one of his natural
functions. The girl might as well be frightened because he breathed, or
because he had two eyes. It made a personal matter of it, and changed
his lack of sympathy to more active annoyance; the girl sensed all this,
and her teeth chattered with fear. Paralyzed, she ceased to pull away
from him, and stood unresisting.

"Enough has been said," said Loa, with decision.

He dragged her roughly over the threshold, into the greater darkness
within. Her active terror renewed itself there, as she thought of the
idol and the bunch of feathers close beside her, and she screamed. Loa
had his hands upon her now, and the touch of her flesh was rousing in
him instincts which overmastered any remaining reasonableness surviving
his previous irritation.

****

Musini wished to extinguish the fire. It had not rained all day, and in
that wooden village there was danger in leaving a fire unattended during
the night. She had assembled some of the other women, and they had
filled wooden pitchers with water and brought them to the fire. Pitcher
after pitcher was emptied upon the embers, at first with sharp hissing
and sputtering, and in the darkness the heavy steam which arose brought
its wet smell to their nostrils. By the time Musini's turn came and she
emptied her pitcher the embers were sufficiently quenched for there to
be almost no reaction, and there was hardly a sound save the splash of
the water on the dead fire. And inside the house the screams had ceased.

Musini looked at the dark mass of the house, almost invisible visible
own house. It was not the first time by any means, and by no means would
it be the last, that she had brought a young new wife over to Loa's
house, most of them trembling and frightened. It was beyond her capacity
to wish that she did not have to do this; the conception of human love
was something she knew almost nothing about, and the idea of a personal
love for Loa the god never occurred to her. She may have noticed that
these events upset her and disturbed her, made her sharp-tongued and
self-assertive, but even if she did she did not make all the possible
deductions from the fact. It was so long since she had become the mother
of Lanu her son; men had many wives when they could afford to buy them,
and Loa of right had all he desired. She did not know that she wished he
did not desire them.




CHAPTER V


Delli's fantastic story of the strange people with magic weapons and
unnecessary clothing, who had raided her town and carried off the
inhabitants, was on its way to being forgotten, like Delli. Had the life
of the town proceeded undisturbed for another thousand years, as it had
done for the last thousand years, some small fragments of the tale might
have survived, imbedded in the lore of the town like fossils in a
sedimentary stratum, in the same way as there lingered the memory of the
family of gorillas which had wandered into the town thirty years back
and which had been slain after a bloody battle. There were still
occasional allusions to Delli's story in the gossip of the town; it was
still a comparatively fresh joke to shout out "Bang bang!" in imitation
of her. But nobody thought of making any deductions from her story;
still less did it rouse any feeling of apprehension. The only raiders
the town knew about from its own experience, the only enemies that
existed, were the little people of the forest. They were a pestilential
nuisance in the persistence with which they stole plantains and manioc,
and the poisoned skewers and pitfalls with which they beset the forest
paths made excursions into the forest dangerous, but all that was part
of experience and tradition. Nobody else had ever raided the town, and
nobody ever would. Such a thing might well happen to outlandish people
with outlandish speech like Delli's, but it could not happen to the
town, which was really the world--anything outside it was unreal and of
quite doubtful existence.

So that at nights the town lay quiet and unapprehensive. No one dreamed
of setting a guard; no one ever lay down to sleep with any doubts as to
the morrow. Certainly Loa did not. He was secure not merely in the
unchanging present, but also in his knowledge of his own divinity. His
lack of imagination about guns and slave raiders might well be excused.
He did not know--he could not know--of their existence. He was even
unaware that there were parts of the world where the trees did not grow
so densely as to cut off the light from the surface of the earth. Two
warnings like Delli's, the arrival of another refugee, and he might have
come to believe in the necessity for taking precautions, even at the
vast sacrifice of some of his belief in his divine nature. But a single,
isolated instance was not, and could not be, enough to make him realize
the danger approaching the town--all this aside from the fact that he
and his inexperienced people could probably never have displayed enough
imagination to devise efficient military precautions.

In the Central African forest there often comes a chilly hour before
dawn, when the temperature drops to that of a hot summer's day in
England. The insect pests grow somnolent, evaporation is easier, and a
man who has lain naked through the night, and who has spent almost all
his life in an atmosphere like that of a Turkish bath, may reach
gratefully for a cover and pull it over him, only half awake, and then
fall into an hour of the most restful sleep granted him. Loa had done
exactly that, and he was more deeply asleep than he had been during the
whole night, when the slave raiders launched their attack. They came
from the far end of the town, across the marshy stream beside Litti's
ironworks, where there were no overgrown clearings to impede their
advance, and they were halfway up the street before the alarm was given.

Loa heard the first screams and cries in his sleep, and muttered a
protest against them, turning over angrily, but the musket shots woke
him fully. He sat up on his bed listening to the turmoil down the
street. Another musket shot echoed in the darkness, and there was no
mistaking it. Loa remembered Delli's "bang bang," and a torrent of
recollections poured into his brain. The gray-faced men with clothes on,
the killings and the fighting... His ceremonial battle-ax lay as
always beside the bed, and he seized it and sprang to his feet; the girl
who had shared his bed was whimpering with fear in the darkness. He paid
her no attention, but rushed madly out of the house and down the street.

Even outside it was still dark. Loa saw an orange spurt of flame and
heard the report of a musket halfway down the street whence the screams
were coming. He had no fear, not even of the guns; his rage at this
intrusion carried him in furious haste down the street. Women and
children were running past him in the opposite direction, most of them
screaming; one of them cannoned into his legs and almost brought him
down, but he managed to keep his feet and hurried on. The last house in
the street was on fire, and by the light thrown by the flames he could
see a group of men gathered round the doorway of another house. People
were running out of the door, and as they emerged they were struck down.
Loa came yelling up to the group before they were aware of their danger.
He swung his ax with all the strength of both arms; the edge of the
blade came down on a man's shoulder and clove deep into his body,
smashing him to the ground. With another yell Loa whirled the ax again.
Someone raised his arm in a futile attempt to guard himself; the ax cut
through the forearm as though it had not been there and then shattered
the skull. But even while he was dealing the blow someone hit him with a
club. It was like an explosion inside his head. He staggered, stupefied
but not quite unconscious. Before him there was a white-clothed figure
at which he struck, but the man guarded himself with his gun barrel and
the ax blade glanced off. Somebody struck him a frightful blow with a
club on his left side; the breath came out of his body in a groan, and
the pain was atrocious. He reeled, and his arms had no strength to raise
his ax again. There was another blow on his head. Orange flames and
white clothing wheeled in circles round him and his knees could not
sustain him. He fell on all fours and yet still strove to rise, but he
could not. Strive as he would, he could not even stay on hands and
knees, but collapsed limply face downward, with only a trace of
consciousness left him. There was stamping and screaming all round him,
as he vaguely knew, but the dreadful pain he was suffering occupied most
of his attention, while before his closed eyes circled tangled shapes
and colors which effectually prevented him from thinking.

Loa was a brave man, though his courage was indistinguishable from
stupidity. As soon as he could he roused himself from his lassitude. His
head reeled as he sat up, and the pain in it made him sick--pain was
something he hardly knew, and this great pain was a total novelty to
him, but yet he strove to ignore it, for he had to go on fighting for
his people. The fighting round him had ceased, and the noise of the
struggle now centered higher up the street towards his own house. There
was a gray faint light of dawn now, by which he could see the two dead
bodies that lay beside him. The upturned face of one of them--the man he
had almost cloven in half when he struck him on the shoulder--was far
blacker than Loa's own chocolate complexion, and the tattooing on cheeks
and forehead unlike anything Loa had ever seen before. The gaping mouth
seemed to grin, and already there were flies gathering round it. All
this Loa seemed to see without seeing. What he took note of was his ax
lying there; he had to feel towards it before he could grasp it, for it
was hard to focus his eyes. There was a knob-headed club, too, and for
some reason he took that in his other hand. He got unsteadily on his
legs, stepping clumsily over the other dead man, and went staggering up
the street to do further battle for his people, ax in one hand, club in
the other.

The raid had already achieved its main objectives. The men who had shown
fight had been killed. A good many women and children, and a few men,
had been secured as prisoners already, and were being driven in groups
down to the far end of the street where they could be conveniently
herded together. There were men and women and children hiding in the
overgrown clearings round the town, and they could be dealt with next,
those of them who could easily be caught.

Here came Pinga and half a dozen half-grown children, driven along by a
couple of the black men, whose spears bore long broad heads of iron, and
who carried in their left hands oval shields of hide. The guards raised
a shout when they saw Loa reeling towards them, coated with blood and
dust, and they came to meet him, while Pinga and the children fell into
a wailing helpless group. Loa plunged forward on uncertain legs, but his
enemies noted his massive frame and the bloody ax in his hand and came
cautiously to the encounter, separating so as to attack him front and
rear, and holding their shields before them, their spears poised either
to thrust or to throw. For some seconds they circled. Loa sprang forward
and struck, but the man he struck at evaded his blow, and Loa only just
wheeled round in time, swinging his ax, to ward off the attack of the
other. It could not have lasted much longer; a few more seconds and one
or other of those spears would have been through him.

But down the street came a white-clothed leader, one of the "gray-faced"
Arab halfcastes, with at his heels a dozen Negro fighting men. The Arab
took in the situation at a glance. He took note of Loa's sturdy bulk,
and shouted to the spearmen not to kill him, while a sharp order to his
own escort sent them to take him alive. Loa was ringed now by enemies,
and he stood there, desperate, but with no thought of yielding entering
his mind. The Arab saw his ferocious determination, the scowling brow,
the lips crinkling back in a snarl to show the white teeth, and he put
his hand to the pistol in his sash. But a noose of rope, dexterously
thrown from behind, dropped over Loa's head and pinioned his arms. His
frantic strength tore the rope from his captor's hands, but before he
could free himself it had been seized again by others. They swung him
round; he dropped ax and club, and someone reaching out caught him by
the foot and brought him down with a crash. They threw themselves upon
him, and they were experienced in securing refractory prisoners. Someone
roped one of his wrists. He actually got to his feet, heaving off the
half-dozen men who clung to him, but they brought him down again, flung
their weight upon him, secured his other wrist, and bound the two
together behind his back. Then they got to their feet, and looked down
at him still lying in the dust, his wrists tied behind his back and the
first rope with which he had been noosed still coiled round him. Loa
glared up at them from where he lay. He saw the Arab looking down at
him, the white clothes and the gay sash, the lean dark face with the
coarse cruel lips--a face unlike any he had ever seen before.

"Get up," said the Arab.

Despite his queer accent the words were intelligible to Loa, but nobody
had ever given Loa orders in his life, and he still had no intention of
yielding.

"Get up," said the Arab again.

Loa may have been too dazed, both by the turn of events and by his
recent struggles, to obey or to reply. Yet even if he had not been he
probably would have acted in the same way, with a stubborn obstinacy.

The Arab took from his sash a small whip. It was made from a single
strip of hippopotamus hide, tapering from a convenient thickness for the
hand at one end to the fineness of a knitting needle at the other.
Flexible, hard, and imperishable, it was ideal for its purpose; a
perfect example of mankind's ingenious inhumanity, in that so
comparatively rare a material as hippopotamus hide should have been
found by experiment to make the best whip for the whipping of men, and
women. It was the dreaded kurbash; wherever the Arab culture penetrated
in Africa it carried the kurbash with it--fire and sword and the kurbash
enforced Arab dominance over the more primitive races.

The Arab swung the kurbash slowly in his hand.

"Get up," he said for the third time, and still Loa disobeyed.

The Arab struck suddenly and sharply, and Loa started with the pain. It
was like sudden fire in his shoulder--an instant acute agony and a
lingering intense smarting.

"Get up," said the Arab; now he made the thong of the kurbash whistle
menacingly in the air.

He knew how to handle these dull-witted pagans who were even ignorant of
the virtues of the hippopotamus hide until they were demonstrated. Now
he struck again three times; it was like being touched three times with
a hot iron, and Loa, in his sitting position with his hands bound behind
him, fell over on his side as he started at the pain of it.

"Get up," said the Arab, with another swinging cut delivered with the
full force of his arm, and Loa, without knowing what he was doing,
scrambled to his feet; the Arab slashed him again so that the startling
pain made Loa leap clear off the ground.

"Next time do as I say," said the Arab.

Bewildered, Loa tried to run, but one of the black spearmen caught the
trailing rope that encircled his chest and arms and halted him, and the
Arab, following him with three quick steps, struck him again and again,
each time the pain being so unexpectedly great that Loa jumped into the
air.

"Now go along," said the Arab.

Loa stared about him with frantic disbelief. Pinga and the children were
huddled together in a terrified group, terrified not merely at what was
happening to them but even more at the sight of Loa treated in this way;
that was the clearest proof of the end of their world. The faces of the
black spearmen wore expressions of dull disinterest; they had so often
seen unruly captives reduced to obedience with the kurbash; those who
had caught his rope had done so as indifferently as if Loa had been a
refractory billy goat. There was no aid in all the world, in all the
world which an hour ago had been indisputably his own, in its entirety,
where every object, living and dead, had been dedicated to his service.
Now he was utterly alone in it, brought down from superhuman to subhuman
in a moment of time. There was agony of mind and spirit in the
realization, as far as realization went in that unhappy hour.

The spearmen were herding Pinga and the children down the street.

"Go along," said the man who held Loa's rope, and when Loa did not start
immediately he reached forward with his spear to prick him with the
point.

The gesture sufficed; Loa had learned the lesson of pain, and he started
to walk before his captor down the street. At the far end everyone who
had been caught was herded together, many men and very many women and
children, naked black spearmen standing guard over them under the orders
of a few white-clothed Arabs. At the sight of Loa there arose a thin
wailing from the crowd, to see their god and king driven along at the
end of a rope. Some of the people even fell down, instinctively, in the
attitude of prostration as he approached. The Arab guards laughed at the
spectacle, and one of them idly swung his whip with a crack upon the
salient curves of a prostrate fat old woman so that she sprang up again
with a startled cry, fingering herself in bewilderment. Loa looked round
at the misery about him, and sorrow overcame him. Sorrow not merely at
his own plight, at his own frightful deposition from divinity, but
sorrow too at the plight of his people. Tears ran down his cheeks, and
he stood there sobbing, his hands bound behind him so that he could not
cover his face.

Many of the raiders were at work beating the overgrown clearings for
fugitives; once or twice the loud bang of a musket shot could be heard,
as the pursuers brought down a group of pursued for a warning to the
rest to stop. Every now and then small groups of captives were brought
in and added to the herd.

On the edge of the herd was one of the little people of the forest, with
a rope round him, the end of it held by a spearman. It must have been he
who had guided the raiders, for the wandering forest pygmies knew the
paths and derived much of their food from the plantations of the
townspeople. He was a bright-eyed little manikin, naked like all his
people, watching with rapt curiosity the destruction of the vast town
and the gathering together of this enormous mass of people. Seven
hundred people, men, women, and children, had lived in Loa's town. A
hundred had been killed, three hundred captured. Of those three hundred
perhaps thirty would eventually survive the march across Africa for sale
in the slave markets of the Nile valley, of Abyssinia, and of Arabia
across the Red Sea.

Two Arabs came along herding a dozen young men of the town, who were
bearing on their shoulders the ivory tusks that had been stored in Loa's
house. They were a prized collection, of no intrinsic value at all--no
one in the town had ever thought of carving ivory--but beyond price for
sentimental reasons. Every pair was a memento of a notable occasion when
an elephant had been taken in a pitfall, when the whole town had gone on
a twenty-four hour orgy of meat eating, whose memory, and that of the
feeling of triumph, gave pleasure for years afterwards. Every forest
village--although Loa did not know it--had similar accumulations of
ivory going back for centuries, and it was the existence of these
hoards, as much as the chance of capturing slaves, which had lured the
Arabs across Africa from Zanzibar and the Nile. But the sight of his
lost collection moved Loa almost as much as the plight of his people;
the tears ran down his cheeks and dropped upon his dusty chest.

Here came a spearman, limping awkwardly. A barbed arrow was stuck in the
calf of his leg, and he was holding the end of it in his hand so that it
would not trip him as he walked. He lay stoically still while one of the
Arabs freed the barbs from the flesh with a knife and then cut deeply
all round the small wound so that the blood ran in streams--these
raiders had had long acquaintance with the forest arrows. Loa looked
down at the arrow as it lay on the ground. It was one of Soli's, he
could see. So Soli had been alive and free at least until lately, and
had taken some sort of revenge upon the raiders. The last batch of arrow
poison had been of good strength, and probably had not yet grown too
old. Definitely not; the wounded man as he sat there was looking round
him in a bewildered fashion. He was babbling foolishly, pointing at
nothing. Now his eyelids were drooping, and now he was laying himself
down to sleep. Loa watched his death with savage enjoyment.

The nearest house suddenly caught fire and was rapidly consumed by the
flames that ran up the dry wood; presumably some ember had been
smoldering beside it for some time--two other houses had burned earlier
in the day, scattering burning brands. The fire spread to the next
house, Huva's; the flames roared in the thatch of dry leaves, and the
heat was noticeable even where they were.

Now there was a bustle and a stir among the raiders. Another party was
arriving. First came a white-robed Arab with a dozen spearmen. And then
emerged the head of a short column, and at the sight of the first people
in it Loa caught his breath with horror. They were naked men, men like
his own people, and they were linked together in pairs by long sticks
whose forked ends were clasped about their necks. Loa remembered what
Delli had said about those forked sticks. Each man bore a burden upon
his head, and at a command from an Arab they all halted and dropped
their bundles on the ground. Two of the bundles jangled loudly as they
fell, and when they were opened they contained short lengths of iron
chain; the first chains that Loa had ever seen, and he could not imagine
their purpose. He learned immediately.

Others of the slaves carried between them bundles of forked sticks
similar to those about their own necks. A man of authority among the
spearmen--he wore a bristling headdress and his face and body were
scarred with fantastic tattooing--picked up one of the sticks. They were
five feet long and forked at both ends. He pointed to the two nearest
young women.

"Come here," he said.

He put a fork on the shoulders of one of them, and another man took a
hammer and staples and one of the lengths of chain, and stapled the
latter to the forked ends about the girl's neck, tightly so that she
could just breathe with comfort. He clapped the other fork on the other
girl's shoulders and stapled a chain to that, too. So the two girls were
fastened to each other rigidly five feet apart, unable to touch each
other, and yet free to move as long as they moved in unison. They could
never run away through the forest bound together like that, and yet each
was perfectly free to carry a bundle on her head, and any unwieldy
package could be slung from the stick between them. Then he tore off the
bark-cloth kilts from the girls so that they were naked, and then he
turned to another pair.

"Come here," he said.

He worked with the rapidity of long practice, fastening the captives in
pairs, indifferent to their sexes, and stripping them all naked. He came
to Indeharu, took one glance at his white hair, and rejected him, making
him stand aside, to be joined by other old men and women in a separate
group. Loa, when his turn came, found himself bound to Nessi, Ura's
wife. Nessi was weeping bitterly, hugging her baby to her breast; they
struck her to make her raise her head. When they had chained Loa into
the fork they freed him from the ropes which bound him; he was helpless
now to make any move without dragging Nessi with him, and the chain was
close about his throat, threatening to strangle him if he made any move
uncoordinated with hers.

The young children able to walk with their mothers they left free, and
many of the women, like Nessi, had infants in their arms; Loa, slowly
emerging from his stupefaction, had a momentary gleam of pleasure at the
realization that neither Musini nor Lanu were among the prisoners. They
might still be free--unless they had been killed. Soon all the prisoners
were fastened, save for the children and the group of older people.

"Kill those," said the headman with a wave of his arm towards the older
people, and the spearmen closed in on the group.

They beat in their skulls with their knobbed clubs, and thrust their
spears through them. The old people died amid a diminishing chorus of
screams. Indeharu broke away and tried to run on his old legs, but a
flung spear stuck in his thigh, and a black demon, leaping after him,
shattered his skull with a single blow that made a horrible sound of
breaking bones. Indeharu was the last to die; the others had already
fallen in a tangled heap, although in the heap an arm or a leg still
moved feebly. The headman snatched the child from Nessi's arms and flung
it to the ground, and someone else thrust a spear into it. Nessi
screamed and plunged forward, cutting the scream short as the chain
tightened about her throat, for Loa naturally did not plunge with her.
Fallen to her knees, Nessi tried to crawl to where her dead child lay
just out of reach, but Loa stood rooted to the earth, and Nessi could
not reach it. The chain dragged against Loa's neck.

All the little children, the babies in arms and those who could only
just walk, were killed, so that their mothers would be freed of the
burden of carrying and attending them. The children who could run beside
their mothers were spared; those among the boys who should survive both
the long march across Africa, and the crude surgery to which they would
then be submitted, would fetch high prices in the slave markets of
Mecca, higher even than the girl children of undoubted virginity. But
the little babies were a liability and in no way an asset; long
experience had taught the raiders that to allow a woman to keep her baby
was almost certainly to lose them both, and that meant the loss of a
carrier.

The slaughter was soon over, and the raiders began apportioning loads
among their slaves. The biggest tusk in the town's collection was
allotted to Loa and Nessi. It was not one of a pair; maybe the other one
had not developed in the elephant's jaw, or anyway its fate had long
been forgotten. This one was dark brown with age--an Arab scraped the
tip of it with his knife and showed his teeth with pleasure at sight of
the pleasant fresh material within. The tusk was five feet long, and of
such a weight that a man had to put forth his strength to lift it. They
slung it on the stick that connected Nessi with Loa, thereby
illustrating a further advantage about this method of securing captives;
the stick was of great use for supporting loads of a shape or weight
unsuitable for carrying on the top of the head.

Now that everything was ready a party of spearmen started ahead down the
path across the marshy stream. Behind them, in single file, two by two,
the raiders set the slaves on the march. It soon became the turn of
Nessi and Loa. As was only natural, the act of moving from the spot
unbalanced Nessi again. She uttered a wail, reaching out for her dead
baby, tearing at her cheeks with her finger nails. But a slashing cut
from the kurbash brought her promptly out of her hysteria, and her
wailing terminated abruptly in a startled cry of pain; she began to
stumble after the others, with Loa walking behind her. While Nessi had
wept Loa had looked back at the town; at the flaming houses, at the
piled corpses. It was not the same town to him, not the same world. One
world had come to an end for him, and he was in another, new and raw and
unspeakably harsh. He might still be Loa the god and king, but he was a
king without a kingdom, a god without worshipers, and he had met a power
stronger than his own--the whip. He had learned the lesson of the whip
even in this short time, even in his dazed and stupid condition.

Nessi stumbled ahead of him down the path. When she checked at an
obstruction, Loa caught his throat against the fork; when she took a
longer step, the chain jerked against the back of his neck. The tusk in
its slings of vine swung between them to their motion. Sometimes the
butt end hit him in the stomach, just below his ribs, and sometimes the
point prodded Nessi in the small of the back. The weight of it dragged
the fork down against Loa's shoulders and the chain against his neck,
and the friction resulting from his motion made the rough wood chafe his
shoulders. Loa soon found himself hunching forward, and then leaning to
one side, to relieve the chafed places. In the neighborhood of the
stream the soil was even marshier than usual in the forest, and at each
step Loa sank to his ankles, so that the labor of plodding along with
his burden was severe. In the stifling atmosphere of the forest the
sweat ran down him in streams, and soon his breath was coming jerkily,
and his throat was parched.

The bogginess of the soil gave way to actual surface water, a sluggish
little rivulet creeping among the trees. Loa stooped with his burden to
scoop himself a handful of water to drink, but Nessi ahead of him was
staggering along blindly and unthinkingly. The tug of the chain at his
neck overbalanced him, and he fell, bringing Nessi down with him,
wallowing in the mud below the few inches of water. They scrambled to
their feet; the ivory tusk had slipped in its slings and was hanging
precariously. Loa grabbed for it, still not allowing for the rigidity of
the pole between him and Nessi. He choked himself against the fork,
threw Nessi forward off her balance again, and then he saw, as they
floundered, the tusk slip from its slings and fall with a splash into
the water.

Sudden agony in his shoulder; an Arab had come up to the ford and was
slashing with his whip. Nessi screamed, roused from her brutish misery,
as the kurbash bit into her.

"Pick up the tusk and bring it here," snarled the Arab. His
pronunciation and use of words were as strange as Delli's had been, but
they could understand him.

Loa groveled down into the thick brown water, found the tusk, and with
an effort heaved it up in his arms.

"Here!" said the Arab.

The rest of the column was halted behind them, and long experience with
many columns had taught this Arab the necessity of keeping them well
closed up and on the move. As Nessi and Loa came to the place indicated
beside the stream he impatiently motioned the waiting column to go on,
and they splashed down across the ford, two by two, naked and sweating
and burdened, their eyes cast down, all of them gasping with the heat
and the effort.

"Hang up the tusk again," said the Arab.

Loa struggled with the huge mud-daubed thing clasped in his arms.

"Help me, Nessi," he said. "Turn round."

"Hurry yourselves," snapped the Arab.

Within the triangle of fork and chain Nessi's neck was free to revolve,
and she turned herself cautiously, so as to face Loa. Between them they
were able with difficulty to replace the tusk in its slings of vine, and
Nessi turned herself about again. The column had all gone by; two
spearmen from the rear guard were waiting, at the Arab's orders, to herd
them forward in the track of the column.

"Hurry! Hurry!" said the Arab.

The whip bit like fire in their flanks as they started forward again and
re-entered the ford; at the first sign of their pace slackening the whip
hissed in the air.

They plunged on blindly through the sultry twilight of the forest. Soon
they had proof enough that they were following the path of the column. A
corpse sprawled beside the path, the head five feet away from the neck:
a middle-aged woman's corpse, the breasts flaccid and empty. The
tattooing on it was not that of anyone in Loa's town; one foot was bent
strangely outwards and supplied the explanation of why the corpse lay
there. When that ankle was broken there was no chance of keeping the
woman on the march, and the quickest way of getting her out of the fork
was to take off her head. The body already swarmed with ants. One of the
spearmen walking behind them laughed and made some unintelligible
remark, which probably did not refer to the dead woman. Loa knew already
that dead bodies were far too common to excite a jest.

And then, farther along the path, Loa caught sight of something else. So
blurred was his vision with sweat and exhaustion that at first he did
not believe that what he saw had a concrete existence. It might have
been something real but with no place in this world, like what he used
to see among the bones in that other life. A tree had fallen near the
path, bringing down with it a tangle of vines, amid which glowed gaudy
flowers, and at this point a shaft of sunshine reached down from the
outer sky nearly to ground level. There was light and shadow and a
screen of greenery. And from the edge of the screen a face looked
momentarily out at Loa. It was Lanu, little Lanu, son of Loa and
grandson of Nasa, once a god and a god to be. It was impossible that
Lanu should be out here in the forest. Of course; now the face was gone.
Loa had not really seen it. And then it came again, among the light and
shade, indisputably Lanu, indisputably. The face split into a grin, with
a flash of white teeth, and then it disappeared again. It was Lanu
looking out at him from the cover of the vines. Loa was too miserable
and too weary to think of all that implied. He had seen Lanu, and he was
faintly cheered, but he had to go on plodding through the forest under
the burden of the fork.




CHAPTER VI


Before sunset they emerged from the forest onto the bank of the big
river. The light was still glaringly bright even though the sun was
dipping towards the treetops on the other bank, and Loa, utterly worn
out though he was, felt the old sensation of shrinking a little in the
presence of the sky, the usual slight vertigo on looking out on those
immense distances. The sky was his enemy as well as his brother, and he
had always known it. It must be the sky that had dealt him this fatal
blow, through the agency of the raiders. Here was the proof of it, this
vast encampment surrounded by terrifying distances.

They had reached the temporary base of the slave raiders, a central
point where they had established themselves so as to be able to strike
out in all directions and sweep up every community within thirty or
forty miles. Here a long wide rocky beach ran down to the water's edge
covered with only sparse vegetation. A town of many houses stood above
it; the townspeople were now either slaves or dead and the raiders lived
in their houses. On the rocky beach was gathered all the accumulated
plunder--the captives and the ivory. More than a thousand human beings
were there, moving about with a certain amount of freedom; what freedom
there was, when they were chained two by two, neck and neck, in the
forked sticks. Loa looked with dull amazement at this immense number of
people; drawn up on the beach was a row of canoes, vast things, and he
stared with fearful interest at yet another just coming in to the
landing place propelled by a dozen glittering paddles.

"This way," said the Arab.

This was the central dump of the ivory captures. More than a hundred
tusks lay together on the ground here, unguarded, for in Central Africa
ivory had no more than a sentimental value--that mass represented a
fortune only when borne on men's shoulders a thousand miles to Zanzibar
or twice that distance to Cairo.

"Put it down here," said the Arab.

Loa allowed the tusk to slide out of the slings to the ground. The
relief of being free of the weight of it was unbelievable.

"Go over there and get your food."

The Arab turned away without evincing any more interest in them. His
final gesture had indicated a thicker nucleus in the mass of people on
the beach.

"Let us go there," said Loa to Nessi.

The grammatical construction he used was unusual to him; self-analysis
of course was something quite foreign to him and he took no note of what
he was saying. He spoke as one equal to another, not with the complex
construction of a superior to an inferior. The physical fact of being
chained to one end of a pole while Nessi was chained to the other seemed
to make this method of speech inevitable. Nessi began to pick her way
towards the little crowd, Loa plunging along after her. Because of the
rocky irregularities of the beach they jarred each other's necks as they
went along; they passed many other people, all similarly confined in
forked poles, all of them as naked as Loa and Nessi. Some were wandering
aimlessly, some were squatting or lying on the ground, the individuals
in each pair rigidly five feet apart from each other. Among the crowd
the situation was more complicated, for the people and their poles were
liable to entangle themselves by aimless movements. The focus of the
crowd was a wooden trough, beside which stood a couple of white-clothed
Arabs and two spearmen. Most of the people were standing dumbly eyeing
the trough, not speaking, merely looking. Nessi wound her way through
the crowd; the pole behind her bumped against people as she did so; Loa
was too weary and numb to make more than a slight attempt to keep it
clear. Arriving at the edge of the cleared space round the trough Nessi
hesitated, but one of the Arabs singled her out immediately as one who
had not already had her ration and beckoned her forward. She approached
the trough with Loa behind her.

"Fill your hands," said the Arab, making the gesture of getting a double
handful.

At the bottom of the trough there was a thin layer of cooked tapioca,
and Nessi filled her hands with it. As she did so she realized that she
was hungry, and she bent her head to eat, while Loa behind her fumed
with sudden hunger--it was twenty-four hours since he had last eaten,
and he had fought a battle and made a long march during that time. His
restless movements reminded Nessi of his existence at the other end of
the pole, and she wheeled aside to allow him to come up to the trough.
He scraped himself a double handful of the glutinous starch. The second
Arab standing by, a man of more aquiline features, noticed his iron
collar and bracelets.

"Here," he called to Loa, beckoning with a gesture of authority.

Loa stared at him stupidly, but the Arab was not a man to tolerate a
moment's hesitation in obedience to an order. With a malignant snarl on
his face he repeated words and gesture, and Loa went up to him, dragging
Nessi behind him. The Arab reached out and struck him on the mouth with
his fist; Loa staggered, dropping most of his tapioca. He winced as the
Arab reached out his hand again, but this time all that happened was
that his head was roughly jerked back so that his collar could be
examined. A mere glance was sufficient to reveal it as base metal, and
half a glance sufficed for the bracelets. The Arab turned his back and
gave Loa no more notice, and almost instinctively Loa turned to refill
his hands at the trough. There were some other late-comers already being
fed there, and a warning cry from the guardian of the trough checked Loa
in his stride. That Arab had a whip in his hand, and Loa knew whips. But
he was hungry. There was a little tapioca still in his hands and he
licked at it; two swallows and it was gone. He edged forward again, but
the whip whistled in the air and he drew back. Another late arrival was
scraping up the very last of the tapioca from the trough. Then the Arab
guard swung his whip again in a wide gesture, driving the lingering
couples away; before his whip they withdrew reluctantly, bumping each
other with their poles.

Here came a whole group of the Arab raiders, white-clothed, muskets in
their hands, striding down towards the river. They took their places at
the water's edge, and spread mats before themselves. They made strange
sounds, and strange gestures, dipping their hands in the running water,
prostrating themselves with their backs turned to the hidden sun now far
behind the trees across the river. Night was beginning to fall; the
eastern sky towards which the Arabs were kneeling was already dark.

"I am weary," said Nessi, sitting down; she had had experience enough
now with pole and chain to do so cautiously, and with due regard to
Loa--a tug at his throat meant a tug at her own.

"I too," said Loa, squatting down as well.

Five feet apart they sat in the gathering darkness. And then Nessi began
to weep. She wept out of weariness, she wept for her dead child, for her
lost liberty, out of terror for the future and regret for the past. Her
wailing rose thin on the heavy evening air, and her example was
infectious. Another woman near began to wail, and then another and
another so that the sound spread down the riverbank. Some man shouted
his sorrows in a raucous dialect, the hard, clipped words punctuating
the wailing. Another man echoed the cry in a cruder rhythm. Now the
whole encampment throbbed with the misery of Africa. Loa could tell, by
the dragging of the pole in the darkness, that Nessi as she sat was
swaying her body backwards and forwards in time with her weeping; she
was dissolving in an ecstasy of unhappiness, and so were the others, and
their misery was dissipating itself in hysteria.

Loa might have been carried away in the flood; he might have joined the
shouting wailing chorus, to sob until he fell asleep like a drunken man,
had not his own unhappiness been beyond hysteria. But he had lost more
than anyone else there, unless, as was possible, some other local god
had also been enslaved. In the darkness Loa's face bore an expression of
puzzled thought. So hard was he trying to think that he remained
uninfected by the rhythm around him. For until today Loa had been a god
ever since he could remember. When he was seven years old--eighteen
years ago--a strange sickness, a mysterious magic, had descended upon
the town. Almost everyone had suffered from it, and nearly everyone who
suffered from it had died. Nasa, Loa's father, had died. Pustules had
formed to cover his body, and he had shouted words that had no meaning,
and then he had died, quickly. His brothers had died, his wives and his
children had died. In every house more people had died than lived, and
in some houses everyone died. Loa himself had sickened; he bore on his
forehead and on other parts of his body the hollow marks, grayish in the
chocolate-brown skin, of the pustules which had formed there. But Loa
had lived through it, lived to find himself the sole survivor of the
house of Nasa, a god unquestioned. Upon him had devolved the duty of
seeing that Nasa and Nasa's fathers before him were supplied with
attendants consonant with their dignity. It was he who had to recall the
errant moon from the arms of the river, it was he who had to ascertain,
by virtue of his divine powers, who were the miscreants of the town, and
it was he who, by his mere existence, had to ensure the prosperity and
happiness of his people. The few surviving old people--Indeharu, whose
skull had been beaten in that morning by a knobbed club, was the last of
them--had been able to tell Loa about all this when he was a child. And
the younger women had borne children, and the immature had reached
maturity and become fathers and mothers. The young men who had taken
wives lately had been born after the sickness, and their wives long
after, and they had never known any other god than Loa; they knew of the
dread majesty of Nasa, whose name none but Loa might pronounce, and they
saw people sent to serve him and his majestic predecessors, and the
knowledge increased their awe. They knew that Loa was brother to the sky
and the forest, that the moon was his sister and the sun his brother.

Loa had never had reason to doubt any of this himself. What he wanted
was his; he owned the whole world, which meant his town. The forest
round it, with its little people and its vague hints of other peoples,
was merely a setting for the town, a chaos in which his world hung
suspended, and a chaos, moreover, which was his own brother. He knew of
the effectiveness of his powers of divination as positively as he knew
that hair grew on the top of his head. There had never been in his mind
the least doubt about his divinity, and of course there had never been
the least threat to it. He had never been aware of any limitations
encompassing himself because he had never sought any. A world of a
continuous sufficiency of food, of an almost complete absence of danger,
a world of no ambitions and no disappointments, was not a world
favorable to metaphysical speculation. A red ant could bite him,
although he was a god; this was a world in which red ants could bite
gods, and it was not a world in which one inquired into the relative
natures of red ants and gods.

This was true only up to this morning, and now everything was different.
Loa sat with his fellow captives wailing round him, trying to fit his
new self into this new world, while his mind, utterly unused to logic,
was weighted down in addition by the grave handicap of a clumsy
language. His clubbings of the morning had kept him somewhat dazed until
now, but their effect was wearing off at the same time as hunger was
stimulating his thoughts. Although he did not join in the rhythmic
wailings about him, he yet heard them, and they worked upon him.

His genuine sorrow at the destruction of the town moved him
inexpressibly, and he knew now that hunger could gnaw at his divinity,
and that knobkerries could smite it and hippopotamus-hide whips could
cut into it. Yet it was not easy for the habits of thought of a lifetime
to be discarded. Having almost come to grips with reality Loa turned a
little lightheaded, thanks largely to hunger and the beat of the
rhythmic wailing on his brain. It was his brother the sky who had
betrayed him; he had always distrusted the sky, and now his distrust was
justified and his perspicacity demonstrated. The sky had extended help
to his enemies; it was by the aid of the sky, encamped as they were
under its protection, that they had been able to enslave him. A little
deliriously Loa vowed vengeance on his treacherous brother. He would
degrade the sky, he would kill the sky, he would pay back these
sufferings of his tenfold. In the midst of these wild thoughts came the
memory of his glimpse of Lanu in the forest. Lanu would avenge him if he
did not avenge himself. Lanu would continue the line of his divinity.
Although Loa kept silent, he was soon as ecstatic and delirious with
emotion as Nessi or any other slave about him. When the fit passed he
was both drained and weary, like the others, and like the others he sank
into an exhausted sleep, lying motionless under the dark sky with a
thousand fellow unfortunates. The mosquitoes and the ants--the myriad
insects of Africa--could not break into his comatose slumber, nor could
the rocky earth beneath him. He lay like a corpse, and so did Nessi, so
that neither of them disturbed the other with tugs at the stick that
held them together.

That was a strange bond between them, uniting them and yet keeping them
apart. They could never be nearer than five feet to each other, and yet
never farther, never out of sight, and yet never within reach. When Loa
woke in the dark dawn, he inevitably awoke Nessi. She gave a sharp cry.

"Ura," she said, "where are you?"

Ura was the name of her husband, one of the best of the young hunters.
Nessi put her hand up to her neck and the touch of the fork and chain
recalled to her the events of yesterday which she had thought
momentarily a dream.

"Oh," she wailed. "Ah--ee--ai--"

Then she remembered who it was who lay beside her, and she looked round
in the gathering light.

"Lord," she said, "is it indeed you?"

"It is indeed I," said Loa.

He was using again the language of a god, and Nessi was addressing him
in the language of a remote inferior.

"Lord, what will they do with me?"

"You will bear burdens for them," said Loa, hesitatingly.

It was not an easy question to answer in any event. The conception of
slavery had quite died out in Loa's little community. And Loa found it
hard to imagine the existence of other communities, or of distances
greater than a day's march. But with a prodigious effort of his
imagination he was just able to picture the possibility that the
slavers, coveting the ivory tusks, had come a long way for them, and
needed bearers to carry them back to their town in a far part of the
forest. To mere mortals, he knew, wives were desirable property,
something to be coveted, but if any slaver intended to take Nessi as a
wife he had shown small disposition to do so as yet.

"Will it be far, Lord?" asked Nessi.

"Very far."

"How far, Lord?" persisted Nessi, with a child's need for exactitude.

"Many nights, many days," said Loa, his imagination making a fantastic
leap to such a wild idea.

"But you, Lord, you?" said Nessi.

She was only a mortal and such things might happen to her within the
limits of insane possibility, but now she remembered again that Loa was
chained in the other fork of her pole, and of course nothing like that
could happen to him.

"Doubtless I shall come too."

The equatorial dawn had fully broken by now, and the overcast sky was
shining its light down upon them. Nessi looked at Loa, thinking hard. He
was as naked as she was, as naked as all the other slaves about her. He
had no leopardskin cloak, and the only reminder of his former greatness
was his iron collar and bracelets. And they were talking familiarly
together, Nessi with him, and he had just admitted the possibility of
being driven like a goat across the country with the others. Her world
was a mad place. And people were no longer putting their faces into the
dirt for him, and yet were suffering no apparent harm. Ah, that was the
point. No apparent harm; but without doubt Loa would summon his secret
powers and rend these slave raiders apart when he decided to do so. At
the moment he was actuated by motives for delay incomprehensible to mere
mortals--a conclusion that satisfied her vague wonderings. Except that
she had a lingering wish that Loa's whim for being in temporary
subjection had not involved the killing of her baby yesterday.

"Look, Lord," said Nessi. "There is food."

A full wooden trough had been carried down, and already a mob of slaves
were milling round it.

"Let us go there," said Loa, suddenly remembering that he was
desperately hungry.

A double handful of tapioca; that was what he got for himself at the
trough, and this time he saw to it that he dropped none. He was careful
that the pole moving from side to side under his nose in response to
Nessi's movements did not interfere with his feeding. Pushing round them
to get to the trough were many people from his town, mingled with many
more whom he had never seen before. It was significant that already the
one sort paid him scarcely more attention than the other. They
frequently failed to recognize him, chained as he was to Nessi, and when
they did it was sometimes with a startled cry and sometimes with nothing
more than recognition, so that Loa knew they knew who he was. Chains and
nakedness and misery were leveling them all. And Loa's own personal
reaction was not too consistent. Sometimes he was sunk in despair, but
sometimes his natural curiosity and interest in the world would break
through his depression and his bewilderment. Some kind of selection had
gone into his breeding. Some ancestor of his must have been markedly
different from his fellows to be accepted as king and god, and the
qualities had not been bred out in ensuing generations, for from a mass
of people of the royal blood only one received deification, and each god
in turn had his choice of the women as a vehicle to continue the royal
line. So that even on that first day of captivity by the river, Loa's
wits were coming back to normal and beginning to exercise themselves on
what he saw.

It was clear that the river and the sky had betrayed him; the raiders
had a fleet of canoes with which they could cover great distances and
strike without warning. The night before they attacked the town they had
undoubtedly made use of canoes to drop down the river, presumably as far
as the rocks from which he was accustomed to summon his sister the moon.
He saw a flotilla come back with a few slaves, but with the canoes
crammed to the gunwales with food, the result of some raid on another
town, he supposed. It was obvious that the problem of supplying the
large mass of people encamped by the river was a serious one, and could
only be solved by ceaseless raids upon the surrounding country.
Moreover, this source of supply would exhaust itself in time; and when
that time came, the only resource would be for the party to move on,
either into some fresh area, or homewards. That was a brilliant piece of
deduction on the part of Loa, uneducated as he was; but in one respect
Loa was well equipped--between childhood and the present day he had had
some thorough administrative experience, for in his town when all was
said and done he had been ultimately responsible for the economic
working of the life of the place, down to the smallest detail. The
duties had not been onerous, in the absence of any difficulties
regarding food or population, but they had opened up channels of thought
in his brain which were available for the passage of these new notions.

"Let us go up there," said Loa, to Nessi, pointing up the steep slope to
the village. He did not make use of the greatly superior form of
address, but that used by one lofty equal to another--the way Indeharu
would have spoken to Vira in the old days; the old days two days ago.

"Let us go," said Nessi obediently and almost deferentially.

She rose to her feet and they began to plod up the slope, picking their
way through the yoked pairs dotted about. This bare rocky slope was a
continuation and expansion of the main street of the village above,
whose houses they could see. Like the houses with which Loa had always
been familiar, they were built of thick planks split from tree trunks,
but they were unfamiliar to Loa in the details of their design.

"Those men are different," said Nessi, pointing--they were walking at
this moment with the pole diagonally across their course, with Nessi on
Loa's left front. By this arrangement it was more convenient to talk,
and the pole was not such a nuisance as it was if they walked side by
side.

"They are indeed different," agreed Loa.

Nessi had pointed to two armed men lounging by the entrance to the
village; they were dark brown rather than the deep black of the
spearmen, and they carried shields of plaited reeds, and short stout
bows with a few arrows whose heads were wrapped in leaves--poisoned
arrows, therefore--altogether, in color and weapons, resembling the men
of Loa's town rather than the strange barbarians who had captured them.
But they were just as hostile.

"Go away!" shouted one of them as they approached, and, when Nessi and
Loa still advanced, he put an arrow on his bowstring menacingly.

"Go away!" he repeated, leveling the arrow with every intention of
drawing and loosing.

"We must turn aside," said Loa.

From where they stood they could just look up the street. Naked black
women were moving about it on domestic duties, carrying wooden jars of
water and so on, and they caught a glimpse of a white-robed Arab. Then
Loa led Nessi along the top of the slope, high above the river. On their
left hand were the old village clearings, the usual wild tangle of
stumps and creepers, so dense that even a single agile man would have
difficulty in picking his way through; a yoked couple could never do it.
Strangulation or a broken neck would be the fate of one or both of them
before they had penetrated ten yards--there was no escape in this
direction. At the far end of the clearing the rocky slope had narrowed
down to a few yards, and there the forest began, with the path by which
they had come. Here lounged two more men with shields and bows. There
was no word in Loa's limited vocabulary for "sentries." He had to think
of them by the elaborate circumlocution of "men who wait to stop other
people passing," but at least that exactly described them.

"Turn back," said one of them as Loa and Nessi drew near.

He was as ready to shoot as had been his colleague at the other end of
the clearing, and the whole width of the gap, from where the clearing
ended to the water's edge, was no more than fifty yards. Moreover, the
spaces between the trees, Loa saw, were closed by a double row of
pointed stakes, leaving only the path free. There was no way of escape
this way, either. They were on the water's edge here, where the river
ran, golden-brown, its otherwise smooth surface disturbed here and there
by the ripples and eddies of its progress. Far out, a huge tree was
being carried rapidly down, now and again turning over and round,
raising fresh branches and roots towards the sky as it went. Loa saw the
gaunt limbs raised in silent and unavailing appeal to the sky, and he
was shaken by fresh emotion. He was as helpless as that tree-trunk.

"May you die!" he suddenly shouted at the sentries.

He shook his fist at them in rage. "May the bowels of your children rot!
May--"

"Oh, let us run away," said Nessi, for one of the sentries was coming
towards them menacingly. "Come!"

Nessi tried to run, and when the pull of the chain choked her she put
her hands up to it to hold it clear of her windpipe and plunged forward,
dragging Loa with her.

"Oh, quickly!" said Nessi.

Her panic infected Loa, and they ran back to lose themselves among the
crowded couples along the water's edge, the chains of the yoke dragging
at their necks when the irregularities of the ground made them diverge
or converge a little.




CHAPTER VII


It was a strange bond between them, was that yoke. It held Loa and Nessi
together and yet it kept them apart. They could not even touch each
other with outstretched fingertips, and yet neither of them could move a
yard without not merely the consent but the co-operation of the other.
They could never be out of each other's sight or hearing; there was
nothing the one could do without the other being aware of it. If one
should fall, the other suffered equally. It compelled each to walk with
due attention to the other's well-being. When they lay down to sleep on
the unlevel ground it was necessary for each to see that the other was
comfortable; if one should roll over or slip a little down the slope the
other had perforce to conform. They had to be brave together, or
timorous together. One could not be restless or try to explore if the
other were torpid, nor could the torpid one remain torpid--each had to
sink or rise to the other's level of activity. Because of the yoke Loa
and Nessi experienced all the disadvantages of intimacy and enjoyed none
of the advantages. They could easily make each other uncomfortable and
unhappy, but it was almost impossible to make each other comfortable or
to console each other. They could not even speak to each other
privately--at that distance apart they must needs talk loudly enough for
others to hear. All their secrets they must share with each other, and
yet they could have no secrets unshared with the world.

For husband and wife, for two people who had long been intimate, the
yoke would have caused difficulties enough; but Loa and Nessi had hardly
known each other. Loa had been the god, immense and unapproachable,
before whom Nessi had to prostrate herself; Nessi had been a pretty
wench that chance had never before thrown his way. He knew much more
about her now--he knew just how her head was set on her shoulders and
how her arms swung as she walked. Looking round the pole he learned all
about her back and thighs; as the day lengthened he watched the gradual
fading of the weals left by the kurbash. She was a fine figure of a
woman, of the slender type which Loa favored (unlike most of his
fellows), with good muscles that showed to advantage under her skin when
she set herself to climb a slope. Yet she was eternally out of his
reach.

It was obvious to Loa by the end of the day that no ordinary attempt at
escape would succeed; the simple precautions taken by the raiders, and
their centuries of experience in the handling of newly captured slaves,
made it quite impossible to get away. The yoke was as important an
invention as the kurbash in the Arab subjugation of Central Africa; it
was by means of these two instruments that a handful of spearmen and
bowmen were able to keep a thousand captives under control.

Keeping everyone stark naked was another simple means of maintaining
dominance. A naked man or woman cannot conceal a weapon, or a tool to
assist in escape, or a food reserve to be used in the event of escape.
It reduced to some extent, too, the chances of infectious disease and of
skin parasites being spread through the camp; but, more than anything
else, the mere fact of nakedness was a repressive factor; in the simple
communities from which the slaves had been taken nakedness was nothing
to excite comment in itself. Nakedness implied poverty or helplessness,
for clothing was a matter of ornament and hardly one of protection and
had nothing to do with modesty. The naked man or woman felt more useless
and helpless and was therefore more easily kept in slavery.

Perhaps the meagerness of the rations doled out helped--no spirit could
remain high when only sustained by two double handfuls of tapioca a day.
Already Loa was hungry, and he grew hungrier as the days passed. Nessi
at the other end of the pole wept with hunger. Never in her life had her
belly gone unfilled--usually it had been unsatisfied on a diet
exclusively of starch, but never unfilled--until now. She wanted to join
the wistful groups hanging hopelessly round the feeding troughs, and she
was inclined to sulk when Loa objected. Loa would rather sit on a lofty
point of the encampment and survey the scene around him. He could force
himself now to endure the unwinking gaze of the sky, to stare across the
mysterious river at the distant shore on the other side, and he was
interested in observing the behavior of his guards. The mumbo-jumbo of
the Moslems, their ablutions and their prostrations, interested him. He
was sharp enough to guess that these formalities were in honor of some
god, but he could not guess which god it was. It was more than could be
expected of his uneducated mind that it should develop a good working
theory regarding comparative religion, but having been a god himself
made him something of a practical theologian. Stirring in the dark
recesses of Loa's mind there were some curious thoughts, and there was a
stern conflict going on. When a man who has always thought of himself as
a god begins to have atheistical doubts the conflict is bound to be
severe. Loa might well have gone insane if his interest had not been
caught by his surroundings--if, for instance, Nessi's whims and moods
had not kept him busy, and if he had not been wondering about escaping.

The majority of his fellow captives were apathetic in their misery,
content to hang round the feeding troughs or merely sit staring at
vacancy. There were a few active spirits, but not many, and the kurbash
kept them in check. And if the kurbash did not achieve its end there was
another punishment possible. Loa never knew what was the crime of the
two of his fellow slaves who suffered the death penalty. They may have
tried to escape, or they may have gone insane and struck a Moslem. No
one really knew, but everyone knew how they died, for they were perched
upon stakes of impalement in the center of the encampment, and there
they stayed, screaming throughout one long day, screaming at first so
loudly that they could be heard from one end of the camp to the other.
Later the screams died down to delirious moans. Loa knew about
inflicting death; he had killed people in cold blood himself. And he
knew about casual cruelty, the result of carelessness or indifference.
But deliberate cruelty of this frightful kind was something new to him.
He sat and watched under lowering eyebrows the writhings of the tortured
men. It was all part of his education. He had never had to keep men in
subjugation--allegiance to him had been voluntary, so ingrained by habit
and tradition as to be classed as instinctive--but now he knew how it
was done.

There was no attempt at organized sanitation in the camp, and the stench
and the flies were consequently appalling; the deluges of tropical rain
that fell were welcome in one way, as washing away the filth that lay
everywhere, but they added to everyone's discomfort all the same. The
naked peoples of Central Africa, like naked people in most parts of the
world, detest the impact of rain upon their skin. The slaves tried to
huddle together during the storms; Nessi would sit in close embrace with
a dozen men and women whose yokemates similarly tried to huddle together
at the other end of their poles, all whimpering in chorus, each trying
to shelter himself from the pitiless downpour at the expense of the
others. But Loa the god sat apart and indifferent (except when Nessi's
writhings, communicated through the pole, jerked him off his balance)
while the thunder of his brother the sky raved overhead, and the thick
clouds obscured the face of his brother the sun so that for a time it
was as dark as twilight. He bore the unpleasant nagging of the heavy
raindrops on his skin with some kind of stoicism; stripped of his divine
dignities he was clinging to his personal dignity--about which he had
hardly thought before.

There came a day when the whole camp moved off, when the kurbash bit
into dark flesh as the raiders herded the slaves into order, when shouts
and cries and blows drove the slaves first here and then there in
obedience to their masters. Loa and Nessi found themselves loaded again
with an elephant's tusk--not likely to be the one they had borne on
their first day, but one as heavy and as bulky. It was slung to their
pole in loops of cane, and then they were directed, in the footsteps of
those who had preceded them, up the slope to the village, along the main
street, and out at the other end to a forest path well-trodden already.

"Where are we going, Lord?" asked Nessi. She still called him "Lord" and
used the honorific mode of address when she asked him questions.

"To their town, without doubt," said Loa with a bland assumption of
certitude. He wished he knew.

"And when we arrive there, Lord?"

"Some man will make you his wife."

Loa really thought it more likely that Nessi would eventually be eaten,
for that was the fate of wanderers in the world he knew--a few days of
rest, and then the ax or the cord and the roasting spit. But he did not
reveal his thoughts to her.

"Will a black man make me his wife, Lord?"

"Yes. You will dwell in his home, and for him you will cook the
plantains and prepare the manioc. By him you will have children."

"Ah!" said Nessi. Such a prospect, after recent experiences, reconciled
her to her fate, which was what Loa was aiming at. He had had enough of
her misery.

The forest, the dark silent friendly forest, had already enfolded them.
The tusk that swung from their pole was heavy and hard to manage, and
already the yoke and chain were galling their shoulders. Ahead of them
and behind them serpentined the long line of yoked couples, each bearing
burdens, sometimes slung from the poles, sometimes carried on the head.
At intervals along the line walked the guards, and at rarer intervals
still were the Arabs, the few representatives of an alien culture who by
virtue of that culture dominated this vast assembly of human beings. The
African spearmen and bowmen who were the Arabs' paid mercenaries could
be trusted to see that the slaves did not attempt to escape, but could
be trusted very little farther, for they, too, had led the carefree life
of the forest and knew not tomorrow. They could never be impressed with
the necessity for keeping the line closed up, for hurrying the march,
for planning each day's journey from one source of food supply to the
next. In consequence the Arab leaders were busy all the time, hastening
up and down the line, upbraiding their mercenaries, flogging the slaves
forward with their whips, and stationing themselves at different points,
where the march was necessarily checked, in order to minimize delays and
hurry everyone forward again as soon as possible.

Soon Loa and Nessi were running with sweat; soon weariness began to
creep over them as they plodded on through the forest, up and down its
scarcely perceptible undulations, over its dry leafmold, across its
boggy valleys. From far, far overhead the subdued green light filtered
down, from where the creepers tangled together, where the monkeys played
and the parrots shrieked. Nessi's step was shortening; a gap was opening
between her and the yoked pair next ahead. Very soon an Arab appeared
beside them.

"Go faster!" he said, and he caught Nessi a cut with his whip that drew
a yelp from her and quickened her pace.

"Faster!" he repeated, with another cut. Then the whip burned across
Loa's shoulders so that he lunged forward pushing Nessi ahead. Nessi
half ran, half walked until she was up to the pair in front of her, but
she had hardly reached them before her step began to shorten again.
Almost at once the Arab--he was a man of a strange mixture of races,
with a straggling black mustache and rings in his ears--was beside them
again.

"Did I not say go faster?" he demanded, pointing to the gap that had
opened ahead of Nessi. "Faster! Faster!"

At each word the whip fell, first upon Nessi and then upon Loa. Loa felt
the sudden pain, and sprang forwards so that Nessi stumbled and the end
of the tusk struck him in the stomach.

"Hurry!" snarled the Arab, making his kurbash sing in the air. On this,
the first day of the march of the united column, the Arabs were
determined to instill into the minds of their captives the dire
necessity for keeping closed up.

Loa learned the lesson at once, linked as it was with the lesson that
the hippopotamus-hide whip could inflict pain upon the person of his
divine majesty. He kept watch now beyond Nessi to see that the gap did
not open again, and when it showed signs of doing so he pressed forward
with his neck against the yoke to compel Nessi to maintain her pace; by
tensing his throat muscles he had found that he could bear the pressure
against his windpipe for some seconds.

"You go too slowly, Nessi," he said.

"Oh Lord! Oh Lord!" wailed Nessi.

Later in the day came a blessed respite, when some delay ahead jammed
the column. Nessi found herself stumbling against the couple ahead, who
had halted--they were two burly young women, each with a bundle on her
head and each with her lips distorted by scarring. They scowled round at
Nessi, but Nessi fell incontinently to the ground oblivious to
everything except the fact that at the moment she did not have to walk
any more. The young women lowered themselves into a sitting position
without taking the loads from their heads--it was less trouble to sit
with stiff necks and poised heads than to lay the heavy weights on the
ground and subsequently have to hoist them up again. Loa squatted too so
that the tusk lay along the ground. Far too soon they heard movement
ahead of them in the forest, shouts and cries and bustle. The couples
ahead of them were getting to their feet in succession and moving on as
the Arab came down the line. The two women with the scarred lips rose
carefully to their feet, swaying gracefully as they kept their bundles
balanced, but Nessi still lay face downward, sobbing. The women moved
on, on the heels of the couple ahead of them, at the same moment as the
Arab arrived. Loa had seen him coming, and was as much on his feet as he
could be--with Nessi lying on the ground and the tusk so precariously in
its slings between them. He wanted to look ready to march, for he had
learned the lesson that the kurbash hurts. The Arab took in the
situation at a glance, and once again his whip drew a scream from Nessi.
Even then it took a second cut to get her on her feet, although once up
she hurried instantly forward. Loa debated within himself the argument
that Nessi had lain on the ground for an extra period of about two
breaths, at the expense of two cuts with the kurbash. It was much too
big a price to pay, he decided. Yet it was like a woman to pay too much
for the satisfaction of having her own way--it was the sort of thing
Musini did in the old days.

Musini! Loa had hardly thought about her since the raiding of the
village. He knew she was not a prisoner, and he had no reason to believe
she was dead. He knew, or he almost knew, in his half-delirious state,
that Lanu his son was free, and the obvious assumption was that Musini
was free too. Musini had had some narrow escapes. She would have been
sent to serve his ancestors if it had not been for the opportune arrival
of the woman Delli, to whose tales of the raiders they should have paid
more attention, instead of promptly sacrificing her as they did. Musini;
his first wife, the mother of his son, aging now, yet full of fire and
personality surprising in a woman well past twenty years of age. Perhaps
he never would have sent her to serve his ancestors, even if Delli had
not come, even if she had always continued her disturbing behavior.
Nessi was saying something to him as she plodded on in front of him, but
he paid little attention, so preoccupied was he with his thoughts of
Musini. There was Musini over there, just visible through the trees, and
a boy by her side--Lanu. It was all so matter-of-course that for a
moment Loa did not realize the startling implications of what he saw.
Musini stepped out from behind a tree and waved an arm. Musini without a
doubt--Loa stared at her so hard that he did not pay attention to his
footing; he stumbled over a root and with difficulty saved himself from
falling.

"I am choked," said Nessi, peevishly, when she recovered from the jerk
of the chain against her throat. "Cannot you walk with more care?"

It sounded as she were addressing her husband rather than the god Loa,
but Loa had no ears for her. Already the few steps he had taken had
changed all the lines of visibility between the trees of the forest; he
was already doubtful about just where he had seen Musini, and he could
see nothing now either of her or of Lanu. Loa's heart, working hard
because of the heat and the exertions of his body, was now pumping
harder than ever, seeming to fill his breast so that he could not
inflate his lungs. He stumbled again.

"What is the matter with you?" snapped Nessi. "That is the second time
you have choked me."

The complaining voice pierced through Loa's preoccupation.

"May hairy devils pull off your arms and legs," he said.

The god Loa had never used or contemplated using curses; in the old days
he had ridden as serenely above such earthly things as his sister the
moon had ridden, serenely above the clouds--the expression he had just
used he had overheard at some time or other and stored in his
subconscious memory, and now it had come from his lips like the words
used by a gently nurtured woman of our day under an anesthetic.

"And may red ants burrow into your belly," retorted Nessi.

Presumably all the way along the line of slaves there were violent
quarrels--no couple could spend days tied at opposite ends of a stick
without quarreling, unless they were utterly sunk in apathy. Loa did not
continue this unseemly exchange of ill wishes; even if he had known any
more curses he was too busy trying to look over his right shoulder for
Lanu and Musini again. But the path he was following wound about with
nothing to call attention to its windings, and the fact that he had
first seen them over his right shoulder did not mean at all that they
were in that relative direction now.

"Oh, walk more steadily," nagged Nessi. "I am so weary. The pole chafes
my shoulders."

Loa paid no attention, and the exasperated Nessi reached up with her
hands and took hold of the ends of the fork and gave them a maddening
tug, so that the chain at Loa's end rasped violently against the nape of
his neck.

"Do not do that!" he said, roused once more to awareness of his
surroundings.

"I will do it! I want to do it!" said Nessi. "You make my way hard for
me, and I shall make yours hard for you."

And with that she tugged at the yoke again, exasperating Loa so that he
in his turn took hold of the pole and shook it, battering Nessi's fork
against the back of her head.

"You hurt me!" shrieked Nessi, but that was just what Loa wanted to do.
He thought darkly for a moment of twisting the pole and strangling Nessi
as she stood, until he realized that he could not do that without
strangling himself. So he made his neck muscles rigid and contented
himself with poking Nessi in the back of the neck with the fork. A
frightful pain across his shoulders made him stop; the Arab had come up
beside them and was cutting at them with his whip.

"Not that!" snarled the Arab.

He gave Loa two more cuts for good measure and then transferred his
attentions to Nessi. She screamed as the kurbash bit into her
thighs--her back was screened by the tusk slung from the pole. Loa heard
the screams and saw the angry welts appear on her thighs, with intense
satisfaction.

"Now go on in peace," said the Arab, with a stupid misuse of a forest
idiom, but his meaning was clear enough. They went on, with Nessi
weeping and wailing over her sorrows, and Loa more and more irritated by
her.

In the late afternoon the march came to an end, in the main street of a
deserted village. Here there was none of the ample space which had been
available at the original encampment. Instead the slaves were herded
into the street and packed tight, filling the whole area between the two
rows of houses. Loa found himself jostled and surrounded by strange men
and women, some of the latter with footsore children running at their
sides. A babel of sound went up around him, accompanied by the stench of
sweating bodies.

"Is this their town?" asked Nessi, bewildered, through the din.

"I do not know," said Loa, but Nessi had not waited for a reply. She
cast herself upon the ground completely exhausted, and so did the other
slaves--poles, arms, legs, and bundles all jumbled together.

An hour later, with evening at hand, there was an eddy in the crowd. Two
slaves were walking through the press with a feeding trough on their
shoulders; they were escorted by a group of Arabs and mercenaries who
slashed right and left with sticks and whips to restrain the eager mob.
A double handful of cooked plantain each; it called for many troughs to
supply even that moderate ration, but they were correspondingly quickly
emptied, and brought round again filled with water. The slaves drank
from them like animals; and then, hunger and thirst to some extent
allayed, they could lie down again, in their own and in each others'
filth, to sleep, higgledy-piggledy, like animals, with heads pillowed on
bosoms or thighs; and when it rained, as it did twice during the night,
trying (as well as poles and chains and loads permitted) to huddle
together closer. Around them, during the hours of darkness, a few of the
raiders kept guard.




CHAPTER VIII


It was still dark when the slaves on the fringe of the crowd were roused
next day; it was hardly after dawn when it was Nessi's and Loa's turn to
move off after them. There was a running stream at which they could
kneel to drink, at the end of the village, and there were troughs of
food prepared from which they could each take their double handful to
eat as they walked along--Loa had to rest his hands on the pole so as to
eat out of them. The same endless march, the same heat and weariness and
misery. The torment of flies and mosquitoes; the hurried mouthfuls of
water snatched as they forded the streams. The whip of the Arabs, the
sticks of their mercenaries. The same march, the same torments, the same
whips, day following day; until the day of deliverance. No slave counted
the days.

The man beside whom Loa had slept had entertained him for a brief while
with an account of something he had seen the previous day--he talked
freely to Loa, whom he was addressing in ignorance of his status. (It
might not have been different had he known.) During the march this man
had seen a forest antelope, bewildered at the passage of so many men and
women, dashing between the trees and then coming to a startled full
stop. An Arab was close beside Loa's informant. He had put his gun to
his shoulder--the man's pantomime was vivid--and then _boom_! The
antelope had fallen down dead. Dead, quite dead, with the blood running
from his side and his mouth. Dead, killed at a distance no arrow could
be impelled over, killed by the bang and the puff of strange-smelling
smoke. The memory of the story gave Loa something to think about as he
plodded along behind Nessi. It was a strange power these gray-faced men
had. With the bow and the poisoned arrow Loa had been familiar all his
life, of course. And he had killed men with an unseen force--more than
once he had told them that he was at enmity with them, and that had been
enough to make those men waste away and die. But forest antelopes, like
parrots and monkeys and red ants, were not subject to his power. Even a
man took long days to die. He did not fall bleeding as that forest
antelope had done, according to the narrator--as the men had done that
Delli had told about. Loa knew the limitations on his powers; these men
could do something he could not do. It was a disturbing thought; if they
were only men, then what was he?

Here, at a point where the trail made a sharp bend, was an Arab,
standing with the stream of slaves flowing past him as he supervised the
march with his kurbash flicking in his hand. At sight of him Loa took
care to pick his steps carefully, so as not to stumble and invite a
blow--he had learned much during these dreadful days. And as he
approached he heard the high-pitched twang of a bowstring. He did not
see the flight of the missile, but he was instantly conscious of when it
reached its mark. He saw it strike, hitting the Arab just below the jaw,
where face and neck meet; Loa was within a few yards of the Arab when it
happened. The Arab did not stagger; he put up his hand with surprise and
took hold of the barbed arrow as it hung down on his shoulder from his
face. Some red blood--only a few drops--dripped from the wound. The Arab
swung round to see who had attacked him, reaching at the same time for
the gun which hung by a strap over his shoulder. But he was unsteady on
his feet now; his knees bent under him, and although he braced himself
up for a moment they gave way again, and he fell on his face moving only
feebly as Nessi and Loa reached him. Arrow poison works fast, when
injected into the trunk of the body rather than in a limb, and fastest
of all in the blood vessels of the neck. Two people came leaping across
the glade to where Nessi and Loa stood by the body. One was little Lanu,
his left hand grasping his three-foot bow and an arrow; his right hand
held yet another arrow with the bowstring in the notch, ready to draw
and loose. And with him ran Musini, naked, with her long breasts
swinging in front of her; in her hand she bore Lanu's ceremonial
battle-ax, the little ax which Litti the smith had made for him at Loa's
special request. The bright edge gleamed in the twilight of the forest.
Musini's eyes met Loa's. She momentarily clapped her hand to her
forehead in salutation, but she allowed no ceremonial to delay her in
the course of action she had planned. She hacked with her ax at the
creepers which suspended the load from the pole; they were tough and did
not part easily, but Musini slashed away with all the considerable
strength of her skinny arms until the elephant's tusk fell to the
ground, relieving Loa and Nessi of its considerable weight. No word had
yet been spoken. Musini now turned the edge of the ax against the pole
which connected the two prisoners. Twice she hacked at it, but it was of
a tough elastic wood with a hard surface; it bent under her blows and
the ax rebounded from it having made hardly a dent.

"Enough, Mother!" squealed Lanu. He was standing with his arrow half
drawn, looking sharply to left and to right beside the dying Arab. "We
must not wait."

"Come, Lord, come, you," said Musini.

As Nessi still stood bewildered Musini reached out her hand and took
Nessi's, and turned to run through the forest, with Loa lumbering after
her. Some of the other slaves made a move to follow them, but Lanu
checked them.

"Back!" he shouted in his high voice, threatening them with his arrow.
"Back!"

He drew away from the surging knot of slaves and then turned and ran at
top speed after the others; Loa running over the spongy unequal ground
with the yoke pounding on his shoulders, looked down to find Lanu
running beside him. Lanu extended a hand to him, as Musini had done to
Nessi, as if to drag his big bulk along after him. Somebody--either
Nessi or Loa--tripped and stumbled, and the pair of them fell crashing
to the ground, the yokes and chains lacerating their necks, the breath
driven from their bodies.

"Come on, come on," shrieked Lanu, dancing beside them.

They scrambled to their feet and Musini seized the bewildered Nessi's
hand again and dragged her forward. They heard a shout far behind
them--muffled as it reached their ears through the trees--and knew that
pursuit had commenced.

"Run, oh, run!" pleaded Musini.

And so they ran through the forest, through the twilight, between the
great friendly trunks of the trees. They came to a little brook flowing
between wide marshy banks; the mud was halfway up their thighs as they
made their way through. It slowed them, but it did not stop them, and,
once across, they resumed their heartbreaking pace and kept it up until
Nessi began to wail, little short sounds which were all her breathless
condition allowed. Her pace slackened until they were obliged to stop
and allow her to fall gasping on the ground. Loa fell too, his breath
coming heavily, and his legs aching. Musini was content to squat beside
him, while Lanu was still sufficiently fresh to make his way back, bow
and arrow in hand, to peer through the trees so as to be able to give
warning in case of pursuit.

After a few seconds Loa was able to raise his head, and his eyes met
those of Musini beside him.

"Is it well with you, Lord?" she asked. She used the honorific mode of
address--which she had not used in the days when Loa was god and
king--and her wrinkled face bore a fond smile. She put out a hand and
caressed Loa's sweating shoulder.

"It is well with me," said Loa.

To Loa's credit Musini's affection took him by surprise. His fall from
divinity had left him with little belief in himself. People had served
him when he was a god presumably because that was what he was. Now that
he was a naked worthless slave he was surprised and touched that anyone,
even skinny wrinkled Musini, should serve him and love him for himself
alone.

"My face is bright at seeing you again, Lord," said Musini, and there
was some literal truth in the trite metaphor, as a glance at her showed.

A faint cry from the end of the glade forestalled Loa's reply; Lanu was
running back to them and his gestures warned them of pursuit.

"We must run," said Musini, getting to her feet. "Rise up, you."

The last words were addressed to the gasping Nessi, and when the latter
made no further response than a groan Musini kicked her in the ribs with
her tough bare foot.

"Stand up!" shrieked Musini, and took Nessi by the hair to drag her to
her feet. The ax swung in Musini's other hand, and she shot a glance at
Loa. "Shall I cut off her head? Then we would not have to take her with
us, Lord."

"No, she bears one end of the pole," said Loa--a perfectly sound
argument, although it is just possible that Loa was actuated by other
motives than immediate expediency.

Lanu had reached them by now.

"Come on!" he squeaked.

Nessi had risen to her feet, perhaps as a result of Musini's grim
suggestion, and Lanu took one of her hands, and Musini the other, and
they began to run again, with weary legs moving stiffly at first,
running and running, with a weariness that grew until it seemed
impossible even once again to put one foot in front of the other, and
when they could not run they walked, with steps that grew slower and
shorter as the day went on, as the twilight of the forest deepened with
the coming of night.

"Now we can rest at last," said Musini in the end, when it was growing
too dark to see even the ground under their feet.

They stopped, and Nessi settled what Loa was going to do by dropping
flat to the ground where she stood, so that Loa was dragged down too.
With the coming of darkness, there was no chance of the Arabs continuing
their pursuit. He was safe and he was free.

"Tomorrow, with the first light, we shall release you from this chain
and yoke, Lord," said Musini.

She put out her hands in the darkness and felt for Loa's chafed neck.
The touch was marvelously soothing; Loa found himself stroking Musini's
skinny arms.

"I am hungry," said Nessi, suddenly. "Oh, I am very hungry. I wish I
could eat."

"Shut that howling mouth," said Musini. She was utterly scandalized, as
her tone showed, by the familiarity of Nessi's manner of address.

"But I am hungry," protested Nessi.

"Hungry you are and hungry you will remain," was all the sympathy Musini
had to offer. "There is nothing to eat now. There have been many days
when Lanu and I have eaten nothing."

"There is nothing to eat?" asked Loa. With this turn of the conversation
he was now sleepily conscious of the hunger that possessed him.

"For you, Lord, there is this," said Musini.

She fumbled in the darkness, presumably in the little bag which hung
from her neck between her breasts, and then she found Loa's hand and
pressed something into it.

"What is this?" he asked.

"White ants, Lord, all we have. I gathered them this morning."

White ants lived in little tunnels in dead trees, harmless creatures
enough, quite unlike their ferocious red and black brothers. Their
bodies were succulent, and could be eaten by hungry people; but these
ants had been long dead, crushed into a paste by Musini's fingers and
carried all day in her little bag. There was only a couple of mouthfuls
of them anyway; Loa chewed the bitter unsatisfying stuff and swallowed
it down with a fleeting regret for the double handful of tapioca which
had been served out to him that morning.

"It is hard to gather food in the forest," said Lanu.

"That is so," agreed Musini. "Yet has Lanu been clever. He has been like
a man, Lord. It was Lanu who made the bow and the arrows. Lanu is our
worthy son."

"It was I who killed the gray-faced man," said Lanu. "Did you see him
fall? My arrow was in his throat, where I had aimed it. It was I who
made the poison. I used the creeper juice. I made it as I had seen Tiri
the son of Minu make it."

"It was well done, son," said Loa. "And how was it you came to escape
when first the Arabs came to the town?"

They told him between them, Musini and Lanu, of their adventures on the
day of the raid and since then. They had fled into the clearing at the
first alarm, together, for Lanu had been sleeping in his mother's house.
Lanu had snatched up and borne with him his little ceremonial ax, his
latest present from his father, and it had stood them in good stead.
Without it they would have been nearly helpless in the forest, but with
it they had the power that edged steel conveys. Lanu had shaped and
trimmed the bow; Musini had braided the bowstring from the flexible
creeper fibers. They had followed the slave caravan from camp to camp,
living on what they could gather in the forest. With vigilance and
precaution they had escaped the snares of the little people, although
twice arrows aimed at them had narrowly missed one or other of them.
Every day at some time or other they had seen Loa, far more often than
he had seen them, and by continual watching they had made themselves
familiar with the Arabs' methods, so that eventually they had planned
the rescue and carried it out successfully.

"That was well done indeed, my son," said Loa.

There were the strangest feelings inside him at that moment, the oddest
misgivings. Lanu was a clever little boy, but it could not have been
Lanu who was responsible for all this. Lanu could not have displayed the
singleness of purpose, the resolution and the ingenuity which had
resulted in his rescue. Lanu might have loved his father, but--Loa's
newfound humility asserted itself--it was incredible that he would have
gone through all that risk and labor to rescue him except at the
instance of his mother. It must have been Musini who did the planning
and who showed the resolution. It must have been Musini's devotion which
had kept them to the task. An odd state of affairs indeed, when women
should thus display initiative and determination; there was something
unnatural and disturbing in the thought of it.

And it was disturbing in a different way to think of Musini's devotion.
In the time of his divinity, Loa would have thought nothing of someone
running risks to help him or even to contribute slightly to his comfort;
but since that time Loa had been in contact with a new reality. It was
not a god whom Musini had rescued--Loa faced the fact squarely--but a
slave, a slave in bonds, a worthless chattel. It could not have been
from religious conviction that Musini had exerted herself thus. It was
Loa the man and not Loa the god whom she had rescued. There must be a
personal tie. All this was terribly difficult to work out in Loa's
untrained brain and with his limited vocabulary Loa, the man with forty
wives, knew almost nothing of love until now. He was facing something
nearly as new as what he faced when he first felt doubts about being a
god. It called for a fresh orientation of himself. Thanks to his recent
experiences, Loa found difficulty in swallowing the undoubted fact that
Musini must love him for himself alone. He could not take it sublimely
for granted. His exhausted brain grappled feebly with all these
astonishing developments, with the new phenomenon of love, with the
concept of women being capable of decisive action, and then it shrank
back exhausted from the encounter.

"I am thirsty as well as hungry," said Nessi.

She was voicing everyone's sentiments, but that did not help her.

"Did I not say shut that mouth?" snapped Musini. "Let us sleep, for we
are weary."

The blackest possible night was round them, the darkness of night in the
forest, when the hand could not be seen before the face. Beneath them
the leafmold was soggy and damp; around them the stifling hot moist air
was not stirred by the slightest breeze. Nessi had petulantly flung
herself prone at Musini's rebuke, with a jerk at the pole which had
forced Loa to change his position. He tried to settle himself again;
Musini's arms found him and pillowed his head upon her shoulder
regardless of the discomfort the yoke and chain brought her. They slept
in a huddled group, bitten by insects, with the sweat running
irritatingly over their naked skins until the chill of dawn crept
through the trees, momentarily bringing a coolness that was pleasant
until it broke through their sleep to set them shivering and huddling
even closer together.




CHAPTER IX


In the gray twilight it was Musini who proposed the first move of the
day.

"Now let us take off this yoke from your neck, Lord," she said. "Lanu,
come and see what must be done."

The yoke was of tough elastic wood; the few links of chain were stoutly
attached by staples driven deep into the ends. Lanu tugged at them, as
Loa had often done, and equally unavailingly.

"You must cut through the wood, son," suggested Loa.

It was not so easy to do with an ax, although with a knife it would have
been comparatively simple. Loa could be of no help; all he could do was
to sit as still as he could on the ground while Lanu chipped away at the
end of the yoke, with Musini holding it steady in desperate anxiety that
expressed itself in fierce curses at Nessi at the other end of the yoke
lest she should move. Lanu removed chip after chip; the edge of the ax
found a crack in the end of the pole and enabled him to lever off a
larger chip still. Eventually both limbs of one of the staples were
exposed over most of their length.

"Try to pull that out now," said Lanu, speaking as one man speaks to
another.

Loa put one hand to the chain and one to the yoke, tugging with all the
strength the awkward position allowed. The veins stood out on his
forehead; he tugged and he tugged, and suddenly the staple flew out. Loa
dropped chain and yoke, and stepped out, free of his bonds. It was a
strange sensation. He could look at Nessi, still held at her end; he
could look at her from different angles, and at different distances, and
he could step hither and thither without any thought for her. The feel
of his free neck and shoulders was almost unnatural. He danced in his
sense of freedom and Lanu danced with him. A great wave of paternal
affection surged up in Loa. Lanu was no little boy now; recent events
had made a man of him, child though he was, but Loa loved him. Nessi was
watching them, waiting her turn to be set free.

"Now we can go," said Musini.

She must have forgotten the fact that Nessi was still fastened in her
end of the pole; it was only a momentary incident, but it seemed as if
Musini intended that she and Loa and Lanu should strike off now through
the forest, leaving Nessi to trail the yoke after her until overtaken by
inevitable death from starvation or at the hands of the little people.
But Loa and Lanu had turned and addressed themselves to the task of
freeing Nessi at the moment Musini spoke, so that the implications of
the words passed unnoticed. They chipped away at the yoke until a long
pull by Loa tore out the staple, and yoke and chain fell to the ground.

"It is gone!" said Nessi, breathing relief.

She knelt and embraced Loa's knees in thankfulness; it was an immediate
change in her demeanor. Yesterday they were fellow slaves, sharing the
utter equality of the yoke. Today the memories of Loa's divinity came
flooding back, and Nessi groveled before him as different as could be
imagined from the peevish wench whom he had to placate in the slavers'
camp.

"That is well," said Musini grimly. She had picked up the little ax and
was swinging it idly in her hand. "And now?"

They all four looked at each other.

"And now?" said Musini again.

Four human beings--setting aside for the moment Loa's fictitious
divinity--in the immensity of the twilit forest; naked, their sole
possessions the little ax and the bow which it had helped to shape.
Their world of security with its solid past of tradition and seemingly
changeless future had been destroyed, and this was the moment of their
rebirth into a new world, as if they were babies without parents. Rain
in thick heavy drops was falling about them from the dense screen of
foliage overhead, monotonous and depressing. They were community
dwellers, accustomed all their lives to living in the bustle of a town
surrounded by their fellows; bred, moreover, for a hundred generations
as community dwellers. The little people wandered in the forest
migrating eternally in little groups each no larger than a family, but
Loa and the others were not little people. In each person's mind, even
in little Lanu's, there was the longing for a permanent settlement, for
houses, and plantain groves. Their minds went back miserably to the past
and returned empty and longing. All waited for someone else to speak,
but Lanu and Musini and Nessi turned their eyes upon Loa. It was not
inspiration that came upon him. He was voicing his own sentiments and
those of everyone else when he spoke, the words torn from him by his
inward yearnings.

"Let us go home," he said.

"Home!" echoed Nessi in a fervent sigh.

"Home!" said Lanu with a skip of joy.

For a moment it seemed as if the twilight of the forest had lifted, as
if the raindrops had ceased to fall about them. The futility of their
existence had ended with the suggestion of a purpose, with a plan for
the future. As they thought of home they thought of the sunlight blazing
into the town's street, the cries of the children and the smoke of the
cooking fires; that vision died out when they remembered what had
happened to the town, and yet something remained to which their minds
could cling. There would at least be the site of the clearing, overgrown
by forest. The banana groves would not yet be overgrown. It was a place
they knew, the place where they had spent their whole lives. More than
that; the suggestion of going home provided them with an objective. Mere
futile wandering in the forest had no appeal for them; home was a goal
towards which they could struggle.

"So we will go home," said Musini, nodding her head significantly,
chewing the cud of internal calculations.

She did not have to say more to bring them all back to reality. They
were lost in the forest; and they all knew what that meant. To go a mile
into the forest--in certain circumstances, to go a mere hundred
yards--without painstaking precautions meant being utterly lost, so that
one direction seemed as good as any other. And they were separated from
home by a march of many days' duration. In the forest they had no means
of knowing north or south or east or west, and if they had, they still
did not know whether home lay to north or to south or to east or to west
of them. It was deep in the tradition of the town dweller never on any
account to go into the forest beyond the well-known landmarks. And to
all of them the forest was the world; they had no conception of any
limits to it. Their minds could not conceive of any area that was not
twilit by the shadow of vast trees, steamy hot, and dripped upon by
torrential downpours of rain. So that not one of them had the faintest
maddest hope--or fear--of ever breaking out of the forest by traveling
long enough in the same direction. The world to them was made up of
illimitable unknown forest with concealed in the midst of it a tiny
patch of known, and therefore friendly and desirable, forest encircling
their home.

A rush of feeling surged up in Loa's breast. Courage, it may have been;
obstinacy, perhaps; desperation, possibly. He could think of nothing
beyond the two alternatives, on the one hand of determining to make his
way home, and on the other of wandering in futile fashion here in the
forest to the end of his days. The first might be mad, unattainable, but
at least it was preferable to the second.

"Yes, we will go home," he said. "Home! We will find our way there."

He abandoned himself to the utterly absurd: a fanatic preaching, an
impossible crusade, sweeping his audience off their feet. He brandished
clenched fists at the lowering forest above them and around them.

"Home!" he yelled again.

"Home!" yelled Lanu, waving his bow.

"Home!" said Nessi.

Musini turned upon her.

"And so before we start for home perhaps you will find us food?"

There is food to be found in the forest, enough to support life if one
is content to live like a bird, not from day to day but from hour to
hour, with almost every waking moment devoted to the search. Funguses
grow in the leafmold and on the trunks of decaying trees--from the true
mushroom, clean and delicious but rare, to the watery toadstools,
foul-smelling but brilliantly colored, a mouthful of which means death.
Intermediate between them come other species of varying degrees of
nutritive value and toxicity, all to be noted by a sharp eye when
wandering in the forest. There are white ants, not formidable like their
black and red cousins, but harmless, with pulpy bodies that offer a good
deal of nutriment when eaten alive, but it takes many, many white ants
to make a meal, and it is usually a matter of pure good fortune to open
up one of the tunneled channels along which white ants circulate. If a
great number can be caught they can be crushed into a paste which will
endure for a couple of days without rotting, making a ration that can be
saved for an emergency, but at the price of some of the nutritive
qualities being lost with the pressed-out juices. There are snakes and
frogs; on rare occasions a good archer can bring down a bird or even,
more rarely, a monkey. To secure a forest antelope the forest wanderer
must cease for a time to be a wanderer. He must dig a pitfall in a
game-track and plant a poisoned stake in it and wait maybe for days
before an antelope falls into it--it will never happen at all if he does
his work clumsily so that the antelope's instincts are aroused and he
leaps aside from the too obvious danger. In the same way, if the
wanderer has time to spare he can--as the pygmies do--plant poisoned
skewers in the track, or a concealed bent bow in the undergrowth with an
arrow on the string and a trigger device that can be tripped by a strand
of creeper across the path; the same device can actuate a deadfall--a
log armed with a poisoned stake hung up precariously in the branches
above.

The fruits of the forest are doled out by nature with a sparing hand;
they are infinite in their variety but sparse in their occurrence; the
vast trees which fight their way through to light and air and life leave
small chance for fruit-bearing trees to live. Yet some of the vines bear
fruit, and it is possible to drag the flexible stems down, tearing them
from their hold on the trunks, until the fruit is in reach. The amoma
bears a watery fruit with a bitter kernel--either is of some use to fill
an empty belly. A giant species of acacia bears pods of beans with
indigestible skins yet which nevertheless can be bruised and pounded and
cooked into food. There are wild plums--tart, leathery things--which can
be found where soil conditions do not allow the trees to grow so tall;
wild mangoes, woody and untempting; phrynia; even some of the bamboos
which grow in the marshy spots bear berries which can be eaten and will
support life.

With all these things Loa and the others had some sort of acquaintance,
largely acquired when young; wandering as infants on the edge of the
clearing the ceaseless appetite of childhood had been gratified between
meals by the gleanings of the forest. Loa knew less about them than any
of the others, for he had had a pampered childhood as a god almost from
birth. One thing he did know, and that was that it was not by standing
still that food was to be found in the forest.

"Food?" he said to Musini in reply to her remark to Nessi. "We shall
find it as we go along."

He took the little ax from her hand and picked up the pole which had so
recently joined him to Nessi. A few blows and a jerk parted one fork
from the stem. The links of chain dangled from the other fork and made a
clumsy, flail-like weapon, but a weapon, nevertheless. He brandished it
with a feeling of satisfaction and gave back the ax to Musini.

"Let us go," he said.

"Which way, Lord?" asked Musini instantly, and Loa stared round down the
twilit avenues between the trees with some uncertainty.

"It was this way that we came," said Lanu. "You can see the tracks. That
leads to the path you were following with the gray-faced men."

"That is the way we shall go," said Loa. "They will have gone far onward
by the time we reach the path again."

And with that, with so little ceremony, they began their vast and
precarious journey. It was as well that Lanu had made his explanation
regarding the tracks, for Loa's unskilled eye could see nothing on the
monotonous leafmold. Even Lanu's sharp eyes were put to a severe test,
as the profuse rains at dawn had gone far to obliterate the heavy traces
they had left in their flight from the slavers. Lanu went in front, his
bow and arrow ready for instant action; the others spread out behind
him, looking about them as they walked, seeking
something--anything--that would relieve in small measure the pangs of
hunger that afflicted them the moment they admitted to themselves that
they were hungry. Musini found a cluster of fine white mushrooms, and
she brought the largest to Loa. It was wonderful to set one's teeth in
the firm white flesh, to taste the keen pungent flavor of the raw
mushroom, to swallow it down into a stomach that complained bitterly of
being empty. Other finds of Musini's she shared with Lanu. Nessi plodded
along by herself; what she found went into her own stomach.

They came to the boggy stream which they had crossed yesterday in their
flight; the leafmold under their feet grew less and less resilient, and
water oozed out of it as they trod; soon Lanu turned back towards them
in despair.

"I do not know where we went," he said pathetically. "I can see no
more."

He had been proud to guide them up to this moment, and now he was
pitifully aware of his shortcomings, no longer a pert young man, but a
child again. And once more they all looked at Loa, while round them the
silent forest waited for his decision.

"I will tell you which way we shall go," said Loa--he said it to comfort
Lanu more than for any other reason, for he had no plan in his mind at
that moment.

He looked round him at the silent trees, at the glades opening up around
him. He could not think while he looked at them, and so he pressed his
fists against his eyes as a stimulus to thought, pressed them firmly in
as he used to do when he was a god and had a decision to make. The
turning lights before his eyes were not disturbing like those silent
glades. His mind grappled with the problem, to bear it down by sheer
strength like an unpracticed giant overpowering a skilled lightweight
wrestler. Seeping through this bog was a little river, a childish
version of the big river wherein his sister the moon was wont to hide
herself. The superstitions of his lifetime warred with the hard logic
inculcated by his recent experiences, for his first tendency was to
think of the little stream as being endowed with human likes and
dislikes, as being likely to wander here and there in accordance with
its own whim, stopping if it saw fit, going on or going back if it saw
fit. But he made himself realize that rivers run eternally in the same
way, that some unchangeable law made them do so, just as water would
always run out of a tilted bowl. A weak mortal--or an unguided god, for
Loa was not quite ready to admit his mortality to himself--might wander
in the forest in a thousand directions with no definition of route at
all. But a stream must flow from somewhere to somewhere. It at least had
a unity of purpose a human could not display.

"Where is the water?" he asked of Lanu, taking his hands from his eyes.

"It is here, my father," said Lanu.

"Lord," interposed Musini, correcting him.

"No," said Loa. "We are men together, and I am father of Lanu."

Lanu's delighted grin was ample reward for the condescension the
fondness of Loa's heart had evoked. They plodded through the mud to
where the little stream lay between its flat banks; the trees met above
it, and all about them their black and naked roots twined over the mud.
Loa plucked a fragment of bark from a tree trunk and dropped it into the
center of the stream while the others breathlessly awaited his decision.
The current here was hardly perceptible, but very slowly the bit of bark
moved with the water relative to the bank; Loa was watching it as
intently as he had ever watched the heaped rib bones in the firelight.
He noted the motion, and looked downstream to where the little river
lost itself to view amid the trees.

"That is the way we shall go," he said.

He said it with all his natural authority; he made no attempt to analyze
the motives that had brought about this decision. Enough confidence in
his powers still lingered with him for him to feel that whatever he
might be guided to do must be right. And he was sustained in his
confidence by the reception given to his decision by the others. They
were lost in the forest, uneasy, aimless, and their misgivings had
returned with redoubled force when Lanu had lost the track. It was
intensely reassuring to them for someone to set them on the move again
in accordance with some definite plan, any plan, especially when they
could feel that Loa's supernatural powers would ensure that it was a
good plan. It raised them from depression to something better than
resignation, and started them again upon their vast journey with new
strength.




CHAPTER X


There were advantages and disadvantages about following the course of
the sluggish stream through the forest. The marshy nature of the soil
altered the prevailing character of the trees; they were not quite so
monstrous, so that the smaller species had a chance of survival; there
were wood beans and amoma to be found, and the marshes contained numbers
of bullfrogs, big creatures, which could be caught if the four wanderers
formed a wide circle, hip-deep in the ooze. The thighs of a dozen frogs,
torn from the wretched creatures while they were still alive, and eaten
raw, would have constituted a fair meal even for a man of Loa's vast
appetite, but they unfortunately never caught even a dozen between them.
But if the problem of food was rendered easier, the problem of travel
was rendered harder. Inexplicably here and there the forest would yield
altogether to growth of another sort, to belts of small trees and
tangled undergrowth. The change would at first be imperceptible; the
undergrowth would close round them insidiously like some wary enemy, and
they would recognize the nature of the country too late to turn back,
too late even to turn aside, for the extent of the belt on either hand
could not be guessed at. Then there would be nothing to do save to
plunge forward, stooping under, climbing over, hacking a path when
necessary, gratefully following a game-track when one presented itself
for a few yards, in an atmosphere yet more steamy and still than among
the tall trees, and far more noticeable because of the increased
physical exertion necessary to make progress. Even where the vegetation
was far too thick for the sky to be seen, they plunged along through
suffocating twilight until at last the slow disappearance of
undergrowth, an increase in the height of the trees, and eventually the
welcome feeling of leafmold underfoot, told them that they were through
the obstacle. In these struggles Loa, ax in hand, would lead, with Nessi
following him and Lanu following her and Musini bringing up the rear.

It was vastly difficult to retain any sense of direction in that kind of
jungle, but they learned that it was a help for them all to echo a cry
by Loa, who, hearing the shouts behind him, could judge the direction in
which the little column was pointing, and that would help him to correct
his own new direction. His instincts were sound enough to save him from
ever becoming completely reversed as to his orientation while in the
undergrowth; on emergence once more into the dark groves a cast to the
right (they were following down the left bank of the stream) would
eventually--although sometimes only after a long and despairing
journey--bring them back to the boggy borders of the river. It was
impossible to stay close to the water's edge; the bogginess, the sharp
roots in the mud, even the leeches which lived there in great numbers,
prohibited that.

They were lean with their exertions--the once well-rounded Nessi was
lean, so that every rib could be counted, and her breasts shrunken and
her hipbones clearly apparent; and they were all scratched and cut so
that their bodies were covered with healing scars and open wounds. They
had purulent sores where ticks had burrowed into their skins or where
the bites of black ants had become infected, and yet they went on
through the forest from dawn until dark every day, for twelve hours each
day, and no question arose among them of ceasing this monstrous labor.
They were still faced with the same alternative, that to halt meant to
reconcile their minds to permanent settlement here in the forest, while
to go on meant still cherishing the hope of eventually reaching "home."
And in Loa's mind there were still some residual traces of his
confidence in himself as a god. Something within himself told him to
push on downstream, and nothing occurred to make him doubt this inward
inspiration, which drove him eternally onward and carried his followers
with him.

Yet he was by no means the perfect leader, for he was not nearly as
skilled in the details of forest life as were the others. He was
dependent on them to such an extent that it seems likely that had he
been alone he would have starved. He could not recognize sources of food
nearly as quickly as the others could; Musini did much to feed him and
even Lanu contributed, vaguely amused at this big father of his who was
so incompetent in some ways. He could not make fire--Musini and Lanu
were expert at it and could produce a flame in less than fifteen minutes
of work if the materials were not hard to find. They needed a lump of a
softish wood, and a foot-long stick of hard wood, and some handfuls of
the rotting fiber pulled from under the bark of a fallen tree. They
would loop the string of Lanu's bow round the stick, and then restring
the bow. Musini pressed the end of the stick firmly into the block of
wood, while Lanu moved the bow from side to side, rotating the stick
rapidly against the block, cutting a short shallow groove into its
grain. As the groove grew hot Musini, still pressing the stick hard
against the block, would take a handful of dry fiber and cram it round
the rotating point, pressing it down into the groove. The fiber grew
hot, the sparks were caught in it, and soon Musini bent to blow into the
handful, coaxing it into a glow that could with skillful management be
transferred to light dry wood kept ready to hand. It was a series of
operations with which Musini had long been familiar, and which she
carried out with the skill of long practice. With the fire so obtained
they could toast into digestibility the wood beans gathered during the
day, and anything they might have in the nature of meat could be cooked
on long sticks. The smell of the fire, the smoke by day and the flame by
night, would reveal their position to the little people, but that was a
risk they had to take. So far they had seen nothing of them except their
handiwork--the poisoned skewers in the trails, and the deadfalls
overhanging them.

In the lighting of fires, in most of the hunting for food, Loa was of
less use than Musini and Lanu, even less than Nessi. He was both
inexperienced and ignorant; it was as if in these practical affairs of
daily life his wife and child accorded him a good-humored toleration,
even a tolerant contempt. He was to be reverently followed implicitly in
matters the others knew nothing about, such as the route they should
follow, but when it came to digging out white ants, or toasting frogs'
legs on a stick before a fire, he was demonstrably less capable than
they were. Lanu would sigh with a resignation prematurely adult, but
Musini was even capable of shoving Loa aside. Loa was content to let it
be so, for it did not lessen his opinion of himself--it did not even
change it--that he should be unable to carry out duties always relegated
to boys and women. He was content to squat and think his ponderous
thoughts while the women might busy themselves, while Lanu might address
himself to shaping a new arrow, chipping and whittling with his little
ax, rubbing down on a stone, braiding the binding for the head out of
creeper-fibers. Loa could squat and meditate, and eat the food they gave
him, while Musini harassed Nessi as always with her sharp tongue. And at
night he slept in Musini's loving but skinny arms.

It was ironical in consequence that Loa obtained for them one of the
best meals they had. He was walking through the forest carrying his
flail, the long pole that had once been his yoke, with the links of iron
chain dangling from it, when he disturbed the black snake. Seven feet
long it was, as thick nearly as a man's thigh, one of the largest
specimens of the most deadly inhabitant of the forest. Loa saw the snake
just in time and stopped; the snake was coiled, ready to defend itself,
not seeking to strike needlessly, its eyes glaring coldly back at him.
Loa stood as still as a statue, with every muscle tense, and then at
last he stepped aside to circle round the thing. The black snake, coldly
confident in its power, turned its flat head to watch him. Yet there was
a second when Loa had an opening, and Loa seized the opportunity. He
struck like lightning with his flail, muscles and eye coordinating with
the exactitude of a primitive man's, his prodigious strength swinging
his weapon at a speed equal to the snake's. The iron links struck into
the snake just behind the head, probably disabling the creature at that
single blow, but Loa struck again and again and again at the coils as
they straightened and bent, not ceasing until his arms were weary and
the sweat was running down him in rivers. Before him the snake still
moved, its uncoordinated segments heaving although its back was broken
in a dozen places. Loa raised his voice in a shout of triumph which
brought the others running to him, to look down from a safe distance at
the dying death. With his flail Loa carefully poked the head free from
the coils--the mouth still gaped and shut--and pounded it into an
unrecognizable mass, and even then he was not satisfied until he had
taken the little ax and severed the shattered head from the body. He did
so with another exultant shout, in which the others joined.

Here was food in plenty, pounds and pounds of it, and none of your
belly-aching beans at that, but meat--rich, delightful meat. They camped
on the spot; they lit a fire, and Lanu went to work with his ax,
skinning the creature as well as he could and hacking it into vast
collops--disregarding its slight writhing at each blow--which soon were
frizzling over the fire and giving out a savor that brought the water
into Loa's mouth as he waited. He burned his fingers, callused though
they were, as he seized the hot meat when it was given him; he burned
his mouth as he bit into it. Juicy meat, fit food for a god; his big
white teeth tore the meat from the bones and he swallowed it down with
unmatched pleasure. And when that was finished there was another collop
ready to be eaten, and after that another, so that the first pleasure of
gratifying a fierce appetite blended with the next of eating steadily to
fill an empty stomach, and from that he could progress to the next
wonderful step of packing tight a stomach already comfortably full. To
eat although he felt he could eat no more was a gratification of the
mind acutely pleasurable after so long a while with never enough to eat.
He ceased to squat, unable to bear longer the pressure of his thighs
against his bulging belly. He lay on his side to eat his last collop,
and he feebly let fall the last fragments, lying out straight and
enjoying the perverse pleasure of the pain of overeating. He groaned in
delightful agony.

It was that night that Loa added Nessi to his long list of wives, and
presumably it was because that night he was filled with meat. Ura had
been Nessi's husband, but Ura was most likely dead, and Nessi's child
was dead, and it was likely that Nessi was a piece of property left
without any owner at all, and in that case Loa was entitled to inherit,
as he always did in similar circumstances. That was the only way in
which a widow could come into anyone's hands who was not a relation, but
it was perfectly legal and not unprecedented; but Loa had no thoughts
about legality or precedents, and neither, it is to be feared, had
Nessi, when Loa reached out his big arms to her in the faint light of
the dying fire. It was a plain ebullition of animal spirits; for both of
them it was a strange contrast, after having been attached to each other
for so long by a five-foot pole, that added a fierce savor to their
embrace--and for Loa there was the added contrast of Nessi's gentle
submission after Musini's more exacting affection.

Next morning Musini was more bitter of tongue and chiding than ever, and
Nessi was pert and inclined to be disrespectful to her, tossing her head
at some request of Musini's. Musini darted a glance at Loa to see what
his reaction would be, but Loa was experienced in the ways of rival
wives--he was especially experienced in Musini's behavior in these
conditions--and he blandly ignored the whole incident. He had no
intention of being involved in any arguments, and he acted as if he had
been completely unaware of any friction at all. He took his flail and
started off on the day's march; the ants during the night had made a
clean sweep of the remaining fragments of the snake, so that only white
bones remained round the ashes of the fire, and already he was hungry,
perhaps as a result of his exertions in the night. Certainly he was
thirsty; he scooped up handfuls of water from the stream when he walked
down to it and drank them with eagerness, and then he set his face
downstream on the two coincident businesses of the day, to find that
day's food and to go on towards home--if indeed home lay in that
direction. And Nessi stayed close at his side, all that day and all that
night.

****

The sky, unseen above the tops of the trees, was disturbed. Day after
day in the late evening, the thunder would roll deafeningly, the flashes
of lightning were bright enough to illuminate the forest so that the
tree trunks could momentarily be seen, and the rain came streaming down
in an abundance that spared nothing and no one, causing Loa and his
followers hideous discomfort. The little people, in their normal life in
the forest, used to counter this difficulty by erecting huts of phrynia
leaves, temporary encampments which gave them shelter for several days
before they were driven to move on by the consumption of the local food
supply, but Loa's people had not the trick of it, and in any case never
allowed themselves time before nightfall for any such labor. They had to
endure their discomfort, changing their positions on the chilly wet
leafmold, shifting back hurriedly when some alteration in conditions
above them, some gust of wind perhaps, let loose a torrent of water,
falling as if squirted from a hose upon naked skin, down through the
roaring darkness. It meant sore heads and bad tempers in the morning,
accentuating the nagging ill humor of Musini and the stubborn defiance
of Nessi. Even Lanu was at times peevish and irritable, despite his
perennial pride in doing man's work; and if the rain came on unusually
early, making it impossible to light a fire at which to cook the wood
beans they had gathered during the day, it meant going to bed
supperless, and an early halt next day to enable them to satisfy their
consuming hunger.

Yet there were days when there was compensation for their hardship. They
were struggling through one of the stretches of forest where the growth
grew thick, where above them the roof of greenery grew thin so as at
times even to let through shafts of actual sunlight, when Lanu raised
his voice in a high-pitched squeal, soaring up, up, up nearly to the
pitch of a bat's squeak.

"Plantains! Plantains! Real plantains!" squealed Lanu.

"Never!" said Loa; that was his immediate reaction to the suggestion
that plantains might be found growing in the virgin forest, but he
checked himself when he remembered that Lanu might still be a child in
years but was a man in the forest.

"Plantains!" cried Musini as Loa made his way through the undergrowth
towards them.

So they were; desirable hands of fruit, each plantain almost the size of
a man's forearm, many of them verging upon ripeness. Loa and Musini and
Lanu, and Nessi when she straggled up to them, stood and gazed at them
hanging close above their heads, dappled with sunshine.

"People have lived here," decided Musini. "This was a garden."

It seemed the only possible theory. The tangled jungle about them, of
saplings and creepers, had until recently been a town clearing, and the
trees had not yet grown sufficiently tall, and the parasites not
sufficiently numerous, to destroy the plantain trees. The plantain in
its Central African form is a product of civilization, which can only
live with the help of man, who must fell the trees and root up the
creepers to give it breathing space; the moment man's attention lapses,
the forest crowds in again to suffocate the plantain. Normally a
clearing will provide two or three crops before the exhaustion of the
soil makes it desirable to make a fresh clearing and replant the
plantain suckers. But this could not be an exhausted clearing, for here
were the plantains in full bearing. And that mass of vegetation over
there, Loa realized, of tangled vine and gay orchids, must be the stump
of a felled tree, buried already under parasites, and yet not felled too
long ago. There was no word in Loa's vocabulary for "year" or "month,"
living as he did on the Equator where there was never any change of
season, but he guessed that that tree could not have been felled at most
more than two fruitings of the plantain ago. But where were the men who
had felled the tree? He wrinkled his forehead momentarily over the
puzzle before he put it aside to indulge himself in the pleasurable
knowledge that here were plantains ripe for eating.

Lanu and he hacked a clearing in the steamy undergrowth, felling and
dragging aside saplings and creepers alike, so that he could look up and
see blue sky above him, a hole in the greenery which had roofed him in
for so many days, over the edge of which his brother the sun glared down
at him brassily. Loa saluted him with fraternal affection. The habits of
thought of a lifetime were not so easily cast aside; whatever doubts Loa
entertained regarding his being a god, he still could not see the sun
without an instinctive family feeling. Here there was plenty of young
sappy wood for the gratings before the fire on which plantains could be
cooked, and Musini and Nessi prepared the food, not without the usual
friction. Nothing Nessi did seemed to satisfy Musini, and nothing Musini
said pleased Nessi. But the plantains were delicious. All their lives
they had been accustomed to a diet in large part of bananas, and a
return to them after all this time was gratifying. Loa, gulping down the
starchy things, never spared a thought for the old days when he had
complained bitterly about being given bananas for dinner. He ate with
contentment, and Lanu, squatting beside him, ate with relish.

It was not merely a meal for today; the bananas would provide a meal for
tomorrow and the day after, for, split in two and toasted before the
fire, they shrank into leathery morsels that could be pressed together
into lumps which could at least sustain life. With the certain prospect
of two days' food before them, they were raised infinitely above the
status of nomads living from meal to meal, and they were all vaguely
conscious of their bettered station in life, temporary though it might
be. At the thought of the temporary nature of the change Loa felt a tiny
temptation. Here were bananas, the staff of life. It was open to them to
stay where they were, forever, to make a fresh clearing, to build
themselves houses, to begin a new town. But he put the temptation aside
without even considering it and without even knowing he had been
tempted. He was going "home," and the difficulties he had encountered so
far in the forest made no difference to his resolution.

"We need more plantains," said Musini. "Come, Nessi!"

The two women left Loa and Lanu sitting together. Lanu was preparing a
bow for his father out of one of the saplings they had cut; he was
shaping the stave with his little ax, fining it down progressively
towards the ends, with many a careful look along the length of it to
make sure he was keeping it balanced.

"A big bow this will be, my father," he said. "The cord will have to be
tough for you to draw it to the full."

"Musini will prepare the cord, and then your father will draw it," said
Loa, the contentment arising from a stomach full of plantains making him
drowsy. Night was gathering for its final rush upon them, and he was
ready to sleep.

"I sent an arrow today," gossiped Lanu, "against a bird beside the
stream. Gray and white he was in color. Oh, how he flew back into the
trees when my arrow went past him! My arrow plunged into the marsh and I
lost it--a good arrow it was, too. When I have finished this bow I must
make many more, both for you and for me."

He chipped away delicately with the ax at the bowstave; the fine steel
edge took off the shavings as neatly as could be desired. Lanu,
squatting with the bow between his knees, was an epitome of mankind. He
was using steel and making a bow, two of the greatest inventions which
have brought about man's material progress. But more than that; he was
making a bow not for instant use, but against a future need, displaying
that thought for the morrow which enables man to rise superior to the
animals about him. And also he had not invented the bow; he was copying
what he had seen other men doing, making use of tradition whereby every
generation can rise superior to the preceding one. Tools, forethought,
and tradition made the history of man's advance, and the boy with the ax
and the bow exemplified all of them.

Musini came quietly back with a hand of bananas on her back, and
squatted down to peel them and dry them at the glowing fire; Lanu gave
her a moment's attention as he worked on the bow.

"We shall need a long stout cord for this bow, my mother," he said.

"I will make it," she answered quietly. She licked her fingers to keep
them from burning, and began to turn the bananas on the wooden grill.

"I could eat more now," said Lanu, and Musini handed him a hot plantain
without demur, and brought one to Loa when he held out his hand.

The minutes passed as they ate and worked and gossiped; Loa found
himself nodding off in the darkness as sleep crept upon him.

"It is dark now," he said. "Where is Nessi?"

Musini came over to him from out of the faint light of the fire.

"Do you always want Nessi, Lord?" she asked softly. "Here am I, the
mother of Lanu, and here is your bed which I have prepared of banana
leaves. Think no more about Nessi tonight."

Loa was too well-fed and sleepy to question the arrangement.

"Lord," whispered Musini in the darkness, "I--I--am your servant."

That was a declaration of consuming love in the limited vocabulary of
Musini and Loa. A leopard snarled frightfully in the treetops not far
off, and the monkeys he was stalking chattered and bustled in affright,
and the sound of their terrified movements came down to the unhearing
ears below. Then simultaneously came the last frantic shriek of a
stupefied monkey who had fled along a branch within reach of the waiting
leopard, and the triumphant howl of the leopard as his iron claws closed
upon it. Then there was silence through the forest.

And in the morning Nessi was not with them, although so assiduously did
Musini attend to their wants that her absence was not forcibly called to
their attention. Musini found embers in the remains of the fire, and
blew them into a glow. She toasted a fresh supply of bananas for their
morning meal. She wrapped fresh leaves round the bananas she had dried
the night before, and she bound them with creepers to make the bundles
easy to carry. Loa heaved himself up a little stiffly in the wet morning
air, and only now did he bring thought to bear on the subject of Nessi's
absence. It occurred to him that she was perhaps sulking some distance
off because he had chosen to lie in the arms of Musini the night before.
Women had curious whims and fads, and took exception to the oddest
things.

Well, he was not going to involve himself in any of the women's
quarrels. Let them settle them among themselves. He stepped off into the
undergrowth, flourishing his flail, his feet leading him along the path
they had trodden down towards the banana trees, and there he found
Nessi, and knew the reason why she had not come back to them. The
quarrel between her and Musini was undoubtedly settled. The ants were
swarming over Nessi, into her open eyes, and the gaping mouth from which
a blackened tongue protruded, and over the body which was already
swollen with corruption after the long hot night. Loa saw all this, and
walked quickly back to the others, and Musini raised her eyes from her
work to look at him intently.

Lanu's thoughts were progressing along the same lines as had Loa's.

"Where is Nessi?" he asked. "We wait for her."

Loa moodily poked the ashes of the fire with the end of his flail, and
at length Musini answered for him.

"We shall wait no longer for Nessi," she said. "She will not come with
us today, nor ever."

"But why not?" asked Lanu, yet as he asked the question a glance at his
parents' attitudes gave him some hint of the truth.

"We shall go on without her, my son," said Loa, heavily.

"Indeed we shall," said Musini, and with those words Loa caught a vague
glimpse of himself in his true role.

God he might still be, but he was a family god now, literally familiar
and not to be feared. To be humored, perhaps, placated a little when
necessary; something more like a mascot than a tribal deity, to be led
and coaxed in the ordinary affairs of life. The powers he had were
something unaccountable but not because of them was he to be dreaded. He
might know the way through the forest; he might at some future time
again make use of supernatural forces when he read the past or divined
the future with the heaped-up bones; he might be more than man in some
ways, but in others--at least in Musini's eyes and probably in
Lanu's--he was less. He could not carve a bow or make a fire, and to
that extent he was dependent and parasitic upon his family.

Loa felt all this, although he did not think it out logically. But when
they left their camping place and set out on their day's march he
purposely did not lead them past Nessi's body. He did not want Lanu to
know every detail of the truth, for it seemed to preserve for himself a
little of his dignity if Lanu did not know everything. This was a
tottering world; to find women not only resenting their husband's
polygamy but actually taking such drastic steps about it was almost as
great a shock to him as his original deposition from divinity. And
during the day Musini strung phrynia leaves on a length of creeper and
made for herself a kilt which she girt about her waist. It was a saucy
and provocative garment, like those which marriageable girls
extemporized before they graduated to the more sober bark cloth of
marriage--bark cloth took long to prepare and there was no chance of
making any here, so that there was plenty of excuse for Musini's action,
and yet the association of ideas was somewhat disturbing. Until now she
had been apparently content to go naked.




CHAPTER XI


The old clearing in which they had discovered the banana trees was of
great extent; they had to struggle for a long way through tangled
undergrowth in the steaming heat, climbing over fallen trees, hacking
their way through bushes. There was a wide area of young forest, where
the creeper-wreathed saplings were just beginning to assert their
mastery over the more lowly forms of vegetation. It was a level area,
and in a clairvoyant moment Loa realized that it was the actual site of
a town. Houses had stood here, and presumably there had been a big
central street, and the surface during the lives of countless
generations had been worn down to the bare earth. Catastrophe--fire,
presumably--had come to the town, and had swept it utterly out of
existence, and now the saplings sprouted where once the houses had
stood, and the creepers and mosses covered the ground. A raid by the
gray-faced men may have caused the fire. No one would ever know.

The little people were present in the forest round here in their usual
numbers, all the same, for the wanderers were continually seeing their
ax marks on the trees, and sometimes their poisoned skewers in the
paths. And then one day they met them face to face--or rather a single
one of them, first, who appeared at one end of a short glade when they
entered the other. He vanished in a twinkling behind a tree, from which
a second later one of his short arrows came lobbing towards them, so
slowly that they could distinctly see the single leaf which feathered it
rotating in its flight. Yet slowly as the arrow came it bore death on
its point, they knew. They sheltered behind the trunks, Lanu peering
round with an arrow on his string ready to shoot back when a target
should present itself. But the little man behind the tree had raised his
voice in a loud cry to his companions, and they heard answering cries.
Their peril was extreme; if they stayed where they were they would soon
be surrounded, and if they moved to their right they might be hemmed in
against the river and its marshes, and if they retreated they would
come, he knew, to a stretch of difficult country. To the left lay their
hope of safety.

"Come," said Loa, looking round at the other two, at Lanu grinning
boylike with excitement and Musini tense and anxious behind the tree.

Together they leaped across the glade, risking the arrow flight, to the
safety of the trees beyond. Loa's mind was working automatically; with
the tail of his eye he was watching the trees, noticing the passages
through them, lest there should be too much danger in exposing
themselves in their regular progress across successive glades. They
paused at last for breath in the lee of a thicket, and Loa could think
again about what they should do next. They could withdraw, hoping to get
round the tangled country at their backs, or they could continue to
circle to their left to pass round the little people altogether, and
this was the sensible course to take, for the alternative meant actually
a mere postponement of the problem. Loa gesticulated to demand silence
and that they should follow him. He rounded the thicket and they began a
cautious progress through the forest, flitting from one tree to the
next, waiting to peer and to listen, and then flitting on. His own bow
was slung across his back, nor would he take it in hand. He had Lanu
beside him to shoot when necessary, and he himself carried that which
would deal out a quicker death than the poisoned arrow. Loa held the
chain of his flail close against the staff, so as to prevent its
rattling, and their feet made no noise upon the spongy leafmold, and all
round them prevailed the stillness of the forest. Yet through that
stillness, they knew, little men were creeping, with arrow on string,
seeking for them, little men to whom they were only meat on two legs. At
that thought Loa could not prevent himself from glancing down his naked
body whose joints might soon be roasting over a fire. And he himself,
the Loa who dwelt in this body...?

He was in too great danger to continue such an unprofitable speculation;
he shook it off, and flitted on to the next tree, and from there to the
next. In their attempt to achieve silence they were more successful than
even the little people. As Loa stood behind his tree making ready for
his next move he heard a tiny sound, a foreign sound, distinguished from
the insect noises of the forest and, his ears told him, not related to
the overworld above the treetops; one single brief noise of wood against
wood--an arrow against a bowstave? A bowstave against a tree trunk? He
swiveled his eyes round towards Lanu behind his tree and Lanu was
looking at him, with a world of meaning in his expression. He, too, had
heard the sound. They froze in their attitudes behind the trees, utterly
tense, only Loa's eyeballs moving as he stared through the creeper which
swathed the tree trunk that sheltered him. So they waited, their
straining ears rewarded by no further sound.

And then Loa saw an instant of movement, so brief that his eyes were not
quick enough to pick up any details, an instant of something showing and
then disappearing, behind a tree. He looked at Lanu, and Lanu had seen
it too. His knees were slightly bent so as to give him more purchase for
the instant drawing of his bow. Then Loa saw another movement, this time
a trifle more prolonged, sufficient for his eyes to register a pale
brown figure moving from one tree to the next, and immediately later
another flash of movement followed. A little bowman was coming
diagonally across their front with all the precaution to be expected of
a man who knew that there were enemies in the forest. He was unaware of
their immediate presence, all the same, as his movements and his
direction proved. It was impossible to guess his future course, whether
Lanu would be able to get a clear shot at him or not. Loa knew that Lanu
was ready to seize any opportunity; a glance back at Musini showed her
standing like a statue. Whether she knew what was going on or not she
was sensibly imitating her menfolk in making no movement at all, and as
she stood she would remain invisible to the little man for a long time
to come.

The little man came on to another tree; his next advance might expose
him to an arrow from Lanu's bow. But it did not, for the pygmy chose
instead--by pure chance, obviously--another route which kept a couple of
trees in a direct line between him and Lanu. This time, as the little
man paused before going forward again, Loa could see part of him quite
plainly: the naked shoulder and left arm, the hand holding the bow, and
the forearm protected against the bowstring by its bracer of wood. The
faint breath of wind that was stealing through the forest was luckily
blowing away from him--the little people have keen noses, and Loa was
sweating with excitement. Loa waited ready to spring. The distance was
too great for him to charge yet, for the little man would hear him in
plenty of time to draw his bow and send a poisoned arrow home. And when
the little man hurried forward again no opportunity presented
itself--Loa would have had to pass round a tree to intercept him, and
the delay might be fatal, as Loa decided. Now the little man was no more
than twenty-five yards off, out of sight altogether again behind his
tree. Loa could only know he was there without seeing him; he could only
wait, poised, hardly able to believe that the little man could be
ignorant of their proximity. Yet he was. He emerged from his tree to
move on to the next, still not offering a clear shot for Lanu, and Loa
hurled himself forward in one frightful leap. The little man heard Loa's
first movement, and swung round, but he was far too late. A swinging
blow from the flail struck the left hand that held the bow forward; the
flail circled without losing its momentum and the next blow fell on the
little man's head with its sparse peppercorn curls. After that it was
like killing the snake, raining blow on blow on a body that writhed
feebly at first and then lay quite still.

Lanu was beside Loa, dancing with excitement after his long restraint,
but his good sense was displayed in the fact that while he still had an
arrow on his bowstring he had not discharged it. He spurned the dead
body with his naked foot, capering in triumph, but Loa turned upon him
with a warning gesture, and he instantly fell silent again. They had
made too much noise as it was, with an unknown number of enemies
prowling through the forest in search of them. But if it was a line (as
presumably it was) which was beating through the forest they had broken
it by killing the little bowman; it was the moment to push boldly
through. Loa beckoned his family after him and hurried forward with all
the speed precaution allowed. It was Musini who lingered by the dead
body to strip it of its poor plunder, the little bow and short arrows,
and the small knife stuck in the waistband. Loa frowned at her, for he
was afraid of the noise that these things might make carried in Musini's
hands, but Musini ignored his disapproval. She stuck the knife into her
own waistband, slung the bow on her shoulder, and followed her husband
with an arrow in each hand.

They hurried from tree to tree, waiting to look and to listen, and then
hastening on. They had just had the best possible lesson in the results
of incautious movement, and they took it to heart. Loa saw a footprint
in the soft earth beside a tree, and leaped aside instinctively as if it
were a snake, but it was only a pygmy's footprint, as the small size and
the high instep proved--perhaps it had been made by the man he had just
killed. At another moment Lanu held up his hand imperatively for them to
stop, trying the air with his nostrils. The others imitated his
behavior. Faint upon the air was a scent of wood smoke, the tiniest
trace of it. There was only the gentle air of wind through the forest,
which must be carrying to their nostrils the smoke of the little
people's cooking fires. The camp must be upwind in that direction, with
the women and the little children and the old men; the line they had
broken through was composed of the hunters. Loa swung round and headed
off in a fresh direction, for he had no wish to come to the camp--there
might still be some hunters there. They crossed a broad lane trampled
through the forest by a herd of elephants--the air was redolent with the
fresh droppings--and pushed on without pause. They were hungry and
thirsty, but there was neither time nor opportunity to gather food when
from behind any tree the feathered death might come without warning.
Later in the day came a storm, when Loa's brother the sky raved above
the treetops, his face dark with rage, until within the forest
everything was nearly as black as night, and streams of water poured
down upon them, chilling their naked bodies and wetting their braided
bowstrings until it would hardly be possible to send an arrow thirty
yards.

They camped in misery, huddling together, all three of them, at the foot
of a tree where the earth was not quite so damp, but they had hardly
lain down when a terrible event brought them to their feet again. The
sky had demonstrated his rage in a final access of mania. The roar of
the thunder was accompanied by a flash of lightning which played all
round them; they were deafened and blinded, and the thunder's roar was
accompanied by a rending crash. The tree next to theirs had been smitten
by the sky's lightning-ax, and had split from summit to bole. The
paralyzed seconds which followed were punctuated by the sounds of
wreckage falling. In the pitch-black night a great branch fell with a
crash beside them, shaking the earth. Above them the blasted tree slowly
tore through the spiderweb of creepers and crashed sideways down,
shattering the branches of its neighbors, until it hung at an angle,
unseen, over their heads, while the smaller fragments, falling from
branch to branch, rained down all round them.

They clung to each other in terror, with Lanu howling loudly in the
middle until Musini quieted him. Indeed the sky had been very angry with
them, and they were lucky that he had missed his aim. Yet what had they
done to rouse his anger thus? He was still very angry, for his ravings
could still be heard overhead; at any moment he might return and deal
another blow--Loa clung to Musini at the thought of that. What could it
be that had infuriated him so? What had they done differently from
usual? Loa searched his memory and his conscience. They had killed the
little man, but surely the sky would not be angry with his own brother
for the killing of a mere forest pygmy, and yet--_was_ the sky his
brother? The old habit of believing it, rudely shaken when the slavers
captured him, had asserted itself again lately, but never with its old
force, and now Loa's doubts returned redoubled. He might be--he probably
was--only one more inconsiderable ant creeping about among the trees. He
thought of the dead body of the pygmy, lying in the abandon of sudden
death, the red blood oozing from its wounds. The little people were
malevolent magicians. Perhaps by spells and incantations they had roused
the anger of the sky. Maybe his victim, after death, had ascended to the
sky and himself clamored for vengeance in a way that had admitted of no
denial. Maybe he had returned and was creeping about even now in this
utter blackness that surrounded them. Loa thought of the uncounted dead
of the forest and the numberless ghosts--why, even Nessi might be among
them--that might be stalking between the trees until terror overcame him
and he howled as loudly as Lanu had, and he searched urgently for
Musini's embrace, shaking with fright.

"Peace, peace, Lord," said Musini soothingly.

Her hands stroked his shoulders and his spine and by their soothing
touch moderated his terror. Such a little man that he had killed, a full
two feet shorter than Loa's own massive bulk. The low growl of thunder,
far distant now, that responded to this thought was in its way
reassuring. The sky may have been angry, but his anger was clearly
subsiding. He may have struck a mighty blow, but, when all was said and
done, the blow had missed. He, Loa, was still alive. He had once been
enslaved, but now at least he was free; a homeless wanderer in the
forest, but free. The pygmy may have invoked the anger of the sky; but
the pygmy was dead, and he was alive, with his flail ready to his hand
to kill any other little magicians that might cross his path. He would
not only kill them but he would eat them, roasting their bloody joints
at a fire and champing them up with his teeth. A magician roasted and
eaten and borne within his own belly could do him no harm--the idea of
it appealed to Loa's comic sense and set him off in a roar of laughter
that startled Musini far more than his howlings had done, for she was a
level-headed person and her husband's eccentric hysterias still
occasionally took her by surprise.

But the laughter was a more cheerful and reassuring symptom than
howlings of terror. All three of them gradually subsided into sleep as
the rain ceased, despite their fright and the wet and the hunger, and
when daylight came there was something oddly cheering in the sight of
the shattered branches all round them, and the huge tree hanging almost
directly over their heads--the whole top of it, and a portion of the
trunk, while the rest of the trunk was split and rent nearly to the
ground. In truth the sky had dealt a mighty blow and had missed. It was
even possible that Loa's brother the forest had come to their rescue,
for was not the treetop sustained by the creepers and branches of the
rest of the forest?

All the same, the forest might not really be their friend, for with
their awakening came the realization that they were utterly lost. Today
there was no friendly stream at hand to give them the comfort--even
perhaps the false comfort--of a sense of direction. Their wide detour of
yesterday, forced upon them by their encounter with the little people,
had taken them far away from it, and in which direction it now lay was
more than any of them could guess. All the glades of the forest looked
alike to them, and they could not tell by which one they had arrived the
night before in the darkness of the storm, and the deluges of rain had
washed away all hope of recognizing their trails.

"Which way, Lord?" asked Musini; her ignorance led her to address him
with the honorific, instead of as any wife might speak to any other
husband.

"I will tell you," said Loa, heavily.

Really he had no notion at all, but admitting it would be of no help to
anyone, and certainly not to himself. He squatted down and pressed his
fists into his eyesockets in the old gesture. It helped him to shut out
distracting influences; for that matter it helped to stop him from
thinking sensibly, so that his instincts and his subconscious memory
were allowed full play. In the inner recesses of his mind calculations
took place without his knowledge or volition, estimates of how far, and
in what directions, they had gone in their circuit round the little
people. Something was stirring in his brain when he stood up again and
peered round him. So slight was the trend of the ground about them, as
far as they could see through the trees, that no cool, thinking mind
could have noticed any at all, but all Loa's physical sensitiveness was
active. He had not thought at all--he had not even made the simple
deduction that downhill would lead to water--but he could tell which was
the way, and he could point to the right direction. He wanted to go
downhill, and he knew which was downhill.

"Come," he said, and he started off, so that the others had to collect
their poor impedimenta and hasten after him.

The thought that was in Loa's mind as he led the way was quite
irrelevant; he was thinking that if Nessi were still with them this
would be just the moment for her to say that she was hungry, and his
recollection of her peevishness went far to reconcile him to losing her.
For Musini never complained, bearing hardship and danger without a
word--Loa was thinking idly at this moment about how poorly Nessi would
have come through the ordeal of yesterday--and Lanu was a hard-bitten
veteran. It was Musini and Lanu who contributed the whole sum of their
small knowledge of how to live in the forest. It was Lanu who knew how
to make a bow, Musini who knew how to braid bowstrings. Loa did not even
yet know which creeper it was whose juice made arrow-poison. Musini had
the domestic knowledge, which was of great use; Lanu, thanks to his
boy's experiences in a childhood spent wandering about and around the
town, and his observation of what men did, knew of the other arts. But
Lanu's cheerful endurance of hardship, his fatalist carelessness about
the future, his manual skill and ingenuity were qualities beyond all
price. All that Loa could contribute to the partnership was his physical
strength and his mind, which thought quickly after his recent
experiences; and, above all, the fact that he was Loa, the born god,
accustomed to lead and to be obeyed, with a natural assurance that might
command confidence or at least blind faith.

Confidence and faith were put to the test during the next several days,
for it was not that day nor the next that they came back to the stream.
The forest undulates very slightly; it is to be presumed that Loa led
his party on a course far from straight, while the necessity for seeking
food naturally made their progress slow. They were hungry all the
time--hardly sustained by funguses and white ants--white ants took long
to collect and were not at all sustaining. The forest fruits did not
even cheat their stomachs, but rather mocked them. They saw traces of
the little people here and there, which keyed them up and set them
peering fiercely about them, and not only because of the danger. The
little people were meat, meat on two legs. Loa's starving stomach
yearned for a pygmy, and he longed to meet one alone in the forest--away
from his fellows--so that he and Lanu could kill him and make a fire on
the spot to cook him. But chance brought no little men their way.

In the end chance--or Loa's instincts--brought them back to the stream
again. For some time their course had lain along a minor watercourse, a
mere thread of water winding through boggy undergrowth. And then the
boggy area grew more extensive, the character of the forest changed
perceptibly in a morning's march, and they found themselves beside what
they had come to look upon as their own stream--if indeed it was the
original one; it may well have been some other. That did not matter, and
the thought did not occur to them. Here was a tree round whose base had
fallen ripened pods of forest beans; that was what mattered most, while
they could hear bullfrogs croaking in the distance. They camped at once,
and lit a fire, and Lanu and Loa left Musini beside it to pound and
roast beans into digestibility, while they went off to catch frogs.
While there were beans and frogs no one need despair.




CHAPTER XII


For four or five days more they followed the course of the stream. The
water surface of it was wider than before; here and there it even
widened into marshy pools a hundred feet across, so wide that the trees
did not meet over them and they could see the sky overhead, and with
reeds and weeds growing thickly in them, wherein lived a myriad birds
and a myriad mosquitoes. On one occasion Loa found Lanu crouching intent
and anxiously on a bit of firm ground beside one of these pools. Lanu
gesticulated for silence and Loa crouched beside him obediently. A big
gray parrot came flapping across the lake, and settled on a branch
within range, and Lanu trained his arrow round upon it inch by inch, the
motion almost imperceptible. At last he released the arrow, and with a
sharp hum of the cord it sped true and straight at the parrot, which
dropped stunned into the still water of the pool. Lanu gave a cry of
triumph, and started towards the bird; his feet were actually in the
muddy water at the edge when there was a surge upon the surface. A huge
evil head emerged with gaping jaws, the jaws armed with large conical
teeth--the most frightening, the most horrible sight they had ever seen.
The jaws engulfed the floating parrot, and the head disappeared, to be
replaced momentarily by a long tail that swept the water and then
vanished in a flurry; the ripples broke against Lanu's legs as he stood
petrified in the shallows. He fled back terrified to cling to Loa, and
Loa embraced him to comfort him, although he was terrified as well. No
transmitted memory of hairy devils could equal that sight, and the
unexpectedness of it added to the horror.

"What was it? What was it, Father?" asked Lanu, his frightened hands
clutching at Loa's bare skin.

"Some snake or other, without a doubt," said Loa, with all the calm he
could muster; he was preventing himself from shuddering at the memory
only by the strongest exertion of will. It was his love for Lanu that
made him exert this self-control when he had never tried to control
himself in his life.

"Let us go away from here, Father," said Lanu. "Let us go quickly."

"We shall go," said Loa, as soothingly as he could; he still made
himself retain his calm in the face of the infection of panic. "First
pick up your bow and your arrows and your ax. We need not leave those
for the snake."

The matter-of-fact words went far towards calming Lanu. He obediently
picked up his weapons with one hand while he wiped his beslobbered face
with the other. He was in no panic as he led the way from that fatal
pool, so that Loa walking in his footsteps felt that they were not
walking fast enough, although he refrained from saying so. That
water-dwelling devil had turned a cold, horrible eye upon them as he
swallowed the parrot; Loa, shuddering, wondered if that glance would
cause them to waste away, would cast them into the sleeping sickness,
perhaps, or bring them ill fortune in the matter of food or in their
next encounter with the little people. It had brought them ill fortune
at the moment, for the matter of that, because all they had for supper
that night were the beans Musini had bruised and toasted for them.

Musini listened to Lanu's voluble account of the horrible apparition in
the pool.

"Big, mother. Big--big--big!"

Words failed Lanu when he tried to tell of the ugliness of the creature,
or the frightening effect it had upon him.

"Indeed a big snake," said Musini, looking at Lanu's outspread arms.

She glanced at Loa, who was chewing beans, and the glance told her a
good deal about Loa's feelings; she knew him too well to be deceived by
that stolidity of manner.

"Such things live in the water," said Musini, indifferently, "as
elephants do in the forest."

It was Loa whom she was trying to cheer up; she herself was frightened
by Lanu's description, and in other circumstances she might have allowed
herself to indulge in her fear, but as it was she cunningly set herself
to minimize the occurrence. Her allusion to elephants was apt and
effective, for the elephant, huge and terrible though he was, was not
the object of utter fright such as this new creature inspired. Elephants
were the lords of the forest, roaming where they would; if they chose to
enter the town's banana grove and strip it of its crop nothing could
deter them, and yet elephants were not supernatural. Once in a great
while one would fall into the pits dug for them, and would die upon the
poisoned stakes and under the poisoned arrows shot into them by brave
men. Loa had eaten roast elephant, and a man could hardly cherish
superstitious fears of something he had eaten and whose tusks had for so
long adorned his house.

"That is so," agreed Loa, parentally pontifical, and Musini could see
that this time it was not all a pose. Being married to a god for a dozen
years had given her a curious insight into the supernatural.

****

They went on down the stream, skirting the marshes that bordered it. The
marshes grew wider and wider, compelling them to keep farther and
farther from the water, until at last, without almost no warning, they
came to the great river. Walking in the twilight of the forest, they
could see a growing whiteness beyond, shafts of light penetrating
between the tree trunks; they smelled the raw smell of the decaying
river vegetation, so unlike the faintly musty smell of the forest, but
they were not ready for the full revelation when they reached the river,
when they stepped out from the last tree into the immensity of the
daylight. The river was huge at this point, gleaming metallically in the
sunshine. The farther bank was a mere dark strip on the horizon, and
Loa, looking across at it, felt the familiar inward shrinking and
vertigo at the brightness and the immense distances. He wanted to cower
back, but Lanu was beside him troubled by no misgivings. Overhead Loa's
brother the sky, the vastest thing in all their experience, glared down
at them; but at their backs was his friendly brother, the forest, ready
to afford them shelter and protection. With the moral support of the
forest, and with Lanu and Musini beside him, Loa was willing to meet the
sky's unyielding stare--the sky that had flung lightning at them, the
sky which made them miserable with rain, the sky under which that awful
creature had emerged from the lake to swallow the parrot. But Lanu and
Musini were paying only scant attention to the sky; it was upon him that
they were conferring their blinking respect, for he had led them through
the trackless forest through all these endless days and had brought them
out here to the river, which they knew and recognized. Neither of them
knew how much chance had had to do with it; neither of them had followed
the obscure reasoning in Loa's mind--more instinct and superstition, if
the truth must be told, than reasoning--regarding the flowing downhill
of water, which, combined with his memory of the trend of the country,
had determined him on their course.

Neither Loa nor his family knew about the possibility of rivers flowing
in great arcs; they had no means of knowing about it. They turned and
set their faces downstream along the great river. They had a definite
route to follow, and were much the happier in consequence. They knew
that it was possible for someone lost in the forest to wander for a
lifetime in an area ten miles square, and they could be certain this at
least would not be their fate. It was not easy to travel at the water's
edge--in fact marshes and the obstructions of the forest made it almost
impossible--but it was easy enough to find their way along a short
distance from the river, certain that it was on their right hand. Often
they were within sight of the water and its marvels. They gazed
breathlessly one day at a herd of vast creatures disporting themselves
in the shallows, snorting and grunting, swimming with deceptive ease and
lumbering through the reeds like elephants in a manioc patch. More than
once they saw canoes upon the water, the paddles flashing in the
sunshine. That meant men were there, and not the little people of the
forest, either. Loa knew much about canoes as a result of his experience
in the slavers' camp, so that he could give answers to Lanu's eager
questions about them--conveying information that was satisfactory, if
not correct.

At the water's edge there was more chance of a fair shot at one of the
birds which flew in clouds among the trees, and once Loa himself managed
to hit a monkey with an arrow. The little brute fled straight up a tree
before the poison began to work in him, and he clung for a long time to
a branch, crying pitifully--Loa and Lanu would have laughed at the
amusing sight if they had not been so desperately interested in the
chance of getting fresh meat--as the paralysis crept over him, and even
when he showed no signs of life he still clung on, far out of reach,
while Loa and Lanu waited below, almost in despair before the muscles
relaxed and the dead monkey came tumbling down through the branches to
fall with a satisfactory thump to earth. That night they ate fresh meat
and rejoiced; it was fortunate, from the point of view of all forest
hunters, that the minute amount of poison introduced into an animal's
circulation paralyzed its brain but had no effect on the human stomach,
at least after cooking.

Not many days later, one afternoon, Lanu put back his head and tried the
air with his sensitive nostrils.

"There is something that I smell," he said.

Loa and Musini tried the air likewise.

"I smell nothing, my son," said Loa, and Musini agreed with him.

"Yet there is something," persisted Lanu.

He said so again that night when they camped, hungry after an
unprofitable day, and after an hour's march the next morning Musini,
too, turned to Loa with the remark that there was a scent in the air.
Loa blew his nostrils clear and tried the air again. Perhaps there was
something, the faintest smell of wood smoke, perhaps--a camp of the
little people a great way off, presumably. Lanu and Musini disagreed
with him. That was not the smell. And an hour later some variation in
the wind bore the smell down upon them in greater volume, and Loa knew
they were right. He sniffed carefully. Wood smoke undoubtedly was the
main constituent, but there was a series of undertones of odor as well.
A whole torrent of memories, of stored-up images, flooded into Loa's
mind as he sniffed. It was the smell of a town: the smell of wood smoke,
of cooking, of decaying vegetable matter, of refuse, of humanity--it was
the smell of home.

"That is the smell of a town," said Loa, announcing what Lanu and Musini
had long before suspected.

They looked at each other, all three of them, as they wondered what they
should do next.

"We shall have to go round it," said Loa.

With difficulty he was forming mental pictures of the situation. He had
never seen a map or a plan in his life, so that he could not slip into
the easy method of the civilized man of visualizing a map first and then
plotting a route upon it. He had to plod along step by step; at least
his experiences with the slavers had shown him other towns than his own,
but it was home that he knew best. He thought in terms of home; of a
town in the forest, with the river running some miles away from it.
Surrounding the town would be the old clearings and the new banana
groves and manioc gardens. Beyond the clearings there would be the area
frequently or habitually traversed by the men of the town, the hunters
wandering through the trees with their bows in the hope of a shot at
monkeys or birds, digging pitfalls for antelopes--or for elephants on
occasions when there was an unusual burst of communal energy--and closer
in there would be the fringe where the older children would seek for
forest fruits. It would have to be a tremendously wide sweep that would
carry Loa and his family right round the town without any possibility of
contact with any of the inhabitants. Also, in the neighborhood of the
town there was a far greater likelihood of meeting the little people,
who were attracted there by the chance of stealing plantains (Loa
remembered the depredations of the little people at home) and goats and
the coveted weapons of iron; and by the chance of getting for themselves
meat on two legs. Loa, exchanging glances with his family, knew that he
and they were in greater danger than usual.

Yet round the town they had to go. Loa strove, without arithmetic or
maps to help him, to calculate how long a journey it would be to go
safely round the town on the side away from the river. A day's march was
such a variable quantity. It depended both on the ease with which food
was found and upon the obstructions offered by the forest. The occasions
when town dwellers camped in the forest were very rare indeed, so
that--this was a triumph of Loa's calculating power--half a day's march
from the town would mean they were safe from town dwellers, though not
from the little people. To circle the town at a distance of half a day's
march and to come back to the river again would take--how long? Loa
could form no idea. It was far too difficult a problem for him. It meant
a prodigious number of days, he could be sure, and the detour into the
forest would be dangerous in another way, too. It might take them so
deep among the trees as to make it impossible for them to find their way
back to the river at all. After all their efforts they might be lost in
the forest. It would certainly be quicker, and might well be safer, to
push through between the town and the river. Loa put his limited
vocabulary to work to explain this to his wife and son, and the
suggestion met with their approval. They continued their way as close to
the water as they could, proceeding with the utmost caution. If some
lucky chance should bring them in contact with an isolated town dweller,
the question of meat for their supper might be solved. They were hungry
as usual.

The character of the riverbank changed as they went along. The land
began to trend upwards, with the water washing at the foot of a low
cliff of earth; even the nearly vertical face of the cliff was thickly
grown with vegetation, young trees projecting out from it almost
horizontally. No tree had a long life there with the cliff being
steadily undercut by the river, for this was the bluff at the far end of
a loop. They had to keep to the top of the cliff, for the water lapped
at its very foot. Behind them the sun sank slowly across the river, his
face almost obscured in a sullen haze.

They came to a point where the cliff face was seamed by a steep gully
running down to the water; a weak spot in the face had been deeply
undercut and had collapsed, leaving a fairly easy descent with a little
beach at the foot of it. It seemed a good place in which to camp, with
convenient access to water, while the sides of the gully would conceal
their fire at the bottom. As if to make the site completely desirable,
at the lip of the gully grew no fewer than three young trees of the
species of giant acacia, which gave them the forest beans which
constituted the bulkier half of their diet. With one accord they halted
there and busied themselves with preparations for the night, gathering
beans and dead wood. It was for Musini and Lanu to light the fire; Loa
saw them start work and then with ax and bow climbed back up the gully;
a little good fortune might bring them some addition to their meager
supper, and in any case it was desirable both to keep guard up here
against some surprise attack and to reconnoiter the ground round about.
At the head of the gully he paused to look back; down by the water Lanu
and Musini were bending over their preparations for a fire, while the
sun, now buried in a purple cloud, was slowly approaching the almost
invisible farther bank of the river. Right underneath it was a vague
speck--some canoe, possibly, on some mysterious journey.

Loa wandered off into the twilit forest. Despite the need for silence he
had to take the precaution of slicing with his ax a bit of bark from
some of the trees he passed, for it was necessary that he should find
his way back to the gully; in his left hand he held his bent bow, with
the string fitted into the groove of an arrow whose shaft was clasped
under his forefinger and thumb. A single motion would enable him to draw
and loose, should a monkey or a bird happen into range. Only a few black
leathery funguses rewarded his search, and he ate those as not worth the
trouble of carrying back; he found nothing else before the increasing
darkness of the forest warned him to return to the gully. He turned
back, to pick his way from blaze to blaze--even now his vigilance not
relaxing, lest some of the little people should be following up his
trail, unlikely though that might be with night coming on.

****

Faintly through the silent forest there came a high-pitched cry, twice
repeated. The first sound of it brought him to a halt, looking about him
with all the vigilance of a man who within an hour may be hanging on a
roasting spit, but the repetition sent him hurrying through the trees
with a reckless lack of precaution. It was Lanu's voice, he knew. Lanu
was in danger, in fear; Loa broke into a run, his heart pounding with
anxiety. He emerged at the top of the gully while it was still full
daylight. A wisp of smoke drifted out across the bronze river from a
little fire; but there was no human creature in the gully, no one at
all. He ran wildly down it, his naked feet sliding in the loose earth,
and there, beside the fire, he could read part of the story in the
footprints that had torn the ground round about it. Many men had been
there, and there had been something of a struggle. A single arrow, one
of Lanu's, lay at a distance from the fire, but everything else had
disappeared; save for that a clean sweep had been made. A thick chain of
footprints--where individual ones could be distinguished they pointed
both to and from the fire--led along the beach at the water's edge, and
Loa, following the tracks round the little point there, could read the
rest of the story in the mud, for there, with the water lapping up to
it, was a deep groove, the mark of a canoe grounding, with the muddled
footprints all about it.

It was all plain now. A canoe with many men in it, seven or eight at
least and perhaps a dozen, had crept into the shore here, concealed by
the point from Musini and Lanu in the gully. The men in the canoe had
seen the fire from the river and had paddled silently to the shore close
beside it. Creeping round the point they had peered round to see the
woman and the boy intent on their work at the fire--a pair of deep
footprints showed where a single scout had stood still for a long time
staring at them unseen to make sure it was not an ambush. Presumably he
had turned and beckoned to his fellows. Then had come the sudden rush;
Musini and Lanu had been seized--it was then they had uttered the
screams Loa had heard--and carried off to the canoe; and now they were
gone, Loa could not tell whither, for a canoe leaves no tracks. The sun
plunged into the forest across the river, leaving above it a pile of
purple cloud. In a few moments it would be dark, and Loa, distracted
with misery though he was, hastened back to the fire to search about it
in the last gleam of daylight. He did not find what he feared he might;
look as he would, he could see no drop of blood upon the torn-up earth.
Whatever else had happened, it was probable that neither Musini nor Lanu
had been wounded. No spear had pierced them, certainly. No club had
dashed out their brains; even if they had been merely clubbed into
insensibility a drop or two of blood would have probably fallen from the
battered scalp, and he could be almost sure that none had done so. Night
swept down upon him even while he bent to reread the story of the torn
earth. He stumbled back again to where the canoe had grooved the beach,
the last place where his wife and son had touched the earth, and there,
in the darkness, his misery overcame him. He sat down and wept, his
forearms on his bent knees, his face upon his forearms, shaken by his
sobs, while round him the water lapped and gurgled and chuckled.

In time he grew calmer, with the calmness of something approaching
despair. He looked out unseeing in the blackness of the night across the
river. Overhead a star or two showed faintly between the clouds; there
was no moon. Oddly at that moment of supreme misery he realized that he
had not, for a very long time, called the moon from out of her
retirement in the river. There had been a time when he and his whole
world had sincerely believed that she would not leave it if he did not
call her, that the nights would remain dark if he did not summon his
wayward sister back to the sky. His sister! Alone there by the
pitch-dark river Loa had a moment of self-realization, of self-contempt.
The moon was no more a sister of his than she was a sister of the little
people's. He was a mere mortal, like anyone else, and the most lonely
and miserable of mortals at that, and the most useless. It was his
grievous fault that Musini and Lanu had been captured. He remembered
with a sneer his precaution in going to reconnoiter the landward side of
their camp, without any thought at all for the peril that menaced them
from the water. He had even seen the canoe across the river, and in his
utter folly he had given it no thought. The dark invisible water lapping
at his feet mocked him as he sat with his face in his hands.

It was a terrible night, a night of misery and despair, in which his few
moments of sleep were tortured by frightful dreams. He was a gregarious
animal suddenly confronted with the possibility of lifelong compulsory
solitude, a defenseless animal without a friend in the world, the prey
of every living creature in the forest. But that was only part of his
emotion. He was stirred as deeply as might be by the loss of his wife
and child, Musini and Lanu, who had stood by him when he was a slave,
who had chosen to encounter hardship and peril to set him free, whose
devotion to him had never faltered. He had a sense not merely of
physical loss, but of spiritual loss as well. While there was emotion
left in him he wept for Musini and Lanu, until at last he was completely
exhausted. Even with the dawn he still sat in melancholy apathy.
Possibly he might have stayed there and starved if a new stimulus had
not aroused him. It beat upon his ear for some time before it penetrated
into his consciousness--the steady rhythm of a drum. A drum! There was
no doubt about it. Not very far away in the forest a drum was beating
out an exciting, triumphant meter, borne clearly through the trees to
his ears. He had no doubt that it came from the town whose odors his
nostrils could just detect. It called him to action, roused him to do
something.

His subconscious may have been at work during the night, underneath his
misery. Or the sound of the drum may merely have called forth a prodigy
of thinking in his brain. The town was near. Was it not possible that it
had been people from the town, incredibly using a canoe, who had
captured Musini and Lanu? And in that case was it not likely that Musini
and Lanu were still captives in the town? They had been carried off
alive--they probably had not been slain yet. It was not so much hope as
a ferocious determination that filled him and quickened his sluggish
pulse. He picked up ax and bow and arrows. A few forest beans scattered
round the remains of the fire caught his notice, and he ate them raw for
a scanty breakfast, and he drank deeply of the water of the river. Then
he started off towards the town, desperate, the enemy of mankind. The
sound of the drum came more and more clearly through the trees,
accompanying the scent of humanity. It almost made Loa abandon the
caution of movement which had become habitual to him; but he still
instinctively scanned the ground before him for pitfalls and poisoned
skewers; he still halted at every glade to look ahead and listen for
enemies. Along with the sound of the drum he now heard human voices,
roaring a chorus to the meter. There must be some kind of rejoicing in
the town.

His sense of direction told him that he was keeping closer to the river
than he expected, and he had not gone downhill at all--he was walking
along the top of the bluff. He had no clear idea of what he was going to
do; actually he was so desperate that he may have been courting sudden
death. The forest suddenly became dense and overgrown, with shrubs and
creepers intermingled, and, with the noise of the town increasing, he
guessed he had reached the edge of the belt of old clearings round the
town. With his mind suddenly made up, he plunged into the undergrowth,
creeping under, climbing over, hacking a way through with his ax,
keeping a wary eye open the while for snakes. The sweat poured down his
dark skin, for in the undergrowth the heat was intense and the labor
heavy. He wriggled on and on cautiously, with the din of the town
growing ever greater, until at last he parted a bush in front of him and
had a clear view. He could see a circle of houses of a strange
type--round houses, thatched differently from what he was accustomed to.
They faced onto a central space; between the houses he could see
something of it, and the coming and going of many people, first this way
and then that way. A dance was certainly in progress. He wanted a better
view than this, and he turned to his right and began to crawl along,
keeping in the final fringe of dense vegetation through which progress
was not too difficult and yet which screened him from possible sight as
long as he kept down. A hundred yards of this opened up a wider vista
between the huts. He could see fully into the central open space.
Cautiously he backed into the undergrowth, and, lying full length,
parted the grass stems before his eyes as he looked out. A man lying
flat is more likely to escape observation than one standing up, being
below the natural eye-level.

There were trees standing in this open space, unlike the main street of
his own town, and at the far side the dance was going on; more people
than he could count (and yet, he thought, less than had dwelled in his
own town) moving from side to side in a great semicircle to the beat of
the drum, which was out of his sight. Under a great tree a little group
of standing figures centered about a seated one; Loa could just make out
the movement of fans which, he guessed, were keeping the flies off the
chief. He had no word for "chief"; he had to phrase it to himself that
if this were his town that man would be he. He almost thought of the
chief as the "Loa" of the town--the clearest proof that Loa had learned
much in the last weeks regarding his own relative importance, both
present and past. But it was not the chief, it was not the dance, that
attracted Loa's attention. He did not spare so much as a glance for the
tethered goats which meant milk and meat. What attracted his attention
was a little palisade of stakes in the shade of another tree, a good
deal nearer. It was more than a palisade; it was a cage, wound about
with creepers. Loa's heart nearly came out of his mouth as he saw it and
guessed what it might imply. He swallowed painfully and fought down the
impulse to crawl farther out of the undergrowth for a nearer view. It
was just the sort of pen in which humans destined for food might be
fattened; but, look as he would, he could see nothing--so closely woven
were the sides of the pen and so deep the shade in which it stood--of
what was inside it, if anything.

Everything he could see of it told him that it was in use; it seemed to
be complete, and no one would trouble to rebuild a pen when the victims
had been taken out. But if the inmate, or inmates, were lying down--as
was to be expected--he would not be able to see them. Loa looked all
round the village and the open space. He was as near to the pen as he
could ever get unobserved; there would be no advantage in a further
change of position. He set himself to wait, to see what would happen.
The sun blazed down into the undergrowth around him so that he was in a
steady trickle of sweat; insects plagued him and hunger and thirst
assailed him, but he forced himself to lie there waiting; he called to
his assistance all the endless patience of the forest.

If there was a victim in the cage it might well be Musini or Lanu--they
even might both be there. He had not realized, when they camped the
night before, either how near they were to the town nor how near the
town was to the river. It was confirmation of his previous theory. Being
as near to the river as this the town might easily be populated by the
canoe-using people whom he knew to exist, and if it were, it seemed far
more likely that it was a canoe from this town which had captured his
wife and child than one from any other town. If that were the case it
would be Lanu and Musini who would be in that cage. Their captors would
certainly fatten them before eating them; Loa remembered realistically
how worn and thin they both were. He called forth fresh reserves of
patience.

At last the drum ceased to beat and the dance stopped. At first in ones
and twos and then in an increasing stream people began to leave the
place of the dance and distribute themselves through the town. Loa lay
very close to the earth and peered out with only one eye, for there was
much more chance of detection now that there were idle eyes to glance
round the circle of vegetation that hemmed in the town. People entered
the houses near at hand; Loa could hear the voices of the women,
sometimes raised stridently as they chided the children. Then an old
woman emerged from one of the houses; on her white hair she carried a
big wooden jar; in each hand a wooden dish. Loa watched her with tense
excitement. Straight to the pen she went, squatted carefully with her
head still upright to put down what she held in her hands, and then
lifted down the jar. Then she began to unfasten the pen. She passed in
the big jar, and received it back again--Loa could not see from whom.
Then she passed in one of the wooden platters, and proceeded to open the
pen at another point. She passed in the jar, took it back, and passed in
the other platter. She went to the first place again, took out the
platter, passed in the jar again, and received it back. She fastened up
the pen at that point, and then exactly repeated her actions at the
second place. Then, with empty jar and platters, she made her way back
to the house again. There could be no clearer proof that there were two
people in the pen--a child could have made that deduction. Loa was quite
certain. And the fact that two people were there made it more likely
that they were Lanu and Musini; pairs of victims must be rare.

Loa lay in the undergrowth while the sun mounted over the town and the
heat rose to its hideous maximum. It was plain enough that if he
intended to rescue his family he must wait until nightfall--a child
could have made that deduction, too. But it was not so easy to make
detailed plans. Loa had to make his unaccustomed mind think; what was
harder still, he had, almost for the first time in his life, to set
himself consciously to work observing and learning. He had to study the
town and its ways, basing his plans on what he saw and on the deductions
to be drawn from his observations. His forehead wrinkled with the
effort. And he was very thirsty, and if he had not been so acutely
conscious of his thirst he would have been unpleasantly hungry. It
called for all Loa's reserves of character to make himself lie there and
rivet his whole attention on what was going on before him.

On the far side of the clearing, over on his right, there seemed to be
an entrance into the town, by which numerous people came and went. Yet
the river must be very close at hand there. Yes, of course. There were
women coming and going, and without any doubt they were bearing water
jars on their heads; to judge by their gait, empty jars when they went
out and full ones when they returned. There was a house concealing the
actual pathway from Loa's view; he could only see people as they emerged
from it and as they entered into it. Yet there was just a subtle
difference in their manner of walking the moment they appeared or
disappeared; Loa strained his splendid eyesight to make sure. There
could be no doubt about it. At that point there was a steep downslope,
and that house must be built on the very lip of the bluff running down
to the river, and up that slope the town's drinking water must be
carried.

Men used the same entrance frequently. Loa saw a little group come
striding in with something of triumph in their manner. One of them bore
a string of glittering white things which he displayed for inspection to
the passers-by before disappearing into a house. Loa could not imagine
what they were, for he had never seen fish before, but he did at least
reach the conclusion that the town's canoes must lie at the water's edge
at the foot of the path there. He could think of no other reason for men
to use the path.

When, during the coming night, he had freed Musini and Lanu, they would
have to escape from the town. Over there was one possible exit; so much
he knew. At least half of the town was closely ringed in by tangled
second-growth forest, such as was sheltering him at the moment. It might
offer shelter, but it offered small possibility of escape. No one in
darkness could possibly make his way into the undergrowth for more than
a yard or two. It might be that the three of them could hide there
during the darkness, and with the coming of light make their way out
through the tangled belt--the way he had come--to the freedom of the
forest. That would be very dangerous, all the same, because the moment
the escape was discovered there would be a serious search, and they
might be tracked and hunted down in the undergrowth. It was a possible
scheme, but not a very good one. Loa's utterly untrained mind struggled
frantically with these alternatives. It was a terrible effort to deal
thus with theories, for he had done hardly any theoretical thinking in
his life. To weigh one intangible against another was for Loa an
exercise far more unusual and exhausting than the schoolmen had found
the theological speculations of the Middle Ages.

On the far side of the town, beyond the point where the dance had taken
place, women appeared every now and then carrying hands of bananas on
their heads. At that end of the town, as far as Loa could vaguely make
out, there was some sort of street running into the open square, and it
was from this street that the bananas were being brought in. That must
be the way to the cultivated ground, to the banana groves and the manioc
gardens, and it was another possible way of escape to the forest. But
Loa ruled that out as soon as his mind was able to weigh the pros and
cons; it was a long way over there, it involved going down a street, and
there was no certainty that the way would not be barred by clearings, or
that they could find it in the dark if it were not. Loa began to pay
more and more attention to the exit from the town to the river. He was
not consciously learning its bearings--his imagination was not lively
enough to lead him to do that--but he was learning them subconsciously.

Another old woman was carrying out food and drink to the pen. Loa
watched all her actions, which were just similar to those of the old
woman who had preceded her. He saw the big jar of water being handed in,
and he groaned with desire. His unexercised imagination was quite
capable of visualizing the cool water in that jar; his parched tongue
moved over his dry lips at the thought of a long drink. As thirst began
to consume him, Loa almost came to envy Musini and Lanu in their pen.
The temptation began to come to him to withdraw again into the overgrown
clearing, to find his way out through it back to the river where he
could slake his thirst in the hope of returning to his present hiding
place before dark. Loa resisted the temptation; everything about that
scheme was too dangerous. It was for the sake of Musini and Lanu that he
forbore; peril to him meant peril to them, and in that case he was
prepared to endure his thirst.

Thirst at least made him forget his hunger. The appetizing odors that
came from the cooking pots excited no emotion in him at all; he analyzed
them with curiosity and interest, but they did not make him hungry as he
lay there slowly roasting--simmering, rather--in the shade. The strange
unknown smell of cooking fish came to his nostrils, and he observed it
with distaste, for to him it was unpleasant; it heightened the
prejudice, the hatred, he felt towards this town, so that when a
stronger whiff of it than usual reached him he unconsciously wrinkled
his upper lip in a snarl and his hand went out to the ax that lay beside
him.

The great heat of the day was over now for him; it was a grateful
moment--a moment almost sharply defined--when the sun ceased to glare
down on him and the tops of the trees behind him interposed between him
and the sun. The shadows in the open space of the town became longer,
and with the movement of the sun he could see the pen more clearly. It
was very like any pen that would have been constructed in his own town,
except that it had been given little gable ends and ridgepole roof,
almost like the houses in his own town and in contrast with the houses
in this town. The roof was thatched with leaves, presumably to keep out
the rain, for the tree under which it stood gave it shade. Certainly
this town gave much attention to its captives. Even as Loa watched he
saw a third meal taken out to the pen, and how many had been given
before his arrival he did not know. Musini and Lanu were being well fed
in preparation for their feeding of others. And as the shadows grew
longer still, Loa saw the same old woman who had brought the last meal
escorted over to the pen by a couple of men. They took lengths of
creeper and tethered her to the pen, by the waist and by the ankle,
apparently--it was too far off for the smallest details to be seen--and
left her there. That was exactly the way Delli had been guarded after
her capture; it ensured that the prisoners would not pick apart during
the night the fibers that caged them in. That was all that was in the
minds of the townspeople--it was all that had been in Loa's mind when he
had given the same orders regarding Delli--but it was a complication
when it came to a question of rescue from without. Loa grimly noted on
which side of the pen the old woman chose to lie down.

Evening was nearly at hand now. The shadows of the trees were stretching
far, far, across the open space. A couple of boys gathered together the
half-dozen goats that had been tethered to browse on the edge of the
town, and herded them away to some unseen destination where presumably
they would be safe from the nocturnal attack of leopards. Everybody in
the town, it seemed, chose this time of day to come out to gossip and
exchange news, just as they did in Loa's own town. There were passers-by
innumerable in the open space--a few of them clustered now and then
about the pen to view the curious couple confined there. Loa thought
from their movements that they laughed heartily, and this puzzled him a
little. Even if he had remembered how everyone had laughed at Delli it
would not have helped him to draw the right conclusion. He had not
learned yet to be objective enough to think of Musini and Lanu as
figures of fun to strangers. He saw the spectators slap their thighs and
prance in apparent amusement, and he could not think why. But he did not
let that problem bother him; he conscientiously devoted those last few
minutes of daylight to a final study of the ground, so that when
darkness came he was ready for action.

The first impulse was to move at once, but he resisted it sternly. He
had to wait until the town was asleep. The limitations of his vocabulary
and the culture in which he lived expressed themselves in his lack of
any idea corresponding to the word "hour." He could divide the day from
sunrise to noon, from noon to sunset, but he could not express to
himself the idea of waiting a couple of hours. "As long as it would take
a man to get hungry" would have been one of his ways of expressing the
period of time it would be desirable to wait, but Loa was hungry already
and any such term would have appeared absurd to him in consequence. In
the utter darkness of the night there were a few gleams of light in the
town, but only two or three. On the far side there was the glow of a
fire, and near it were two small points of light. There could not well
be more, not even in this town where fish from the river supplemented an
almost purely carbohydrate diet. Oil to supply fat was far too scarce
and precious to be wasted in lamps, although even Loa was acquainted
with lamps--a wooden saucer of oil in which floated a lighted wick of
vegetable fiber. If men wanted to stay awake, they could sit in the dark
or by the light of a fire; but few men did. The night was the time for
sleep, eleven hours of it at least, and any light at night time
attracted so many insects as to make it undesirable to stay near it.

It was not surprising to see the lights soon go out and the fire die
away to nothingness, but Loa still waited. Now his brother the sky came
to his help--the sky which so often before had malignantly plagued him;
furthermore, the help the sky brought was in the form of the rain which
usually distressed him. There was a very distant rumble of thunder, so
distant that not even a glimmer of lightning was visible in the town,
and then came the first heavy drops, falling like pebbles on his back.
Loa blessed the rain. He turned over and opened his mouth to the sky,
and the rain that fell into it eased his frightful thirst. Soon it was
raining with African violence, deluging down as if the whole atmosphere
had been made of water. The roar of it was tremendous; he allowed
himself to wriggle out from the undergrowth into the open space, and he
instantly found a puddle from which he could drink his fill. While the
rain fell nothing could be seen or heard; now was the time for action.

The string of his bow had long been released. He slid his arm into the
loop and slung the bow over his shoulder, and then with ax in one hand
and two arrows in the other he proceeded to crawl forward towards the
pen. The roar of the rain made elaborate precautions unnecessary, but
Loa took no risks. He inched himself forward through the mud into which
the bare earth of the open space had immediately been converted. The
very houses between which he first passed were invisible on either side
of him. Chance depressions made big pools in which he had to be careful
not to splash, but all the same he went straight through them. There was
the danger that in the night he would not find the pen; although his
sense of direction was acute and although he had studied for so long the
line he had to follow he could not possibly risk making any detour from
the straight. He crawled on and on in the roaring darkness, on and on,
until, inevitably, the doubt began to grow in his mind as to whether he
had taken a wrong direction and had passed the pen by. For some moments
he stopped to consider that possibility, with the rain deluging upon
him, soaking his woolly hair so that the water poured into his eyes and
incommoded him. There was nothing for it but to crawl on; if his luck
had been bad he would know it when he reached the far side of the open
space, and that would be the time to think what he should do next. He
put forward his hand to resume crawling, and snatched it back as if it
had touched something red-hot. What he had touched was a wet and bony
human foot. During that time when he had been considering he had been
lying within a yard of the old woman tethered to the pen. As the
realization came to him he drew up his knees to spring. The old woman
uttered a bad-tempered squawk. She must have been nodding off even in
the rain, for she did not appreciate the significance of that slight
touch on her foot. Perhaps she had not felt it, perhaps she attributed
it to a wind-blown leaf, or perhaps in her stupefied condition she did
not react quickly to it although she knew what it implied. That little
squawk, almost unheard in the rain, was her instant undoing. The touch
of her foot and the sound of her voice told Loa--told his instincts, for
he acted quicker than thought--how her body was lying, and his spring
carried the weight of his body upon her with a crash, and his hands
sought urgently for her throat. His knees in her skinny belly squirted
all the wind out of her. His hands found her hair, her face, her throat,
and closed upon it. But the struggle was frightful. She was only a
skinny old woman, but the pangs of suffocation called out tremendous
efforts from her limbs. Her first convulsion threw him off her, but his
hands luckily retained their grip on her throat, wet and slippery as it
was. It was a lean and skinny throat, and his hands almost encircled it
so that their grip was not easily broken, and his thumbs sank deep
between the stringy cords on each side. She thrashed about, her legs
striking against the pen, but it did not last long. The convulsions died
away, and Loa squeezed with his powerful hands until his thumbs almost
met round her flattened windpipe. He maintained his grip until he was
long certain that she was dead, and then he rose up on his knees,
hitching back the bow that still hung from his shoulder.

"Musini!" he whispered.

"Loa!" came the instant reply. "Lord!"

"Father!" said Lanu.

It might not have been they, after all--Loa had no certainty of it--but
not then nor at any subsequent time did Loa ever think of that
possibility.

"Be quiet," he ordered, and he turned aside in the darkness to feel for
the little ax where he had left it; the little ax which Litti the worker
in iron had made so long ago at Loa's order as a gift to Lanu, and which
had been so immeasurably valuable to them ever since. He approached the
pen with it, and felt in the rainy darkness to ascertain what he should
do. The pen, as was to be expected, was constructed of stout stakes and
crossbars fastened together with vegetable fiber, and he set to work
with the ax to sever the fastenings. It was not easy, for those
fastenings were of split cane which almost turned the ax's edge. Loa
chopped and tugged; he tore the nail loose on his left forefinger almost
without noticing it, before he managed to cut through three sets of the
fastenings. Then he laid hold of the upright and put out all his
strength, tugging, with his eyes starting out of his head in the
darkness, until a final ounce of effort tore the upright free.

"Let me try to come through," whispered Musini, who sensibly and with
remarkable self-control had contrived to stay quiet during Loa's
efforts. Loa felt her wriggling in the darkness, her hands touching his
knees as she put her arms through. The pen shook with her struggles, and
soon Loa knew that she was squeezing through.

"Lord, I am free," whispered Musini, rising to her feet beside him in
the darkness. She trod on the dead woman as she spoke, but that did not
alter the tone of her voice at all. Her hands patted his shoulders, and
she nuzzled her face against his wet chest.

But this was no moment for tenderness. Loa shoved Musini away from him,
for his mind was obsessed with the business in hand--had he not, with
incredible self-discipline, kept his mind on it for many hours past? It
could no more be diverted at present than a charging elephant.

"Lanu," he said, and felt his way to Lanu's end of the pen.

"I am here, Father," whispered Lanu.

Loa felt in the darkness along the top of the pen.

"This is the fastening to cut, Father," said Lanu.

Loa felt his hand touched by Lanu's, which he had put outside the cage,
and he was guided to the place. He hacked in the darkness at the tough
cane, more than half his blows missing their mark, until, feeling in the
darkness, he felt that the fastenings had parted. And he felt, too,
Lanu's hand upon him again.

"Cut the one below, Father," said Lanu. "I will finish the unfastening
of this one."

Lanu used the mode of address common between children and used by
ordinary children towards their parents; obediently Loa addressed
himself to the lower fastening. He chopped and chipped away until the
fibers parted, and then, crouching low, began on the next one below.
When this had given way he put out his strength to tear the upright free
from the cage, but it would not yield. He had to cut another fastening,
and this time, when he tugged at the upright, it gave way with a
splintering crash that could possibly have been heard in the houses
despite the noise of the rain.

"I can come through now, Father," said Lanu, and Loa felt him squeeze
himself through the gap. Loa was conscious that Musini was embracing
their son in the darkness.

"Let us go," he said, and added, "I must take my arrows."

There was no diverting Loa from his purpose; haste could not overcome
him in this present mood of his, as this last speech of his proved. He
felt for, and found, his arrows in the darkness where he had left them
to spring on the old woman, and he gave them and the bow to Lanu,
retaining the little ax for himself.

"Come with me," said Loa, setting off into the darkness, so dark still,
with the rain falling heavily, that Lanu took his hand and Musini his
other arm so as not to part from him.

There was no need now to crawl along in an effort, expensive in time, to
achieve utter silence. The old woman was dead, and no one else in the
town would be specifically on guard, so that they could walk, slowly and
with caution, through the mud of the open space. The rain beat down on
their naked bodies quite remorselessly, with a stupefying effect; it was
as well that Loa had a plan in his mind at the start. But Musini still
had to ask questions.

"Whither, Lord?" she whispered.

"River," growled Loa.

The single word was all that was necessary. During their confinement in
the cage Musini and Lanu had had time enough to familiarize themselves
with the topography of the town, and it was by river they had been
brought here. But it was Loa who guided them; perhaps because of the
numbing effect of the rain his instincts had full play, and his sense of
direction could guide him without interference from thought. A sudden
sound at Musini's very elbow made them stop dead, all three of them,
rigid, until their minds, slower than their physical reactions, told
them that what they had heard was the maa-aaing of a nanny goat
sheltered somewhere near. There was no further sound, and they moved
forward again feeling their way with the utmost caution. The bleating of
the goat told them they had reached the ring of the town; invisible to
them, houses must be on either side of them. They paused at every
stride, testing the ground beneath their advancing feet before
transferring their weight. Loa's sense of balance first told him that
they were on a downward slope; they were over the lip of the bluff and
on the path down to the water. He felt pebbles under his feet, and
Musini and Lanu on each side of him were pressing in upon him; the path
was deeply worn and intended for the use of people in single file. And
as the path steepened before them they could tell that they were among
trees again; the noise of the rain on the leaves told them that if
nothing else did. Steeper and steeper grew the path, and then through
the roar of the rain their ears caught another noise, that of the river,
which, sweeping round the bend, came swirling against the foot of the
bluff. The next moment Loa, striding forward with less than his usual
caution, stumbled over something solid in his path which the touch of
his hands told him must be a canoe. They had reached the river.

"Whither now, Lord?" asked Musini as Loa felt round for the ax that he
had dropped.

"This way," said Loa, turning to the left--downstream as ever.

Only a few steps took them among the trees, into the odorous forest
where they could feel the leafmold under their feet again. It was a
nightmare experience. The trees grew thicker and lower here on the
water's edge, and many of them were out of the vertical. The slope of
the bluff was steep, and although that was a valuable guide for
direction in the dark, it made walking difficult with one foot always
higher than the other. They bumped into trees, and they slipped and
slithered on the wet leafmold. Always present in their minds was the
fear of snakes and of pitfalls. Their rate of progress was deplorably
slow, but they maintained it for a couple of hours before Loa called a
halt. He was weary, although Musini and Lanu, after twenty-four hours of
complete rest and good food in the pen, were still fresh. Loa slept,
belly down, his face pillowed on Musini's thigh, while the others dozed
fitfully as the rain ceased.

It was Lanu who woke Loa, shaking him by the shoulder so that he started
up in alarm.

"Father--Lord," said Lanu. "The light comes."

Only the smallest possible grayness was leaking in through the trees
around them, but Lanu was as fully aware as Loa of the value of these
minutes. At dawn, or not long after, the death of the old woman and the
escape of the prisoners would be discovered in the town. Almost for
certain there would be pursuit; conceivably, despite last night's rain,
their tracks would be picked up. It was vitally necessary that they
should make the most of the few minutes' grace which they had gained.
Once deep in the forest and they would be safe, save for some
unfortunate and unforeseeable chance, from the townspeople.

"Let us go," said Loa, scrambling to his feet.

He ached in every joint, but he made no remark about it. Aching joints
were part of the life of the forest--he might as well have remarked on
the fact that there were trees round them. He was desperately hungry,
too, but that was equally part of the life of the forest.

They could just see the tree trunks about them now, and could pick their
way along the slope, while beneath them the river gurgled and chuckled.
Very soon full daylight came--for them the greenish twilight of the
forest. They hurried along as fast as they could, taking care to make no
sound, but not seeking for food, and pausing to listen and look for an
ambush by the little people less than they would have done normally.
They listened for sounds of pursuit coming from behind them, but they
heard nothing; the gentle wind that was blowing in their faces would
carry sound away as well as the smell of the town--in their nostrils
there was only the scent of the forest, untainted by smoke or humanity.

The slope of the bluff soon became vertical again, so that they found
themselves walking on the lip among the tangled trees, with the water
some forty feet directly below their right hands. Soon they came to a
point where the bank had given way, and Loa emerged momentarily to a
view over a long reach of the river, but only momentarily, for he sprang
back, his gestures fixing the others motionless. On the broad surface of
the river was a canoe, and now a canoe was an object of fear instead of
idle curiosity. They peered at it through the leaves, as it passed
rapidly downstream with its paddles gleaming wet in the sunlight. Lanu
was shaking his fists at it, threatening it with his arrows, and
mouthing boyish curses at it--he was far too cautious to say them aloud.

Another canoe was following closely behind, and they could see the men
at the paddles plainly enough. It was reassuring that they were not
looking at their bank as they passed it. That did not seem as if they
were consciously pursuing them, but canoes were such strange unknown
things that it was hard to be sure. A moment later Loa had another shock
of fear, for the two canoes swung round in the current and lay alongside
each other. Loa felt sure that this implied that the paddlers knew they
were there and were concerting pursuit of them. But just as he was about
to lead a flight deeper into the forest the paddlers bent to their work
again, urging the canoes upstream on diverging courses, while a man in
the bow of one of them threw overboard armful after armful of some brown
material--Loa could not see more exactly what it was, but the proceeding
attracted his curiosity and he lingered to watch, against his better
judgment. After a while the man ceased to throw the material overboard,
and the canoes toiled on upstream parallel to each other, and Loa could
see they were connected together at the bows by some sort of rope. It
was an odd kind of ceremony; over the water came the song of the
paddlers as they worked; the words were indistinguishable but the rhythm
was marked.

Loa could not tear himself away from the spectacle, although he well
knew that they should be on their way, but Lanu and Musini seemed
equally fascinated, and after some time their curiosity was rewarded by
the sight of the canoes inching together again, while this time a man in
the bow of each canoe hauled out of the river the brown material
previously thrown in, which apparently had all the time been suspended
in the water from a rope between the canoes. At intervals one man or the
other would stoop and pluck something glittering white out of the
material, and throw it in the bottom of the boat.

"Fish," said Musini, using a word that Loa had never heard before.

"Very good," said Lanu, with a pat at his stomach.

It was a fishing canoe that had captured them the day before, they
explained to him in whispers; they had seen the things and had later
eaten them, but this was the first time they had known how they were
caught. The word for fish had completely disappeared from Loa's language
(if indeed it had ever had a place there) from the time when Nasa his
father had gone up against the riverside village and wiped it out. But
Loa was impressed by the stress Lanu laid upon the excellence of their
eating qualities; one of the old women who had fed them yesterday had
told them the name and persuaded them to try the new delicacy, and the
townspeople who had gathered round the pen had been vastly amused to
hear that the captives did not know what fish was and had never heard
the name.

The canoes passed on up the river, casting their net again as they went;
the incident was comforting as it tended to show that any pursuit of Loa
and his family was not being pressed to the utmost. Yet as the canoes
passed out of sight Loa turned his face downstream again.

"Let us go," he said, as he had said a hundred times before.

There was no pursuit from the town that they ever knew about.




CHAPTER XIII


They went on along the river as before, and as before they starved most
of the time with an occasional overfull meal to sustain them. The bluff
on which the town stood was succeeded by marshy bottom land as the river
wound back in the opposite loop. Here there was treacherous and
difficult going, where the trees stood waist-deep in slime, so that they
had to pick their way from root to root, and where the mosquitoes ceased
to be a pest to become a plague that made life almost unbearable. Clouds
of mosquitoes followed them closely as they floundered through the
marsh, and leeches clung to them and sucked their blood--they early
found that if they tore the horrid things off without letting them drink
their fill the jaws remained in the flesh to cause a sore that was hard
to heal. Their bare feet, horny though they were, were bruised and cut
by the unseen roots in the mud, the sky still dripped upon them, and
there was more than one night when it was impossible to light a fire in
the general wetness.

It was at a despairing moment in this misery that Loa decided upon
leaving the river. Child of the sky, the river was betraying them, was
taking advantage of a too close association. Loa turned his back on the
water and led his family directly away from it, intending vaguely to
attempt to use it as a guide without keeping close to it, hard though
that would be in the forest. It was thus he learned to keep to the
higher ground above the river and cut across the necks of the loops,
avoiding the bottoms altogether and saving an enormous amount of
distance. It was an almost automatic process. They left the marshes to
find themselves on firm ascending ground; turned to the right to keep
parallel with the river, and shortly afterwards discovered that they
were on the bluff at the head of the next loop, with two long reaches of
the river stretching away before them, with sky and river their friends
and allies again instead of their irritating enemies.

"That is the way we shall go," said Loa, pointing along the line of the
bluff.

He had learned the lesson of the nature of the river, how it looped
round marshes and ran to meet bluffs, and he spoke with an assurance
that drew a respectful glance even from Musini.

"It will be good to have easy walking again," said Musini. "Those
marshes were not good for the child."

"The child?" said Loa, off his guard.

The word Musini had used was one that implied a little baby, and not
even as a highly exaggerated endearment could it be applied to Lanu.

"Yes, the child," said Musini. She bellowed with sudden laughter. "Ho!
Ho! Ho! Lord, can you lie with a woman all these nights and not expect a
child?"

Musini meant the question as pure rhetoric, but it came very close to
the truth. Loa had become a father so often, and with such small
after-consequences to himself, and he had had so many other matters to
occupy his mind of late, that the possibility had not crossed his mind.
Moreover, Musini was an old woman--here was Lanu whose existence proved
that--and it was a shock to realize that she was still fruitful. Loa was
a little nettled at this revelation of his lack of forethought; he was
nettled, too, at Musini's jocular treatment of it and at the way Lanu
joined in her laughter. It all stressed the fact which had been brought
home to him on other occasions: that he might be a god, he might at
least have superhuman powers and qualities, but he could not obtain from
those close to him the respect those powers and qualities should ensure
for him. It was faintly irritating, especially coming right on the heels
of such an important discovery as the practicability of cutting across
the necks of the loops of the river. He strode off in something of a
huff, only slightly mollified later when Lanu and Musini both brought
him mouthfuls of food which they had found for themselves.

Keeping to the high ground close above the river they made considerable
progress for some days. There were many things Loa did not realize about
this journey of theirs. He knew that they had wasted a great many days
by keeping close to the water's edge, but it never dawned upon him that
they were within a great arc of the river, along the chord of which he
had been conducted by the slavers, so that even allowing for the new
saving by cutting off the loops his return journey was at least twice as
long as the outward one had been. Moreover, so slowly did they move,
thanks to the need for precaution and the need for finding their food,
that each day's march was far smaller than he had made on the average
when driven by the slavers. Taking all factors into consideration Loa,
if ever he were to reach home, would undoubtedly spend twenty days on
the return journey for every day that he had spent going out.

There was a further and special reason for the slavers to travel by the
chord and not by the arc, leaving untouched the few towns along the
riverbank in the curve; Loa never made the correct deduction, although
the facts were made plain to him. The great curve of the river lies on
one of the upper plateaus of Central Africa; the upper and lower ends of
the curve are marked by cataracts and waterfalls; Loa never saw anything
of the upper falls, but they were now to reach the lower ones. The
tangled forest rose slowly into a low barrier of hills, right across the
path of the river, which broke through them here; Loa and the others,
close above the water, passed through the same gap without climbing the
hills. They knew that the bluffs were growing steeper, and that the
loops were not so marked as the river straightened itself, but they were
not prepared for what they saw when they came to the lip of the gorge.
They had heard, even in the forest, the louder noise the river was
making; now they could see why. The river was far narrower, confined
between steep banks, and it was angry at the restrictions imposed upon
it. It was running with furious speed, roaring with rage. The rocks that
impeded its passage were smothered in foam. The swirls upon its surface
were not the subtle sleek things that they had been accustomed to see
higher up; here they were frantic violent struggles, convulsions like
those of the old woman when Loa had his hands on her throat. Anyone
could see that the cliffs were trying to strangle the river; and the
noise of the cataract was tremendous.

"The river fights with the forest," said Musini at Loa's side, looking
down at the deafening turbulence. Matter-of-fact person though Musini
was, she nevertheless had an apt word on occasions.

They were destined to see a good deal of the cataract over its twenty
miles of length, for its gorge deepened and the cliffs shutting it in
grew steeper, compelling them to pick their precarious way at the very
brink of the water, where the rocky surface practically prohibited the
growth of vegetation, although the cliffs that rose above them bore
trees in every ledge, and elsewhere were covered with brilliant lichens
and mosses. Shut in between the cliffs, Loa was not as conscious of the
vast extent of his brother the sky as he usually was when beside the
river; and he even felt a more friendly feeling towards the narrow strip
that was visible over his head. The continual roar of the cataract
worked on him until he grew lightheaded, and pranced and brandished the
ax as he walked along; the lightheadedness might have been partly the
result of hunger, because they went with empty stomachs along most of
the gorge. It was only when they were near its end that two successive
lucky shots brought down parrots for them to eat.

Twice at points where the water lapped the foot of the cliff they were
forced to climb the cliff face, with endless difficulty, until they
reached a shelf along which they could make their way until it was
possible to descend again. Up there Loa's head swam even worse than when
he emerged into open spaces, but he suppressed, as he always had done,
any mention of this sensation, for Lanu seemed actually to enjoy being
on a height, while Musini hardly spared a glance down the gorge and
clearly acted as though, given a firm footing, she did not care whether
the drop at her elbow was five feet or five hundred. The god Loa of his
previous existence could without qualms have acknowledged feelings of
weakness, but the present Loa, who was little use at lighting fires, and
who was not as good a marksman as Lanu, and for whom respect was blended
with tolerance or even amusement, could not afford to do any such thing.
It was only rarely nowadays that Loa would even admit that he was
hungry, although it is to be doubted if the appearance of stoical
indifference that he cultivated made much impression on Musini.

The gorge gradually flattened out without any abrupt change; the surface
of the river gradually became wider and less studded with rocks, and its
course became slower. It was not until they found themselves among trees
and enjoying the mushrooms and white ants of the forest that they
realized the gorge had ended. What really brought it home to them was
Loa's noticing of a creeper carelessly lying between two trees--just too
carelessly; concealed behind the tree was a bent bow with an arrow on
the string, to be loosed at a touch on the creeper. They were back among
the little people again; all along the gorge they had seen no sign of
them.

This side of the cataract the river seemed to run straighter, without so
many turns, and consequently without being so marshy at the banks, so
that it was a little surprising when they found themselves entering into
an area of bog which seemed to extend a long way inland. It was soon
obvious that they could not struggle through it, and so they turned to
their left (left-handed away from the river, right-handed towards it, as
always) to seek high ground. Keeping to the forest rim, at the fringe of
the marsh, they were forced to make two days' detour; it was on the
afternoon of the second day that they came out upon a prospect that
halted them abruptly. It was only a little bluff upon which they stood,
but it commanded a wide view. To their right was the reedy marsh, with
occasional trees standing in it, and with water visible here and there
among the reeds, and far beyond it they could just see the broad surface
of the river. But in front of them, at their feet, lay another river.

It was nothing like the size of the big river, but it was far greater
than the numerous little threads of water through which they had
splashed in the course of their journey. One might shoot an arrow across
it, hardly even drawing the arrow to the head, but there was no leaping
across it or splashing through it, that was obvious. There were black
depths in that river, here where it made ready to join with the bigger
river, wherein devilish creatures might well live. It was an obstacle
they could not pass.

"So," said Musini at Loa's side. "Another river."

She looked at him sidelong. There may even have been something of
malice--at least of bitter amusement--in her glance, as though to
question what the god Loa proposed to do in these new circumstances. As
Musini advanced in her pregnancy, in that essentially womanly business,
she was inclined to leave men's affairs more to men, and to withdraw
into herself. It was plain that she washed her hands of all
responsibility for the present situation.

"What next, Father?" asked Lanu, eagerly. He still had faith in his
father's superior intellect and experience.

"Wait, my son," said Loa, as ponderously as he could while trying to
keep despair out of his voice.

He sat himself down upon the bluff, at the foot of a great tree, and
addressed himself again to a study of the landscape--more to keep
despair out of his mind than for any other reason. Down to his right
spread the marshes of the river junction--actually the delta of the
tributary--alive with birds, reedy and marshy and everywhere intersected
by water channels. Ahead of him lay the little river, little by
comparison but immeasurably wide when their own helplessness was taken
into account. To his left the river wound among the trees of the forest
out of sight, and behind him--he knew what was behind him. In his mind
fluttered the notion, not very well defined, that all rivers have their
sources somewhere, so that by turning to his left he could follow the
tributary upstream until it became passable, and then, crossing it and
turning to his right, he could follow it back again to this junction.
The notion fluttered in his mind and passed out again. He had not yet
learned enough about the world; he might have thought of such a scheme
had the obstacle before him been smaller, had it been such that he could
nearly jump across it, but he could not really believe that such a major
stream as this could start from nothing.

In that case the problem was insoluble. Even the old trick of pressing
his fists into his eyes was of no help. He pressed until wheels of fire
circled in his sight, and he reached no conclusion; he only fell into
despair. Musini and Lanu waited by his side for him to announce his
decision, and he said nothing, sitting morose and silent against the
tree. It was easy enough to fall into apathy, to sit there not thinking
at all, with all his thinking processes clogged by despair, while dark
shadows played in his mind. So far during all this while, ever since he
had assumed command of the party, he had been borne up by faith, by that
much of the blind belief in his own powers which had survived his
capture by the raiders, or by a mere animal fatalism which had urged him
along. Now all this was at an end; everything was in ruins. He sat there
conscious of nothing save misery and depression.

In time Lanu and Musini became restless.

"Father," said Lanu.

"Lord," said Musini. "Loa. Husband."

She raised her voice with each word; it was the first time in her life
that even she had ventured to address Loa by the familiar expression
"husband," but she could not rouse Loa from his apathy. She put her hand
on his shoulder and shook him gently.

"Leave me in peace," said Loa, heavily, without raising his eyes to her
face. "Peace" was not a fair description of his state of mind, but it
would serve in comparison with what he would feel if he were roused and
set to thinking again. And he was tired, mortally weary. Lanu and Musini
exchanged glances. It was obvious that there was no reasoning with him
when he was in this mood.

"Come," said Musini to her son. "Let us gather food."

Loa stayed where he was in his melancholy for all the rest of that day.
He did not shake off his mood even when Musini came to him in the
evening and told him that food was ready for him. The thought of food
roused him sufficiently to get him stiffly to his feet to walk back
among the trees where the others had lighted a fire, but he sat and ate
his food silently, his brooding depression conveying itself to Musini
and Lanu so that they talked, when they talked at all, in whispers. And
when he had eaten he lay down and slept with no more words either; he
slept heavily, oppressed by formless dreams, so that he awoke in the
morning unrefreshed and as deeply sunk in apathy as before. Lanu and
Musini looked at him as he sat staring at the ashes of last night's fire
without seeing them. They shook their heads and moved silently about
him.

Then they heard sounds, sounds which penetrated even in Loa's
consciousness and roused him instantly, which keyed them all up and
which set Loa grasping for his bow and arrows and then started them all
creeping silently back to the riverbank; not breathing a word to each
other, creeping like beasts of prey towards the source of the noise. Loa
wriggled like a snake for the last yard or two to the point where he
could see the river. With his chin buried in the leafmold he peered over
a root at the base of the tree, showing no more than his eyes as he
gazed down the brief declivity at the water. It was a canoe, not one of
the big canoes he had seen casting nets in the river, but a smaller
craft altogether, tiny and cranky, hardly larger than was necessary to
hold the two men who sat in it, propelling it slowly along with their
paddles. They were big men, much scarred and tattooed, and the one in
front wore on his head an ornament of gray feathers, and there were
bracelets round the arms of the one in the back. Their paddles touched
upon the sides of the canoe as they worked; that was one of the noises
that had attracted Loa's attention, and now and then they exchanged a
word--that was the other noise. One of them laughed, and clearly they
felt themselves in no danger.

But they were well out in the middle of the river, and already a little
downstream of where Loa lay. It would be a long arrow flight that would
reach them, and if they died there in the middle of the river they were
as much out of reach as the other side of the river was. Loa turned his
head slowly to where Lanu lay in like concealment. Lanu had the same
grasp of the situation. He was lying perfectly still merely watching,
and when his eyes met Loa's their lack of expression told Loa that he,
too, could see no reason for immediate action. They watched the canoe
paddle slowly down the river, far out of reach, but not out of sight. It
turned into one of the minor channels among the reeds, and Loa waited
long before he rose and cautiously led the way among the trees at the
water's edge in pursuit. With the patience of the leopard on the tree
branch, with the cunning of man, they crept after the canoe, slipping
from tree to tree, wading through marshy patches, standing stock-still
behind cover when there was the least chance of being observed.

Loa found it hard to understand what the men in the canoe were doing,
especially as frequently they stopped out of sight for long intervals in
one of the narrow reedy channels. On the occasions when he could see
them one or the other of them leaned perilously over the side of the
canoe and drew something out of the water, and sometimes he would toss
something white into the bottom of the boat--these mysterious fish, Loa
supposed, which Lanu and Musini had talked about. But once they stopped
for a long time still, with one man standing in the canoe--all Loa could
see was the black dot of the man's head over the level of the reeds.
This stop explained itself. Loa saw the man's arm rise in the
unmistakable gesture of bending and loosing a bow; the canoe had been
waiting for one of the innumerable marsh birds to come within range.

The canoe threaded its way in and out among the reeds, and Loa watched
it with his interminable patience; patience the more laudable because he
was not waiting for something certain, nor even for any definite
possibility. He was just waiting, in case something, he knew not what,
should happen. He and Lanu were close to the water's edge here, each
behind a tree. Before them ran one of the reedy channels of the delta;
about them was marshy land, not impassable, with the roots of the trees
growing in it--Musini was farther back, waiting too, with the same
patience. About them brooded the sweltering heat and the deep silence of
the forest, and the reek of the delta was in their nostrils. The distant
cry of birds only served to accentuate the silence about them as they
stood like statues, not daring to move because the canoe was out of
sight and they did not know where or when it would reappear. Then they
heard sounds, coming from not far away--almost the same sounds as had
first broken in upon Loa's apathy, the sound of wood against wood, the
murmur of voices, even a laugh like the one they had heard before. Loa's
muscles tightened; he notched his bowstring into his arrow and half drew
it. He could see that Lanu was doing exactly the same. The canoe emerged
round the corner of the reedy channel, heading down it straight towards
them. Loa waited with his bow bent, as the canoe crawled along towards
them, ever so slowly. At long arrow range the canoe stopped, and again
one of the men leaned over the side--Loa could see the canoe heel over
dangerously--to draw something out of the water and examine it and drop
it in again, something that looked like a basket of reeds. Then the
canoe resumed its course towards them, rocking a little with the strokes
of the paddlers, yawing a little from side to side of the channel. Loa
was actually quivering, so tensely expectant was he, but he must
wait--wait--wait. But now the moment had come, with the canoe close
beside him, not twenty feet from his arrowhead. He stepped out and drew
his bow to the full and loosed, seized another arrow and loosed again,
and yet a third time. Lanu's bow twanged beside him. At that close range
the hard wooden arrowhead, hardened in the fire and sharpened to a
needlepoint, could penetrate easily even through something as tough and
as elastic as human skin. Loa's first arrow struck the man in the bow of
the boat below the armpit and went in deep between the ribs. His second
arrow struck lower and farther forward and penetrated as deeply. Even
without the poison on the heads those wounds were mortal. Loa used his
third arrow on the second man, who had turned an astonished face towards
them with Lanu's arrows sticking in his back and his arm. Loa's arrow
whizzed in at the opened mouth at the same moment as Lanu's third arrow
struck him in the breast. He fell backwards, tipping over the crazy
dugout. Both bodies vanished beneath the dark surface of the backwater,
and the canoe, filled with water, floated with only a strip of gunwale
showing. Beside it floated a collection of debris--the two paddles, a
couple of dead birds, half a dozen white-bellied fish, a bow and some
arrows, a wooden bailer.

Loa and Lanu stood by the bank waiting for the boatmen to reappear, but
the dark water was undisturbed as Musini came up and stood beside them.

"They are dead?" asked Musini.

"They are there," said Loa, pointing into the backwater. With the relief
from tension and from his apathy of yesterday his voice sounded cracked
and unnatural.

"They are dead!" said Lanu. "We killed them, Loa and I. With our arrows
from here we killed them. How surprised they were when we stepped
forward with our bows bent. We struck as the snake strikes. We--"

"Peace, son," said Musini, breaking in on his rhapsody. "And now? The
men are dead, and the boat is there."

It was like Musini to call attention to the difficulties ahead. The
canoe, just showing above the water, floated five yards from the bank,
quite beyond their reach, and Loa was a trifle nonplused.

"I can get it," said Lanu, eagerly.

He took the ax and severed a creeper which climbed the tree beside which
they stood, and then, dragging at it with all his weight, he tore it
down from its anchorage far enough to be able to sever it again, cutting
off a piece twenty feet long.

"See," said Lanu, and, standing carefully at the water's edge, he cast
the end of the creeper over the canoe. When he dragged the creeper in
the canoe undoubtedly moved, and came an inch or two nearer. Another
cast just moved it again.

"Ha!" said Musini, her interest and approval caught.

She looked round her and approached a fallen branch and was going to cut
a section from it with the ax, but a glance from her brought Loa to her
side, for there was something vaguely improper about a woman using
cutting tools of steel. Loa cut off the length she indicated and Musini
hastened to fasten it to the end of Lanu's creeper. Now a bold cast
beyond the canoe, and a careful pulling in, brought the waterlogged boat
much nearer, and two or three further attempts brought it so close that
it grounded beside the bank where they could just reach it.

"And now?" said Musini again.

For answer Lanu leaned far out from the bank and took hold of the
gunwale of the canoe, heaving at it. Water lapped over the side out of
it, and Loa came to his help. With a powerful heave they were able to
pour a good deal of the water out, so that the canoe floated against the
bank with a fair amount of freeboard. Lanu began to climb in.

"No! No!" said Musini in sudden panic.

She had qualms about this enterprise; the water of the backwater was
dark and mysterious, and boats were strange things, and she had fears
for her son, but Loa put his hand on her shoulder and restrained her.
Lanu climbed into the canoe with a laugh which was checked when the
crazy craft wobbled violently under him so that he nearly capsized it
again. Common sense made him sit down in the water in the bottom and
stabilize the boat a little; he laughed again, but a trifle nervously,
and the nervousness was the more perceptible when he glanced round and
saw that the canoe had left the bank and he was drifting free. But after
all, he had been in a canoe before, when he and his mother had been
captured; he knew one could float in one and survive the experience, and
his father had told him much about them with an inaccuracy Lanu knew
nothing about.

His momentum carried him out to the floating material, and he reached
out--with a sudden hesitation on account of the lurches of the
canoe--and took a paddle. He waved it triumphantly and was about to try
to use it when his eye caught sight of the bailer floating beside him;
he had seen a bailer used on his short previous voyage. He took the
bailer and set the water flying out of the boat, laughing excitedly
again now. With the boat nearly empty he tried to pick up the other
floating things. He had to use the paddle he had to get to the other
one, and his first amateurish digs sent the little boat circling round
in a quite unpredictable fashion, and his attempts at managing it made
it rock frighteningly again. But soon he had picked up paddle and bow
and arrows and fish and all, looking back at his parents with all his
teeth flashing in a grin, while they for their part regarded him with
parental pride--combined with a little of the consternation of the hen
who has mothered ducklings. It was only a few moments before the obvious
fact was brought home to Lanu that the canoe turned away from the
paddle; by taking a stroke first on one side and then on the other he
was able to propel it in some sort of straight line. It was wonderful.
He headed the boat towards where his parents stood, and after one or two
failures managed to come up beside them. Loa leaned over and took hold
of the side and drew it against the bank.

"We have a canoe!" said Lanu in ecstasy.

Perhaps Musini felt that she did not want to be outdone in the matter of
innovations.

"And there are fish," she said. "Give me that one, Lanu. I am hungry."

Lanu handed her the fish and Musini took it in her two hands. Only once
before had she eaten fish, and then it had taken some coaxing on the
part of the old woman who had guarded her to induce her to do it, but
she set about it now with a determined nonchalance designed to impress
her menfolk. She took a determined bite out of the fish's belly.

"Good," she said, with her mouth full.

The flesh was full of bones, and somewhat insipid, but for a hungry
woman it was excellent food.

"Give me one too," said Loa.

They all three of them devoured the raw fish; it was not until he began
his second one that Loa learned something of the trick of stripping the
flesh from the backbone with his teeth, and also convinced himself that
neither head nor fins were edible. He swallowed a good many bones but
even so the fish constituted one of the few satisfactory meals he had
lately had. Loa tossed the last backbone into the river. He was
revivified, without a thought for the two dead men lying under the black
surface of the backwater.

"Now do we cross the water?" asked Lanu, still in ecstasy.

That was a strange question to Loa, and he hesitated before replying.
Could he bring himself to entrust his godlike person to the unstable
surface of the water, under the glare of the unsympathetic sky? There
was the kindly forest at his back, and under his feet was the earth,
marshy at the moment but reassuringly solid compared with the unfamiliar
element before him. All the conservatism of savagery, the fears of
ignorance, raised a turmoil within him as he faced the decision. But
there was only one thing to say, and he said it.

"Yes."

The difficulties were obvious; the canoe was far too tiny to carry three
people, they were down in the delta of the tributary, and they knew
almost nothing about managing a canoe. Musini took charge of the
details; gods might have divine inspirations, but it needed her to put
them into execution.

"Let us go back to where we saw it first," she said. "Loa, we can walk
there, if you, Lanu, can make that thing come along with us."

That was what they did, Loa and Musini walking along the water's edge
carrying the impedimenta while Lanu struggled to paddle along beside
them. He had untold difficulties with the little craft, more than once
turning complete circles as he tried to propel her along, to Musini's
acute but unvoiced anxiety, but eventually they reached the point above
the delta where the last distributary parted from the river and the
channel was well defined. On the other side lay the forest and the way
home. Musini offered herself up for sacrifice.

"Take me over," she said to Lanu. "Then you can return for Loa."

She made ready to get into the canoe.

"Take care! Take care!" squeaked Lanu, by now thoroughly familiar with
the instability of the dugout. It rocked violently, but Lanu contrived
to keep it the right way up as Musini lowered herself into the bottom,
clinging desperately to the gunwales. Her additional weight had grounded
the boat forward, but Lanu shoved her free and began to paddle gingerly
away from the bank, while Loa watched in frantic anxiety mingled with a
strange pride. He saw the canoe circle in midstream, and he watched it
take its erratic course across the river. At last he saw it reach the
other side, and he saw Musini heave her growing bulk out of the boat and
climb out onto the bank. There was a pause while Musini received the
things which she cannily decided should be handed up to her without
being imperiled by another crossing, and then the canoe came back across
the water, Lanu grinning in triumph as he paddled. Loa climbed
cautiously in, only half-hearing the warnings and advice which Lanu
poured out. It was both sickly and frightening to feel the boat rock
beneath him. With one hand he gripped the precious ax and with the other
he clung like death to the edge of the boat.

"Sit in the middle, Father," said Lanu, tone and grammar both showing a
deplorable lack of respect for a parent and elder, let alone for a god.

Loa shifted his position by a terrified half-inch; the violent reaction
produced by the least movement reduced him to idiocy. Lanu gave up the
hope of attaining perfect balance and started to paddle, and Loa found
the forest receding from him, so that he was exposed on the surface of
the water to all the glare of the sky above him and on all sides. He
felt as insignificant as any insect as he sat frozen with fear, mocked
by the gurgling of the water around Lanu's paddle. Certainly the water
was jeering at him, if not threatening him. His eyes could hardly focus
on the farther shore, where Musini squatted in the shade awaiting
him--he could only see her at intervals, when the swings of the canoe
brought her directly before him, for he could not even turn his eyeballs
to keep her continuously in sight.

But they drew up to her in the end, and she rose to greet them.

"First give me the ax," she said.

Loa handed it up to her, and then tried to stand to disembark. The
rocking of the canoe threw him into an active panic. He was about to
plunge for the shore, careless of the results to the canoe and to Lanu,
but, to his credit, he restrained himself, sitting down and allowing the
canoe to regain its stability while Lanu sighed with relief. Then he
rose more calmly, clutched the roots in the bank, and cautiously heaved
himself out. Lanu did not follow him; he sat on in the canoe, grasping
the paddle with one hand and a root with the other.

"Father," said Lanu, "cannot we keep this canoe?"

"_Keep_ it?" exclaimed Loa, utterly astonished.

"Yes," said Lanu.

It was a new toy to him. He had mastered his fears, and it had been a
delightful and exciting experience to learn to control the canoe on the
alien water. He had the feeling that he wanted to paddle canoes all the
rest of his life.

"We cannot do that!" said Loa, uttering the first words that came into
his head.

"Oh," said Lanu.

It could hardly be said that he was disappointed. It was something more
than life could really offer, to own a canoe. Gone almost beyond memory
were the days when he was a privileged little boy who sometimes wore a
leopardskin cloak, and who had a real steel ax such as marked him out
far above his playmates. But as the vision receded facts came into his
mind to support his despairing plea.

"We might get more fish," he said. "You like fish. You could walk along
the bank while I paddled down the river. There might be other rivers to
cross. We might--we might even cross the big river!"

That was saying far too much, for to Loa the suggestion was so fantastic
as to demand instant rejection.

"No!" he said. "Never! Come out of the boat."

Lanu was near tears, and rebellion stirred within him, not so much
against his father as against fate; Musini saw it and came to the rescue
with a suggestion.

"Perhaps at home," she said, "you will have a canoe. There we are near
the big river, and perhaps Loa will give you one. You will be able to
make it."

It was some mitigation of Lanu's disappointment; it distracted him from
his present desires by setting him thinking about the future.

"I think I could," he said.

He looked down at the crazy craft that was suddenly so dear to him,
trying to note in his mind how it was constructed. A tree trunk had been
hollowed out--Lanu saw how the bow and stern were shaped--and to give
more freeboard a plank had been attached along each gunwale, sewn to the
dugout with fiber, in much the same way as the houses which he just
remembered had been built by Tolo and Tolo's brothers.

"Come, my son," said Loa, more gently.

Now that the initial shock of Lanu's revolutionary suggestion had died
away, he could talk more reasonably, especially as the nervous tension
of his first trip in a boat was dying away too. He held out his hand to
Lanu and swung him up onto the bank, and the masterless canoe drifted
away from the shore.

"I shall keep this," said Lanu, indicating the paddle which he still
retained in his hand--in point of fact he actually did keep it by him
for two whole days in the forest, as a memento of the canoe.

They turned to enter again into the forest, all of them a little subdued
and silent. Somewhere at the back of Loa's mind strange thoughts were
stirring, awakened by Lanu's absurd suggestion about the canoe and by
Musini's equally absurd suggestion about making one. Could it be? Might
it happen? Fish were undoubtedly good to eat. Out on the broad river a
man--not Loa, certainly not Loa, but conceivably Lanu--might enjoy a
freedom of movement and an ability to carry baggage that the forest
could not offer. The slave raiders had made use of the river. The most
vaulting ideas, quite shapeless at the moment, were coming to life in
Loa's brain, such fantastic ideas, in fact, that Loa was disturbed by
them, tried to put them out of his mind in his distrust of novelty.

Musini brought him back to the world of the matter-of-fact.

"We have these birds to eat," she said--she had fastened to her girdle
the birds picked out of the water after the upsetting of the canoe. "We
should eat them soon."

So that same day that he first tasted fish and first went upon the water
Loa had his first taste of duck. It was indeed a revolutionary day.




CHAPTER XIV


Their woodcraft had inevitably improved immeasurably since first they
had been compelled to live in the forest. Once they had been town
dwellers, living a definitely urban life on the produce of a cultivated
land, and Loa even more than the others had been an ignoramus about the
practical details of life among the trees; he had not had Lanu's intense
and recent experience on the fringe of the forest with his playmates.
But months of education in the hardest school of all had taught them
much. They could flit like shadows through the forest. No mushroom half
hidden in leafmold could escape their keen observation. They could read
the tracks of the little people and detect instantly their buried
skewers and their pitfalls. They were not so continuously hungry and
they could make their way among the trees without often coming against
obstructions, which their newly developed senses enabled them to avoid
without actual thought. And all this enabled them to travel with far
greater speed than when they had first begun their journey. They kept
the great river on their right hand, cutting off the bigger loops by
keeping to the high ground without any difficulty at all, and they were
only just conscious of their improvement. If they had been asked, they
would certainly have hesitated before agreeing that they had
improved--at the back of their minds was a feeling that behind them, at
the point where Loa had been rescued from the slavers, was a bad country
where life was very difficult, and that here life was easier.

The river made a wide, shallower curve than usual, but in the curve the
land was marshy as always, and Loa branched away from the river without
hesitation. There was something almost resembling a track here, a path
trodden by the forest antelope and by the little people along the
easiest going, and Loa led the way along it, silent of tread, quick of
eye, alert and ready for instant action. His eye for ground, naturally
good, and cultivated now to a high condition of efficiency, told him
that the river was approaching him again on his right hand, for the
slope was increasing--imperceptibly to anyone save himself--and the
character of the forest was changing, imperceptibly, again, to almost
anyone save himself. Only the minutest differences told him this, but he
was in no way surprised when the light through the trees on his right
front began to increase, when the uphill trend of the ground became more
steep, and the leafmold under his feet grew thinner so that he could
feel rock beneath it. At the crest the rock broke clean through the
surface into a succession of low pinnacles, and Loa came out from the
trees into an open space at the lip of the bluff, with the great river
beneath him.

He had been ready for something like this, but not exactly this. He
shrank down, he almost cowered before what he saw, yet it was not his
usual weakness in the presence of great distances. When Lanu and Musini
came up to him he could not speak; he moved his lips but could make no
sound, so overpowering was his emotion. Lanu looked round him, at the
rocks, at the curve of the river, at the trees growing densely about
them, projecting horizontally from the steep bank in their quest for
light and air. He rubbed his eyes like someone in a dream.

"I have seen this before," he said, and Loa nodded, his chest heaving.

Musini had sat down on a lichen-covered block of rock, for her pregnancy
was now so far advanced as to make her seize every opportunity to rest.
She looked round her too.

"It is our river," she said. "This is where we used to come from our
town."

"It is where you used to speak to the moon," said Lanu to Loa, and
stopped a little guiltily. They all knew that Loa had not summoned his
sister the moon out of the river for months and months now, and yet she
still came back to the sky after each absence.

"So it is," said Loa, hoarsely.

"Through there lies the way home. Only a little way," said Musini,
pointing through the forest.

"Yes indeed," agreed Lanu excitedly.

He seized a lump of rock in both hands, whirled it round, and flung it
out into the stream, where it raised a splash. That was what he used to
do when he was brought here in that other life, but now it was a far
larger rock that he threw. He was almost a man now.

"Let us go," he said. "What are we waiting for?"

Loa looked round at the two of them. They had not had his experience.
They had never known what it was to be a god one day and a slave the
next. This was a moment of triumph, to return after all these uncounted
months to a familiar place, but Loa had learned to distrust moments of
triumph. He felt apprehensive; he did not know exactly why. But his
apprehensions goaded him to a convulsive mental effort, as he made
himself try to picture what he expected to find if he went home along
the forest path. The first feeling was that he would find it as he had
always seen it, always save for the one morning when the slave raiders
came. The orderly street with the tall wooden houses on each side, the
throngs of women going about their domestic business, even Litti the
worker in iron busy at his forge. That was the mental picture that
memory conjured up; and he knew, with strange clairvoyance, that Musini
and Lanu could see similar mirages. But Loa was a realist now, and no
dreamer. The last time he had seen the town the houses had been in
flames, a third of the people were captives of the slave raiders,
children and old men and women had been lying in a tangled mass of
corpses. Loa remembered that once at least during his recent travels he
had set foot on the site of a town, a mere area in the forest where the
saplings contended with the shrubs and only a few half-choked banana
trees remained as evidence that man had once cultivated the spot.
Certainly this was all that they might find now.

And on the other hand...? Loa remembered the encounters he had had
with people from his town while he was a slave. They had hardly known
him, and they had not treated him as a god. So preoccupied were they
with their own affairs that they had not evinced any of the respect or
the terror which his appearance had once demanded. If there were any
people in the town they would have been preoccupied with their affairs
for many months. How would they treat him? For a moment Loa felt that he
did not care. He would not mind being the least considerable of all the
men in the town if only he were home again. He would content himself
with no other wife than Musini, he would reconcile himself to begging
help of other men to build a house, and Lanu would have to work hard to
buy himself a wife; he would endure anything just to be home. His
homesickness was intense enough at that moment to make any sacrifice
agreeable if he could satisfy it.

This was all very well, but Loa, standing woodenly with his wife and son
growing more and more excited in front of him, felt yet other doubts and
apprehensions. He could not define them at all, but his recent
experiences taught him to be doubtful, to take nothing for granted. Fear
had been part of the air he breathed for many months now, and he still
felt fear. His whole attitude was in the strangest contrast not only
with that of Lanu and Musini but also with his own of a few moments ago.
His recent life had been a partial education for him. He had acquired a
certain amount of logical ability, he had learned something of human
nature, and, above all, he knew now that he did not live in a settled
world where the unprecedented did not happen. He slid his hand up his
bowstave, bent it, and slipped the string into the notch, and then
gently twanged the string to make certain the weapon was ready for
immediate action. He examined his three arrows to see that the heads
were properly secured and that the notches of the barbs still retained
their viscid poison. With his bow over his left shoulder he put out his
right hand and gently took the little ax from Lanu, who happened to be
carrying it at that moment.

The others looked at him in some surprise, their ebullience dying away
when they noticed the gravity of his demeanor.

"Lord," said Musini, slipping naturally into the respectful form of
address. "What do you fear?"

Loa the god could not say "I do not know," which would have been the
truth, nor could he say "Everything," which would have been a close
approximation to the truth. He could only turn a terrible eye on his
wife, a cold glare that repressed even Musini and reduced her to
apologetic mumblings. Lanu caught the infection and strung his bow
without further words, waiting for Loa to make the next move. Loa looked
back across the broad river, sullen yet metallic under the sun. He even
looked up at his brother the sky; he lingered unaccountably as he spun
out these last few moments before starting out on what he felt in his
bones to be a decisive move which would affect the rest of his
life--affect it to the extent, even, of ending it abruptly, maybe. It
was strange to be seeking excuses for lingering here under the callous
observation of the sky, when almost at a stride he could gain the
comforting twilight of the forest; but he could not put off the move for
long, not under the eyes of Lanu and Musini, nor under his own eyes. He
hitched his bow more comfortably on his shoulder, took a fresh grip of
the little ax, and started along the path to the town.

Lanu and Musini walked with him in silence, the former out at one side
of him, the latter in the rear, weighed down somewhat by the burden she
was carrying. Lanu scanned the forest ahead of them as keenly as ever he
had. In the neighborhood of a town there was always added danger from
the little people, who were likely to hang round it both to rob the
banana and manioc plantations and to put themselves in the way of
obtaining live meat. Chips had been taken out of the bark of several
trees which they passed; a gesture from Lanu called Loa's attention to
chips of different heights and appearance--both the little people and
real men had passed this way within the last few weeks, to judge by the
fact that lichens had hardly had time to establish themselves on the cut
surfaces. And Lanu pointed, too, to footprints at the base of trees,
which, to judge by his expression, confirmed that conclusion. Loa
glanced at them wisely, but he was not woodsman enough to draw from the
faint indications that survived any inferences on which he could rely.

There was something, however, which offered unmistakably proof that men
were living near. They could smell the town as they approached it, the
wood smoke and the decaying refuse; only the merest trace stealing on
the air, imperceptible to any but nostrils long accustomed to the scent
of river and forest. It even seemed that their ears could catch the
faint sounds of a community; at any rate, what Lanu thought he heard
worked him up to a fresh pitch of excitement so that he grinned and
gesticulated to his father, who stolidly ignored him. This was the path
Loa had trodden scores of times; the changes in the forest, eternal yet
everchanging, could not prevent Loa from recognizing parts of it. Here,
just where he had expected it, began the tangled second-growth of the
abandoned clearings, and at this point, even to a tyro's eye, it was
obvious that the path entered into the tangle. Loa plunged in ahead with
the ax.

****

It was the time when the struggle for existence in the vegetable world
in that clearing had reached its climax, when the saplings were stoutly
grown and yet not large enough to kill by their shade the undergrowth
which had first occupied the cleared space. The saplings grew thick, in
desperate rivalry with each other, while all about them the shrubs and
creepers competed with each other in a waist-deep tangle. Nor had the
felled trees yet been reabsorbed into the forest; there were still
trunks and branches sufficiently solid to halt a man, although one
lichen-covered trunk onto which Loa climbed crumbled utterly to pieces
under his feet--honeycombed to rottenness by white ants, presumably.
Sweating with the exertion and the close heat, Loa plunged on; the path
could not be called defined in any sense, for there had not been enough
coming and going of men or of game to make any impression on the rapid
growth of the vegetation. Then he parted the last bush, and gazed out at
the town.

It was all so different. There was a street, and there were houses, and
the houses were built, as they always had been, of thick planks split by
wedges from tree trunks, and roofed with a thatch of phrynia leaves. But
it was not the same street, not the street that had so often appeared to
Loa's mental vision in his fits of homesickness. The houses were on
different sites, and there were not so many of them. At this end of the
town, where Loa had lived, the forest had begun to encroach. Loa's own
house, and Musini's house, and the big multiple-house which had
sheltered some of his wives, had all disappeared, their places partly
taken by a few poor houses and partly by a mass of scrub and creeper
which had already established itself on the vacant sites. Not merely was
the town smaller, but its center of gravity had apparently shifted
towards the other end, towards the marshy brook and Litti's forge. Loa
gulped as he gazed out, partly with excitement but mainly in a childlike
disappointment that everything was not the same as he remembered
it--even though at one time he had been realist enough to remember the
conflagration that had started in the town when he was a captive of the
slave raiders. But it might as well be a different town, and not his
home at all.

Lanu had come up beside him and was staring out at the town too, and the
changes that he noticed were having a sobering effect on him, judging by
his silence and immobility. There were people walking about the town,
and it was upon them that Loa turned his attention after his first
sweeping glance. Here was a woman with a hand of bananas on her head.
Loa was not sure that he remembered her; maybe it was some daughter of
Gooma, the man who was so expert at cutting the hardwood wedges for
plank splitting--Gooma had a string of daughters. Over there a man with
a bow in his hand came striding out of a house, and Loa knew him at
once. It was Ura, Nessi's husband--it was just as well Nessi was dead
then, for living she would have been a tedious complication in any
future settlement. Ura must have made his escape when the raiders
attacked the town, as must all of these people. A woman emerged from the
same house with a little child whom she laid in the shade of the eaves.
That was Nadini, and she had been one of Loa's own wives--he remembered
her quite distinctly. So she was Ura's wife now. Loa boiled with
indignation. He was not sure about how long he had been away, but
judging by Musini's condition that child was not his; it must be Ura's.
Loa came to some rapid but grim decisions regarding Ura's fate, and
Nadini's, and the child's.

At the end of the town there were a good many people visible, and all of
them were vaguely familiar to Loa. His memories were all jumbled and
distorted now, what with his present stress of emotion and the intensity
of his experiences since he had seen them last. There were some girls,
laughing and joking as they bore wooden water jars on their heads on
their way back from the brook. He could not put names to them.

"Let us go," he said, aloud but to himself.

He took a fresh grip of his little ax and plunged out into the open, and
Lanu and Musini followed him. Nadini caught sight of them emerging from
the undergrowth; the naked man, lean and scarred, ax in hand; the almost
full-grown boy, and the woman far gone in pregnancy. She stared at them
with unbelieving eyes. One of the girls saw them and called the others'
attention to them; one of them was surprised enough to allow her jar to
fall from her head.

"It is Loa!" cried Musini loudly behind him. "Loa, our Lord."

She ran from behind him, clumsy because of her bulky condition, to go
before him.

"It is Loa!" she cried again.

She waved her arms at Nadini and the girls, and went down in the proper
attitude of respect, knees and elbows on the ground, face close to it,
setting the example and then looking round to see if the other women
were following it. They did not. Nadini leaned against the doorway of
her house, her hand to her heart. The girls nudged each other and
giggled in embarrassed fashion. It crossed Loa's mind that he could stop
and remonstrate with them, but some consuming instinct within him said
"Go on!" and he strode on down the street, forbearing to get involved in
some undignified squabble before he should reach whatever vital
situation was awaiting him at the far end. Musini scrambled to her feet
again and once more ran grotesquely in front of him to herald his
approach. On went Loa to the far end of the town, that end where in his
day the riff raff, the low-born, had dwelt with a lack of dignity only
relieved by the presence of one or two respectable families such as that
of Litti the worker in iron. Loa had always had a faint snobbish
contempt for this end of the town.

There was a fair-sized group of people there which opened up and spread
as Musini came up, lumbering and gasping.

"It is Loa!" cried Musini, again, once more going down in the attitude
of abasement.

There were some cries of astonishment from the group, and someone
started to his feet from where he had been sitting in the center of it.
It was Soli, once a leader of the low-class society who had frequented
this end of the town. Loa knew him to be Soli, but the first thing Loa
was really conscious of was the fact that the seat Soli had just quitted
was a tripod, a distorted stool, very like the one he himself had always
sat on to hear the counsels of his advisers and to give judgment in
disputed cases. No one save Loa the son of Nasa (whose name no one save
Loa could utter) might sit on a tripod stool of that sort. And hanging
over Soli's shoulders was a leopardskin cloak--the garment, if not of
gods, at least of princes. And in Soli's hand was a battle-ax which Loa
instantly recognized as having once been his own--his own ceremonial ax,
presumably discovered amid the ruins after the departure of the slavers,
and now desecrated by Soli's touch. Loa flamed with uncontrollable rage.

But if Loa was angry, so was Soli. His face was distorted with passion
as he watched Loa approach.

"Kill him!" shrieked Soli, with a wave of his arm to the group around
him.

"It is our Lord, our Lord Loa," said Musini, raising her face from the
ground.

The group stirred but made no decisive movement, save for Ura; out of
the tail of his eye Loa was conscious that Ura was fumbling with bow and
arrow. Loa's instincts came to his help, and he sprang forward with the
little ax poised beside his shoulder, ready to strike. Soli could not
have retreated before him even if his rage had allowed; that would have
been defeat and death. He sprang to meet Loa, whirling the big ax round
in a blow that would have cut Loa diagonally in half had it struck him,
but Loa managed to wrench his body out of the way. Soli had a
substantial covering of fat--as Loa once had had, when his divinity was
undisputed--but he was still agile and sure on his feet as he had been
when he was renowned as a dancer. He let the swing of the ax carry him
round and away, so that he was facing Loa and out of his reach before
Loa could spring in. They eyed each other momentarily, prepared to
circle round each other. But Loa had at the back of his mind the bow and
arrow that Ura was fumbling with; he could neither waste time nor stand
clear so that Ura could have a free shot. Instinct still carried him
along. He feinted to the right--the natural direction for a right-handed
man to take when armed with an ax--and then instantly sprang to the left
and struck again, and only Soli's quickness of foot saved him after the
feint had deceived his eye. The big ax whistled past Loa's shoulder; the
little ax made a deep scratch in the bulging flesh of Soli's right
breast--only Soli's supple twist at the hips prevented the blow from
being fatal. As it was, the gash it left was six inches long and an inch
deep at its deepest. A wordless cry broke from the crowd.

"Yaa-aa-aa," cried the crowd, as the red blood poured in a broad stream
down Soli's chest, red in the blinding sunlight, and vivid against the
glistening brown of Soli's skin. Soli seemingly did not feel the wound;
he brought his ax round backhanded before Loa could recover from his
blow, and Loa had to retreat, with the big ax whirling before his eyes
so rapidly that, with each swing close upon the swing before it, he had
no time for a counterblow, but could only back and sidle away, an inch
from death at every swing. He might have exhausted Soli's impetus in
time, but the ground was too restricted. Retreating fast, he backed into
a spectator who had not time to get out of the way, and bounced forward
under the swing of the ax, crashing breast to breast against Soli.
Instantly they locked together, their left hands grasping the wrists of
the right hands that held the axes; breast against breast, hip against
hip, they strained against each other.

"Yaa-aa-aa," cried the crowd.

Loa put his left heel behind Soli's right to trip him up, but Soli bent
his body and swung with all his strength, heaving Loa round so that both
his feet almost left the ground, but he clung on, dragging Soli with him
so that they swung together in an ungainly dance.

Musini, still on her knees, was watching intently; as they circled her
she shot out one hand, swift as a striking snake, and caught Soli's
ankle for one brief moment. It was only for a moment before Soli's
momentum carried him out of her grip, but it was just long enough to put
him off his balance. He nearly fell, and his grip on Loa's right wrist
was weakened with the effort of keeping his footing. Loa tore his hand
free. He had no time to strike with the edge of the ax, but he stabbed
upwards and sideways with the head of it, hitting Soli below the left
ear.

"Yaa--aa--aa," howled the crowd.

Soli weakened, so that Loa could swing him away from him by his hold on
Soli's right wrist, and could then strike with all his strength at
Soli's head with the edge. Soli flung up his left arm to protect
himself, and the keen little ax bit deep into Soli's forearm just below
the elbow, nearly severing it so that the limb dangled uselessly and the
blood spouted in a vivid scarlet jet against the sunshine. Yet even then
Soli kept his feet. Loa had released his right hand, and Soli braced
himself and swung his ax back, the effort spattering Loa with blood from
the severed arteries. Loa circled out of harm's way, ready to spring in
again, but the drain upon Soli's strength was too great. He looked
stupidly down at his dangling forearm, and at the blood which poured
from it, and then his body sagged and he stumbled forward on his knees,
his leopardskin cloak still over his shoulders. The nape of his neck was
a clear target, and Loa struck at it, quick and hard.

"Yaa-aa," murmured the crowd, hushed and subdued.

Loa looked about him, the drops of blood clotting on his chest.

"It is Loa, our Lord," said Musini, on her knees.

"Loa!" said the crowd, and they went down on their knees too, their
faces to the dust. Even Ura, with his bow in one hand and his arrow in
the other, and with a clear shot at last open to him, went down on his
knees along with the rest. Nadini and the water-carrying girls, who had
drawn close to see the fight, fell slowly prostrate. Only Loa remained
on his feet, and Lanu, who stood grinning in the sunlight, legs
straddled wide. Loa's eyes met his, and they smiled at each other in
utter accord.




CHAPTER XV


Loa took his eyes from Lanu's and looked about him at the groveling
crowd. He ruled these people again, at least at the moment. He was
tired, and he wiped the streaming sweat from his face with his forearm,
but, tired though he was, he knew that much was demanded of him on the
instant. He might be a god and king again, but he was a god who had only
recently fought for his life under the eyes of these very people--a god,
in other words, who might soon be thought mortal if he did not act at
once in a godlike manner. There was no logic about the way Loa thought
regarding all this; indeed, there was very little thought involved. Most
of what he did was done on the spur of the moment, but it was enough to
prove that he had profited by his experiences.

He stalked over to the tripod stool and sat himself upon it, the little
ax across his knees.

"You may stand," he announced to the cowering multitude, and they slowly
got to their feet.

Loa looked round at them. He could not count them, but his eye told him
roughly how much the slavers' raid had diminished their numbers. More
than half of the population of the town had been captured or killed by
them. There were some new babies, and more, obviously, still to come, so
that the population would soon increase and presumably build itself up
again to its natural figure. The thought of babies brought his mind back
abruptly to Ura and Nadini--Ura, who had had the inordinate presumption
to take one of Loa's wives, and who had tried to draw an arrow during
Loa's fight with Soli. Loa was in no doubt about who was the intended
target for that arrow. He looked round the crowd again more searchingly,
to select men who would be sure to do his bidding; that was a strange
state of mind for Loa, accustomed to instant and utter obedience in his
town. He had never had any need for an inner court circle, for a
Praetorian Guard, before this. There had never been any possibility of
division; loyalty and devotion to him had been equal and universal, but
that was not the case now--the proof of that lay at his feet at that
very moment. Ura, standing somewhere behind his shoulder, would
certainly object to what Loa had in mind.

"Mali," said Loa. "Famo. Peri."

The three young men whom he addressed anxiously awaited his commands.

"Come and stand here," said Loa, indicating the space immediately in
front of him.

They came, in some trepidation. A great hush fell on the waiting crowd.
Loa ostentatiously kept it waiting. He shifted his position on the
stool, apparently in search of greater comfort, but actually so that he
could swivel round towards Ura. He had Ura in sight now, and was able to
watch any move he might make. He repeated the young men's names without
deigning to look round at them; automatically the dignified mode of
address, of a great superior to one vastly inferior, came to his
tongue--he had hardly employed it for months towards Musini and Lanu.
The young men stood tense.

"What I shall tell you to do, do it instantly," said Loa.

The crowd sighed nervously, and the young men stood poised.

"Take hold of Ura!" roared Loa, suddenly, flinging out his arm.

There was a flurry in the crowd. Mali, quicker off the mark than the
other two, headed the rush into the crowd, but Ura had reacted slowly,
taken completely by surprise. No one knows what he might or might not
have done, for even before Mali reached him the people on either side of
Ura had laid hold of him.

"Bring him out here!" roared Loa, with an imperious gesture, and they
led him to the open space, beside Soli's corpse.

They held his arms, and Mali took away his bow and his arrows.

"So," said Loa. "This is Ura. This is the man. Lift his face up to the
sun so that we can see him better."

Mali put his hand to Ura's chin and forced his head back. Ura blinked
with the sun in his eyes, but he made no motion of resistance, paralyzed
by the suddenness of all this. Loa stared at him, and then looked round
at the crowd. There was no need for haste; a dignified slowness would be
more impressive. Over there stood Nadini; she was looking at her new
husband with anxiety in her face, and Loa was torn with jealousy. He had
never cared specially for Nadini, but it was a dreadful, an
unprecedented thing for a man to take a wife of the god's without her
being given to him as a great favor and a great condescension, in the
most formal manner. Loa had intended to mention all this, but sudden
prudence dried up the words in his throat. There was nothing to be
gained, and much to be lost, by calling public attention to the fact
that Loa might have mortal motives. It would be far more impressive to
be incomprehensible, to offer no explanation for what he was going to
do. For one speech he substituted another.

"My father, whose name no one may utter save myself, must have a new
attendant. Nasa and his fathers await you, Ura."

The crowd sighed again, but Ura said nothing. This was inevitable death,
and the lethargy of death was already upon him. Ura might be said to be
the first convert to the renewed cult of Loa's divinity. Mali, anxious
to be helpful, looked down at the big ceremonial ax which still lay
beside the dead hand of Soli, but Loa ignored the hint. He gave his
orders for the preparation of the first stake of impalement ever heard
of in his town. He remembered well--too well--the methods used by the
Arab raiders to strike terror into the hearts of their captives. The
town listened in surprise, with a buzz of comment, when Loa finished
speaking; and they watched the preparations with deep curiosity. A
simple beheading or strangulation was nothing new to them, but this was.
The first sound Ura uttered after his arrest was a shriek of agony, but
it was not the last, not nearly the last.

Loa stole a glance at Nadini from under his brows; her hands were
clasped with the intensity of her emotion as she watched Ura's
writhings. Well and good. Then he looked about him with growing
distaste. He had never much liked this end of the town.

"There is a curse upon this spot," he announced. "Not even that"--with a
glance at Ura dying on the stake--"nor that"--with another glance at
Soli's corpse--"can quite take the curse away."

Here Soli had sat in judgment on his tripod stool; it was not policy
that was dictating Loa's words as much as bitter prejudice.

"Tomorrow, Famo," went on Loa, "you will put a fence round this spot,
from over there, round there, to _there_. No foot will tread on this
earth. The bushes and the trees will grow here. And until the fence is
made, let no one trespass upon this ground."

He rose from his stool; half a gesture from him was sufficient to make a
woman standing near him pick up the stool to carry it after him. The
crowd parted to let him through, and tumbled on their faces as he walked
past them, Nadini too.

"Come with me, Nadini," said Loa, as he walked by her.

Here was Musini, crouching subserviently, and yet not keeping still. Her
shoulders were heaving, and she was writhing as she knelt.

"How is it with you, Musini?" asked Loa.

Musini lifted a face that was apprehensive with pain and wet with sweat.

"Lord," she said. "Lord--I--I--"

Another twinge of pain cut her words off short, for her time had come
upon her. Loa stirred the woman next to her with his foot.

"Who are you? Maku? Then, Maku, attend to Musini. Call for any help you
may need."

Loa walked on up the street, with Nadini and Lanu and the three young
men following close behind him and the rest of the town--save those who
lingered to watch Ura's agonies--streaming after them in loose
formation, like the nucleus and train of a comet. Nadini's baby still
lay in the shade of the eaves of the house here, and Loa, pausing to
look round him, looked meaningly at it, amused at the instant reaction
of Nadini's clasped hands. Whim, or mercy, or policy, or satiation with
blood, led Loa to take no further action, to issue no further order, but
to pass on.

"There," he said to Peri, pointing, "there, tomorrow, you will build my
house. It is to be long and high and wide."

"Yes, Lord," said Peri.

"Meanwhile in that house there will I sleep tonight. See to it."

Another gesture was sufficient to the woman bearing the stool to put it
down outside the doorway, but Loa did not take his seat on it. He was no
longer sitting in judgment, he was abandoning for the time his official
capacity and retiring into privacy. He squatted in the shade of the
eaves of the house.

"You, Nadini, can keep the flies from me. You others may leave me. No.
You--" He glanced up at the woman who had been carrying the stool--"you
shall stay too. Whose wife are you?"

The woman shrank back embarrassed; she tried to speak but stuttered.

"Speak!" ordered Loa, but still she hesitated. "Speak, and no harm will
come to you. Whose wife are you?"

"I am the wife of no one, Lord. I--I _was_ the wife of him whose name I
cannot speak. Of him whose arm you cut off, Lord."

There was a horrified moment, for it was the worst of bad luck for a
mortal to say the name of, or even to allude to, someone who was dead.
But Loa was unembarrassed.

"I cut off more than his arm," he said with a chuckle. "As a widow I
shall give you in marriage again. See to it that you speak to me about
it later on."

The world was very good. He was home again, he was a god once more. And
this woman was well set up and handsome, he reflected, looking her over.

"What is your name?" he demanded.

"Subi, Lord. My father was of the family of Ko."

"That is so," said Loa, meditatively; he ran his eye over Subi again,
and then turned to look at Nadini. A distant shriek from Ura came to his
ears. It crossed his mind that now he might order Ura to be slain, to
put an end to his sufferings, but he decided against it, at least for
the moment. Life was good.

But here came an interruption. Several people were hastening towards
him, but the urgency of their advance died away as they neared him, and
when they were within speaking distance they began to hang back, each
trying to leave speech to the others.

"What is it?" asked Loa.

There was further hesitation, but the others shoved Maku forward, the
elderly woman whom Loa had ordered to attend upon Musini.

Loa looked at her and waited for her to speak, but she could not bring
herself to do it.

"What is it?" asked Loa, much more testily.

In the annoyance in his voice there was an echo, a subtle reminder of
the stake of impalement, of the execution ax. Maku gulped and forced
herself to announce the bad news. She at least was convinced of the
arbitrariness and supreme power of the god Loa, for, innocent herself,
she feared the wanton fate of a bearer of ill tidings.

"Musini, Lord."

"Well, what of Musini?"

"Lord, she has given birth. To two children, Lord."

The others wailed in sympathy; Loa heard Nadini behind his shoulder draw
in her breath sharply. The birth of twins was the worst of ill omens.
People might think, as they always did in similar cases, that while Loa
was the father of one of the children some devil was the father of the
other. But this superstition was not the root of the matter. The
consternation caused by the birth of twins was much more a matter of
unreasoning fear. It was an unlucky thing to happen, the unluckiest
thing there was, much more unlucky than even such a serious thing as
seeing a monkey on the ground to the left, or touching the lintel of a
door with one's head. Twin children must always be slain to avert
calamity. It was quite deplorable that this should have happened on the
day of Loa's return, to Loa's own wife.

Maku screamed when Loa, thinking about all this, forgot to take his eye
off her. She was sure that she was destined at the least to the stake of
impalement, and she flung herself groveling on the ground before him,
her face in the dirt.

"Oh, stand up, stand up!" roared Loa. "Listen to what I have to say."

They rose, whimpering, dust caking on the sweat of their faces and
bodies. Loa was having to think with extravagant speed. He felt in his
bones that it would be bad policy to admit that Musini's twins portended
evil, and with that feeling well established inside him he was able to
free himself from thralldom to the superstitions attendant on the event.
He had done without so many forms and ceremonies in the last months, and
survived their absence, he had had so many beliefs shaken by his past
experiences, that once a reasonable argument could be advanced on the
other side he was willing to believe even that there was nothing ominous
about the birth of twins. But he could not present such a revolutionary
theory to his people. If he laughed at one superstition, might they not
laugh at another--at the theory, for instance, that Loa was more than
mortal? He must do better than that; he must wring some advantage out of
this most unfortunate occurrence.

"What are the children?" he asked, more to gain time to think than for
any other reason.

"Boys, Lord. Both boys," replied Maku, unable to keep out of her voice
some of her surprise that Loa should ask a question so irrelevant to the
issue.

"So," said Loa.

His struggle to think logically was reflected in his face, so that the
onlookers believed they saw the workings of a spirit within him. He
walked through the crowd of onlookers, which parted before him, and sat
himself with the dignity the occasion demanded upon his stool.

"This is the Word of Loa," he began, slowly, using the ancient formula
which gave his words so much weight that it was the direst blasphemy to
debate them. "Musini has given two sons to Loa. Sons they are and sons
they will be. Let everyone be thankful for this gift. They will be
mighty men, killers of elephants and leopards. As they walk down the
street each person will touch another on the elbow and will say 'See,
there walk the two sons of Loa.' Musini will give them milk, and if she
has not sufficient it will be a fortunate woman who will share her duty.
For this is the day of the return of Loa from another world, and all
that happens on this day is good."

His audience was staring at him, almost unbelieving. The point had to be
made clearer, and Loa was warming to his work.

"I return after these many days," said Loa. "And what do I find? Where I
left ten people there are no more than five. Where are the young men and
the young women? Many, many children are needed to replace them. Here
are the first two that Loa brings out of his abundance. See you to it,
you women, that you do likewise."

The novelty of such a suggestion sent a tremor through his audience.

"Soli, whose name I alone may speak, would have killed these children.
But where is Soli? He lies dead. The broad ax of so much power was
useless in his hands before this little ax in mine."

Another shriek from Ura in the distance came as Loa paused for breath,
and he flung out his hand in the direction of the sound.

"Ura is waiting to bear the message to Nasa. He waits impatiently.
Mali!"

At his call Mali came forward, with head low in the presence of Loa
speaking the Word of Loa.

"Lord?"

"Go you to Ura. Take with you a club, a club of iron or a club of wood.
Say to Ura: 'To Nasa may you now go. Impatiently you wait. Bear with you
this message to Nasa. Loa has returned to his town and brought the two
boys who later will be men and who will serve Nasa.' Then when Ura has
heard the message he is to bear, you will strike him on the head with
your club. You will strike him with all the strength you have, so that
he will go quickly on his way. Mali, have you heard the Word of Loa?"

"I have heard, Lord."

"Then go. And you others have heard the Word of Loa. Go!"

They went, subdued and impressed, for the Word of Loa still carried
weight. Loa heard two more screams from Ura, and then no more. He
quitted the stool and went back to the shade of the eaves. He was
content; the great heat of the day was over and here in the shade was
almost a pleasant coolness.

"Nadini! Subi!" he said. "Bring me food. Food for Lanu and myself."

They glanced at each other, each of them exercising their minds over
what they would serve him.

"Hurry!" said Loa.

"Yes, Lord," said Nadini. "What may we bring you?"

"Food, I said!" roared Loa. "Food! Baked plantains in oil--tapioca--give
me food and not words."

"Yes, Lord," said Nadini, and she and Subi hastened away.

****

If Nadini had ever been in any legal way the wife of Ura she was his
widow now, from the moment that Mali's club had thumped upon Ura's
skull. The child ought certainly to die. And yet? The same argument
applied as before, regarding unnecessarily calling the attention of
people to any human weaknesses Loa might have. And he had given his Word
regarding the necessity of repeopling the town. He could not come to a
decision about it at the moment. To save himself the trouble of further
thought on the point he turned to Lanu, squatting silently at the side
of the house. Lanu had said not a word, he had kept in the background
all this time; if he was not awed at the spectacle of his father
reassuming his divinity he was at least impressed by it to the point of
silence.

"My son," said Loa, "we must find you a wife. You are ready for one."

"Yes, Father--Lord."

"This little ax of so much power was once yours. I made a present of it
to you. Do you remember?"

"Yes, Lord."

It was the ax that had shaped bows and arrows for them in the forest,
which had cut creepers for them, which had hacked a way for them through
thickets. And many an evening Lanu had squatted sharpening it on a
smooth stone. Yet despite his familiarity with it Lanu had to admit to
himself the likelihood, if not something stronger than likelihood, that
it was an ax of great power. And this father of his, whom he had known
to howl with terror at the lightning, who was perfectly capable of
walking past an obvious mushroom without seeing it, was yet Loa who sat
on a tripod stool and gave forth his Word. For that matter, he was the
same Loa who had led them back across the whole world, through the
unknown forest, back to the town. It was a complex theological problem
for a half-grown boy. And there was something else worrying him to which
he could not help referring, so that he raised the subject abruptly.

"Do you think all is well with my mother?" asked Lanu.

"Your mother?"

Loa was naturally taken by surprise by the question. He had had so much
on his mind that there had simply not been any room for Musini, not even
for the Musini who had shown her devotion to him during the hungry
pursuit of the slavers' column, the Musini whose capture he had once
deplored so bitterly, for whom he had gladly risked his own life. He had
forgotten all about Musini even while he had dealt with the problem of
Musini's twins.

"I expect all is well with her," said Loa, reassuringly. "When the food
comes I will send and find out."

Lanu nodded a little gloomily. He was aware that during the period
immediately following the birth of a child a woman was peculiarly
susceptible to the attacks of devils and to the poisonings and
enchantments of rivals and enemies, so that she not infrequently died.
Lanu did not want Musini to die, even though he knew it was unmanly to
care a rap about the fate of a mere woman. And Loa eyed him with
actually something of apprehension. Lanu was destined to become a god
like himself--would, one of these days, after the inconceivable but
inevitable moment when Loa went to join Nasa and his other ancestors,
actually be the principal god. It was not going to be easy to initiate
Lanu into the secrets of being superhuman, at a time when Loa himself
had the gravest doubts about his own divinity, and of course stronger
doubts still about Lanu's. Loa looked down the street at the busy
mortals going hither and yon about their business, and told himself with
a twinge of regret that he was of the same flesh that they were. He was
aware of a slight inclination to think something quite different, to
allow his recent feats to persuade him that he was, really and truly, a
being on a higher plane than theirs, but his newfound reaction did not
permit it. He had learned the truth as a hungry slave, when he had
shared a forked stick with Nessi, when he found out that the kurbash
hurt him. Loa, when he thought about all this, was a little like a
character in fiction of whom he had never heard and never
would--Gulliver at the moment of realization that he was of the same
species as the Yahoos.

Loa knew, too, that most likely the ideas of those people down the
street regarding his divinity would be a little changed at least.
Somewhere at the back of their minds must linger the memory that he had
once been led off as a slave. They all knew that he had fought hand to
hand with Soli. It would be a ticklish business still to claim the moon
for his sister, and to maintain that it was his summons that brought her
back each month from the embraces of the river. It could be done--only
Musini and Lanu knew that he had not troubled to summon her once during
all these months--but it might not be easy. The people's blind
acceptance of the notion of his divinity must be at an end, along with
his own. Instead of going along happily in an unchanging and
unquestioning world he would have to evolve a policy which would make a
god of him despite the doubters. He had already taken a few steps in
this direction when, for instance, he had ordered the impalement of Ura,
and when he had given forth his Word on the subject of Musini's twins.
There would be a lifetime of it before him, and after that a lifetime of
it before Lanu.

The arrival of the women with bowls of food diverted his untrained mind
from its colossal struggles with these problems.

"Baked plantains in oil," said Loa, peering at the contents of a bowl.

Lanu merely smacked his lips, plunged in his hand, and stuffed his
mouth. After months of forest food it was good to come back to town
food, to the food to which he had been accustomed all his life.

"Go, Nadini, and ask if all is well with Musini," said Loa.

Lanu watched her departing form with anxiety--the arrival of the food
had only momentarily diverted his mind from the subject of his mother.
Loa filled his own mouth; it was pleasant to feel the good red oil
trickling down his chin, to stuff himself full, to know that there was
more food than even he could eat to be obtained merely by a shout to
Nadini and Subi. But Loa was a man who had once believed himself to be a
god, and no man who has gone through that mental change-over can accept
unquestioning the thought of the permanence of anything. These plantains
and this tapioca tasted excellent, but Loa made himself remember the
days when he turned with loathing from bananas and tapioca, when the
thought of a continuous diet of bananas and tapioca, however ample, had
revolted him. Those days would come again. He shot an exploratory glance
at Lanu, who at that moment was engaged in wiping out the residual oil
from a nearly empty bowl with his fingers and then sucking them noisily.
Nadini's return delayed his opening of the subject he had in mind.

"All is well with Musini, Lord," said Nadini. "She sleeps, and the--the
children lie at her side."

Nadini showed momentary difficulty in concealing her ingrained disgust
when she had to mention the revolting subject of twins, but Lanu's face
lit up with a broad smile at her news.

"You may go," said Loa to Nadini, and, when she was out of earshot, he
turned back to Lanu and to the subject he had in mind.

"Do you remember," he asked, slowly, "those _fish_ that we ate on the
day that we took the canoe?"

He said the strange word, the word that had disappeared utterly from the
vocabulary of the town, with hesitation and difficulty, but Lanu rolled
an understanding eye at him.

"Well do I remember them," he said. "There were others that Musini and I
ate when we were in the pen in that town. They were good. As good as
meat."

"With canoes," went on Loa, "you could get for us more fish perhaps from
the river?"

He said "you" advisedly and with slight stress, and the form of address
he used was chosen with all the nicety of which he was capable--not the
form used by a god to a mortal, nor that used by a parent to a child,
but that of a superior person to one hardly his inferior. He wanted Lanu
to assume certain grave responsibilities because, vague though the plans
were which were forming in Loa's mind, they were plans he did not
believe himself capable of putting into execution himself.

"I do not know how to catch fish or how to kill them," said Lanu, but he
was not being merely obstructive. Loa could see that he was receptive
enough to the new idea.

"You do not," Loa agreed. "But there are men in towns beside the river
who do. Twice we have seen men catching fish in the river."

"That is so," said Lanu. He was willing to be helpful, but he could not
grasp yet what Loa had in mind.

Loa was not sure himself, for that matter. Neither his mind nor the
vocabulary in which he thought were adapted for logical thinking. The
actual formulation of plans was a difficult step beyond the vague
aspirations which a whole series of experiences and emotional
disturbances had stirred up within him. Theoretical thinking was
something that was almost beyond him, especially when he was thinking
about something quite foreign to his ordinary life. What Loa really had
at the back of his mind was to divert his people's minds from domestic
politics by a series of wars of aggression, but the vocabulary at his
disposal did not allow him to phrase it as briefly as that, nor in
twenty times that number of words. He could only feel the need and grope
his way towards expressing it, both to himself and to Lanu. Besides, he
was moved by pure ambition as well, and in addition to that by a whole
series of other motives, most of them simple enough in themselves, but
adding up to a complexity that utterly entangled him. He wanted revenge
in general upon a world which had treated him so ill; he wanted revenge
in particular on certain individuals and communities; and he wanted,
too, to exercise himself, and provide himself with outlets for his
activity, now that he was back in a world which could be utterly
tranquil at a time when his recent experiences had stirred him up so
that the prospect of tranquility was quite distasteful to him.
Misdoubting his own executive ability, he desired to assert himself
through the medium of Lanu.

"When we killed those men," he said, laboriously, "when we took their
canoe to cross the little river, you wanted to keep the boat. Do you
remember?"

"Yes. I remember."

"You thought you might go down the river in it."

"Yes, Lord."

"And I said that when we reached home you might have a boat of your
own."

"Indeed yes, Lord. I remember that."

"There are towns here, towns like ours, except that they are close to
the river and their people use boats and eat fish."

"Musini and I were captured by such people," said Lanu. "You got us out
of their cage, Lord."

"That is right. We could find such a town again. We have only to go seek
along the riverbank. You could go with the men from here, and at night,
when the town is asleep, you could go into it with the men. With spears
and with axes, you could kill those people who tried to fight against
you. The others you could fasten in forked sticks, if you wished to.
Some of the women we could have as wives, to raise up more children for
us who would fight for us when they grew up. And the men--they would
know about boats. They would know how to make boats. They would know
well how to make boats go upon the water. They would know how to catch
fish. You could make them show you how to do these things. You could
make them do these things for you."

"Lord," said Lanu, "all this might well be done."

He said it with amazement, a new revelation opening up before him. No
physical miracle that Loa might have performed could have impressed Lanu
as much as this speech. Lanu would not have been as excited if Loa had
stood the little ax on end and made it dance of its own volition. Lanu
lived in a world where one did not inquire into the causes of things
very deeply; an ax might dance, a tree might talk, just as branches
moved in the wind or a river chuckled and gurgled. What Loa was
proposing to do was something startlingly different. It was as if he had
pulled aside a series of veils which had hitherto enclosed Lanu,
revealing amazing new landscapes, all well within reach. The pang of
pleasure which Loa experienced when he saw Lanu's admiring reaction to
his suggestion was deeper than anything Loa had felt before. He was
thoroughly aroused now.

"The men would make many boats for us," he said. "Not one boat, but
many. Not little boats, like the one in which we crossed the river, but
big boats."

"Like the one which captured Musini and me," said Lanu. "Boats with many
men."

"Yes," went on Loa. "Many large boats, so that many men could go in
them. All the men in this town. In boats they could go far."

"Indeed they could," said Lanu. "I would lead them far."

"So you would. There would be no town that could stand against us."

"We would come by the river," said Lanu. "We would step on shore in the
darkness close to the town. No one would know we were near. We would
kill them. We would take all they had. We would drive them to the boats
and bring them back here."

Lanu slapped his thigh in his excitement, as the new prospects revealed
themselves in growing detail. Neither Lanu nor Loa was at all aware of
how much they were indebted for these ideas to the Arab slave raiders.
Every new conception--revolutionary, all of them--had its origin in
their recent experiences. The fundamental one, of attacking people who
had done them no harm, was due to the example of the Arabs. The plan of
the night surprise, even the idea of slavery, were from the same source.
There was something, perhaps, of originality in Loa's idea of sea power,
of building up a naval strength on the river as a ready means of
dominating other people, but even that really found its beginnings in
what Loa had seen on the beach at the Arab slave depot. Intense
experiences, working on simple minds that had long stagnated, were
producing violent reactions.

"You can go out soon," said Loa. "You can take with you one or two men,
and you can seek along the river for a town. You can look at it well and
secretly. Then you can come back and all the other men will be ready to
go with you."

"And the spears and the axes?" asked Lanu.

Loa paused to consider the question of munitions of war. There used to
be some spearheads of iron in the town which probably still existed.
There must be many axes; the whole culture of the town depended on the
steel-edged ax which could fell trees and clear the forest for the
planting of bananas and manioc. If Litti the worker in iron had not
survived the raid--and Loa could not remember seeing him today--some of
his family and trade must still be alive. They could make spearheads and
axes; Loa scowled a little as he thought that under pressure they could
make them much faster than they had done in the old happy-go-lucky days.
Most men could make bows, and the women could be put to work braiding
bowstrings. Somebody would have to be detailed to make a fresh supply of
arrow poison. Loa turned back to Lanu to debate another new conception,
that of the mobilization of the nation for war.

It was a deeply interesting discussion; the father and son went on with
it while darkness fell, and they hardly noticed the passage of time.
Only a sharp shower of rain eventually broke into their deliberations,
and made them seek shelter in the house Loa had appropriated to himself.
It was here that Maku addressed them, herself wet and glistening after
running up the street in the rain.

"Musini sends a message to her Lord," she announced, at the threshold.

"What is it?"

"Musini says"--the message did not come easily from Maku's lips--"that
now she lies awake. She lies with her children beside her, hoping that
perhaps Loa her Lord would come and visit her."

Loa could not think on the spur of the moment how to reply to such a
remarkable request, so he temporized.

"Go back to Musini," he ordered, "and say that Loa will consider the
matter."

With Maku gone, Loa turned the notion over in his mind. It was quite
inconceivable that a god should walk the length of the street merely to
visit a wife in childbed. He might look in upon her tomorrow if, as was
to be expected, business regarding the reorganization of the town led
him that way. Musini would be up and about in a couple of days at most.
Meanwhile she was of no use whatever as a wife, incapable even of laying
a plantain on a grid. But on the other hand the rain had stopped, and
there were a few minutes left before complete darkness began. He could
step outside to stretch his legs after so much squatting. A breath of
air at least--Loa had not been under a roof for a year, and it felt
strange to him. Lanu followed him when he rose and stretched and walked
outside. Loa breathed with pleasure the sudden coolness resulting from
the rain and the disappearance of the sun. The mud was soothing under
his bare toes.

"My mother is here," said Lanu suddenly, beside him.

Inside the house it was quite dark, as was to be expected, but Musini
had heard their approach.

"That is you, Lord," she said gladly. "I hoped you would come."

A thin wail arose from the dark interior, to be instantly matched by
another.

"See, Lord," went on Musini's voice. "Your children greet you. They are
fine boys, worthy of their father. Lord, it was good of you to let them
live. I--I did not want them to die. Lord--no devil was the father of
either of them. There has been no thought in my mind but for you all
this time. You knew that, Lord, and so you spared them, the children of
my old age. Lord, I am grateful."

Musini's hand, reaching out in the darkness, found Loa's knee. She
stroked his calf and pressed his ankle eagerly.

"It is nothing," said Loa, but Musini continued feverishly.

"Lord, you have led us home. You have killed Soli. The people put their
faces to the ground before you again. You will always eat your fill, and
many women will attend to your wants. But none of them were with you in
the forest, to find you white ants when you were hungry. None of them
pillowed your head when the rain fell and the lightning flashed, or
listened for the tread of the little people with you when all the forest
was full of enemies. I have shared all this with you. Perhaps you will
never pay attention again to an old woman like me, but I have had what
no woman ever had before me or will ever have again, and that will be
mine for always. Never again shall I be able to speak to you like this,
Lord, but I have said what I wanted to say. I am grateful, Lord."

It was a tactless speech to address to a god. Loa resented,
uncomfortably, being reminded of being hungry and of being frightened by
the lightning. Whatever Musini might say, it was Loa who owed a debt of
gratitude to Musini, and that was not a pleasant thing to think about.
Besides, it was unconventional, to say the least, for a woman to speak
her mind to any man, let alone to him. Loa could remember the days
before the raiders came when Musini evinced a shrewish sharpness that
had not conduced to his dignity--that in fact had nearly sent her to
serve his ancestors--and the fanatical possessiveness underlying her
recent speech warned him that the same thing might happen again, easily,
if similar circumstances ever arose. He must make sure that they did
not, that Musini's position as senior wife should be so defined in
future as to give her no such opportunity.

All this his brain or his instincts, his infinite experience of wives,
told him. He shied away from his love for Musini as a wild animal shies
away from a trap, and yet he was moved inexpressibly by that urgent
whisper, by the feverish touch of the woman's hand upon him. He inclined
more and more towards melting, towards making a host of rash promises.
He had to summon up all his resolution to tear himself away, to free
himself from the magic hold this old woman, his earliest wife, had upon
him. He withdrew himself from her reach, yet even then did not have all
the moral strength necessary to end their relationship once and for all.
Instead he temporized again.

"Sleep well, Musini," he said, with a kindly note that he could not keep
out of his voice. "Feed your children well, and rest in peace."

Walking back from the house he was perturbed, a little sore and
resentful. But there was one easy way in which at least he could forget
Musini, there was one specific opiate which could at least temporarily
negative the sting of his feelings.

"Nadini!" he called as he approached his house.

"Lord, I come," said Nadini.




CHAPTER XVI


For a thousand years at least, perhaps for many thousand years, the
forest and its people had lain in torpor and peace. There had been food
for all who could survive disease and cannibalism; there had been room
enough for all, there had been materials enough to satisfy every simple
need, and there had been no urge, either economic or temperamental, to
wander or to expand. There prevailed an equilibrium which was long
enduring even though it bore within itself the potentialities of
instability, and it was the Arab invasions, pushing southwards from the
fringes of the Sahara, westwards from the valley of the Nile and from
the coast opposite Zanzibar, which first destroyed the equilibrium of
the life in the deep central recesses of the forest. On the Atlantic
coast, where the great rivers met the sea, the disturbance began
somewhat earlier as a result of the activities of Europeans. Hawkins on
the Guinea Coast first bought from local chieftains the victims who
otherwise would have gone to serve the chieftain's ancestors, and sold
them at a vast profit on the other side of the Atlantic. More and more
white men arrived, seeking gold and ivory and slaves, and willing to pay
for them with commodities of inestimable desirability like spirits and
brass and gunpowder; and the demand raised a turmoil far inland, for
where local supplies were exhausted the local chiefs soon learned to
make expeditions into the interior in search of more. Soon there was no
more gold; the supply of ivory died away to the annual production when
the accumulated reserves of ages were dissipated; but the forest still
bred slaves, and slaves were sought at the cost of the ruin and the
depopulation of the coastal belt.

But no effect was evident in the deep interior of the forest. The
cataracts on all the rivers, where they fall from the central plateau,
the vast extent of the forest, and, above all, the desolation of the
intermediate zone, hindered for a long time the penetration of the deep
interior either by the native chiefs of the coastal fringe or their
white accomplices. The Napoleonic wars delayed the inevitable
penetration, and when they ended the diminution and eventual suppression
of the slave trade delayed it yet again. Towards the coast the strains
and stresses of the slave-raiding wars had brought about the formation
of powerful kingdoms--especially in the areas whither Mohammedan
influence had penetrated from the Sahara--which subsequently had to be
destroyed by the Europeans to gain for themselves free passage beyond
them. The Hausa empire, Dahomey, Ashanti, and innumerable other native
states, rose and later fell, built upon a foundation of barbarism
cemented by European and Moslem influences. In the same way the
intrusion of the Arabs from the east set the central part of the forest
in a turmoil, so that war raged and no man's life was safe in his own
town; and these developments occurred at the moment when Arab influence
ebbed away as a result of events elsewhere, leaving the central forest
disturbed and yet not further disturbed; as if the highest wave had
swept the beach and none of its successors ever reached as high.

****

And so Loa was able to build up his little empire undisturbed. Those
moments of vision--blurred though the vision might be--of his first
conversation with Lanu were never succeeded by anything comparable, and
yet they proved to be all that was necessary. There can have been few
statesmen in the world who have ever carried out so completely a scheme
conceived at the beginning of their careers. As time went on, Loa saw
every step of his vague plan carried through. He saw Lanu develop from a
lively thoughtful boy to a bloody-minded warrior. The raiding parties
that Lanu led rarely if ever came back empty-handed. There was the first
notable occasion when, having set out on foot, he returned by water,
with his men in three big canoes paddled by prisoners. He landed on the
riverbank, naturally, at the practicable beach below the site of the
vanished town which Nasa, thirty years before, with less vision than
Loa, had utterly destroyed. Equally naturally there grew up on the site
in time a new little town, the port of Loa's capital, populated largely
by the captives taken in the various raids; for Loa, partly from
necessary policy, and partly from something resembling good nature, did
not send all his prisoners to serve his ancestors.

Sometimes he was ferocious and terrible. There were days when the
ceremonial ax was hard at work, when his own people and not merely the
slaves spoke with hushed voices in fear lest upon them should fall Loa's
choice, when from the grove which sprang up in the accursed spot at the
far end of the town there came the shrieks of men and women in agony.
But this happened only when Loa's instincts told him it was time to
assert his majesty afresh, for often prisoners were too valuable to be
sacrificed when they could be incorporated into his own population, as
wives for his men or as skilled workmen for his enterprises; and the
children could soon be trained into devoted soldiers and subjects.
Skilled slave labor built for him the canoe fleet that swept the whole
long reach of the river between the rapids; captives taught his men how
to handle paddles; and captives, in addition, actually manned the
paddles in great part--it did not take long to convert, by plunder and
victory, the slave of yesterday into the enthusiastic warrior of today.
Lanu, having led armies from boyhood, soon became a skilled and then a
famous warrior, and as the years went by his much younger twin brothers
began to make a name for themselves as soldiers too, but the ultimate
power was wielded by Loa, who never went out on a raid, but who lived in
mysterious state in his own town, sometimes weaving plans, but always,
according to the frightened reports of both his friends and his enemies,
weaving spells that brought him inevitable victory. In twenty years Loa
had spread his rule over a wide circle of the forest, so that his
boundaries came into touch on the one side with the waning Arab dominion
extending from the Great Lakes, and on the other with the new power from
Europe which was slowly extending from the sea.

The battle for the mastery of Central Africa had already been fought,
and the Arabs had been defeated by the Europeans, before the European
tide began to flow finally towards Loa's kingdom. Loa knew of the
European victory; he knew of the advancing European tide. He knew about
the rifles, and about the devil-driven canoes, ten times the size of the
biggest war canoe, which could make their way up the river by reason of
the fire in their bellies. He had no superstitious fear of these things.
He had been a god himself, and he was a god of a different kind now. The
rifles were merely an improvement on the firearms he had seen in Arab
hands--in his own hands, for that matter, for one or two of his
campaigns had resulted in the capture of smooth bore muskets whose locks
had ceased to function even before their ammunition had been spoiled.
Similarly the devil-driven canoes were merely an unexplained improvement
on the dugout. Loa had no superstitious fear of them, but he feared
them, all the same. He thought the invaders from down the rivers would
conquer him when the clash came. But Loa was a very old man now, well
into his fifties, and loath to accommodate himself to changed
circumstances. By yielding to the advancing power he might be able to
make terms; he knew vaguely of other chiefs who (some of them out of
fear of him) had submitted to the new power, and who had been allowed to
continue to live, as tax gatherers and chief executioners, but Loa did
not want to live on those terms even if they should be granted him. He
did not want to live on those terms.




CHAPTER XVII


Captain Victor Augustus Talbot of the Army of the Independent State of
the Congo sat sweltering outside his tent beside the river. Today the
weather seemed hotter and steamier than he had ever known it, and fever
had brought him down to a state of the lowest depression of mind.
Feverish images came unsummoned into existence in his mind's eye. He
thought of iced claret cup, deliciously cold, with sections of lemons
and oranges floating in the great silver bowl of it, with an attentive
mess-steward standing by it ladle in hand eager to dip out any quantity
demanded. There would be cold food, too, salmon and cucumber--he would
never taste Wye salmon again--and chicken in aspic and lobster with
mayonnaise. Talbot found himself smacking his sore lips at the thought
of it. Instead of sitting outside a sweltering shelter tent that a big
dog could hardly crawl into, he would be in the cool and shady marquee
at the edge of the cricket ground. Discreetly in the background there
would be the regimental band playing sentimental airs, not loud enough
to drown the pleasant sound of ball against bat, and the languidly
appreciative cries of "Well hit, sir!" His friends, straw-hatted and
striped-blazered and white-flanneled, would lounge through the big
marquee with the unhurried elegance of English gentlemen, trained to
exhibit no emotion, unobtrusive and yet with shoulders drilled straight
in the finest regiment in the English Army, congratulating each other on
the fine weather for the cricket festival and perhaps even venturing a
mild protest against the July heat--the _heat_, by God! Talbot shifted
in the pool of sweat which had accumulated in his camp chair and swore
filthily. He thought of the claret cup again, and of the muddy warm
river water which was all he had to drink, of the salmon and cucumber in
the past and of the few tins of beef--the contents quite liquid when
taken out--which alone stood between him and a pure African diet.

He was not a very robust figure, and his face narrowed down from above
to a pointed chin under the straggling fair beard. There were the
remains of a weak good nature in his features--the good nature which had
led him, more sinned against than sinning, into one of the historic
scandals of the Victorian Age, resulting in his resignation of his
commission in the Green Jackets. His family had turned against him, his
allowance had abruptly terminated, and he had been faced, unexpectedly
and for the first time in his life, with the necessity of earning money
enough to keep himself from actual starvation. So he had accepted a
commission in the Army of the Independent State of the Congo. King
Leopold of the Belgians was his master, and in the service of King
Leopold men of weak good nature either died or changed their natures,
and Talbot still lived.

The subtlest and most avaricious of all the public figures of Europe,
Leopold, having contrived to obtain a mandate from the civilized world
giving him Central Africa as his personal possession, was now proceeding
to reap dividends from it. It had been a risky speculation--as any
speculation must be which brings in profits of thousands of millions to
a single individual--and for a brief while even Leopold, with his vast
personal fortune and extensive credit, had been near to bankruptcy. The
war with the Arabs, the building up of an army and an administration,
had cost enormous sums. But now was the time of harvest. King Leopold's
servants were flooding into Central Africa, Europeans with a hard
taskmaster urging them on. They armed the native soldiers with European
weapons, and gave them some semblance of European discipline, so that
opposition to their advance was hopeless. Each new district conquered
provided from the accumulation of ages an immediate supply of ivory and
gold, and as soon as the looting was completed the inhabitants could be
put to labor. Every district could be assessed to produce a quota of
palm oil or rubber or ivory for sale for Leopold's benefit, and if that
quota was not forthcoming Leopold was peevish, and wrote peevishly to
his representatives, who in turn passed on his censures to their
subordinates.

There could be no excuse for not producing the quota, for the men in
local control had in their hands an instrument admirably adapted for the
production of palm oil and rubber and ivory--an instrument whose
usefulness they had learned from the Arabs: the hippopotamus-hide whip,
the kurbash; in Belgian-French slang, the _chicotte_. And to facilitate
the application of the _chicotte_, and to open up fresh fields for its
employment, there was the Army. That portion of the Army commanded by
Captain Victor Augustus Talbot was engaged at this moment in a campaign
to open up a fresh field. Someone in the Brussels office--perhaps King
Leopold himself--had noticed on the map a large area not yet conquered,
and had sent the peremptory orders which had put the Army on the march,
with Loa's town as the objective.

Sergeant Fleuron, the product of a Brussels slum, came up to report to
his captain.

"Well?" asked Talbot.

"Perhaps they believe what they have been telling me," said Fleuron, "I
do not."

"You interrogated each prisoner separately?"

"I did," said the sergeant.

In his hand there idly swung the hippopotamus-hide whip which he had
employed in his search for truth.

"What did they say?"

"Mostly lies, as usual. Some of the lies we had heard before."

"For example?"

Fleuron shrugged his shoulders before recounting the result of his
investigations.

"There is a great king over there," he said. "Some say his name is Loa
and some say it is Lanu. Maybe 'Loa' is their word for 'king.' Or maybe
Lanu is the king and Loa is the name of his god. Loa lives in a great
town near the great river. In the middle of the town he has a sacred
grove. Too sacred to speak about without persuasion."

"Crucifixion trees, and skulls nailed to branches," said Talbot, out of
his experience of sacred African groves.

"And ivory perhaps. Perhaps even gold," said Fleuron.

"Let's hope so," agreed Talbot. "What else did they say?"

"Loa has a mighty army."

"How many men?"

Fleuron shrugged again.

"These men never know. Fifty or five hundred--it is all the same to
them. Sometimes Lanu leads this army, and sometimes--"

"Sometimes--?"

Fleuron went on with what he was saying with considerable reluctance.

"Sometimes they are led by two great warriors, brothers born at the same
time."

"Nonsense!"

"It sounds like nonsense, Captain, but all these fellows say the same
thing even after tasting the _chicotte_."

"But they cannot mean twins."

"It's twins that they mean, Captain, without a doubt. They use the very
word for twins. It's strange to hear them. It's a surprise when they
come out with it without any shame. As much a surprise as if a nun were
to use a dirty word."

"And who are these twins?" demanded Talbot.

"They are sons of Loa, or sons of Lanu--who can know where the truth
lies when they say such things? But they are so alike that no one can
tell one from the other."

"I never know how these niggers tell each other apart anyway," said
Talbot. "They all look alike to me."

Sergeant Fleuron had other views. He had the keen wits of the
intelligent slum dweller, and in three years he had learned much about
Central Africa, including so many languages that he was able to
interpret almost any local dialect. Africans to him were distinct
individuals, which made the application of the _chicotte_ a much more
interesting exercise. But he had far too much sense to contradict his
captain, so he went on with his report.

"They seem to worship this Loa in a quite devoted manner," he said. "The
tales they tell! It seems that a long time ago--you can never be sure
which century they are referring to--Loa went away. To heaven, maybe.
When he came back he brought these twins with him, and he started
working miracles. Apparently it was then that he conquered the country
roundabout. He made men travel on the water--from the way they talk, one
would think he had invented canoes."

"We've heard about his canoes before," said Talbot.

"Yes, Captain. He seems to have a navy, a genuine navy. He rules all
this length of river, from these cataracts here to the falls above. A
hundred miles of it, perhaps, and as far inland on each bank as his
armies can reach. Fifty miles deep on each side, perhaps."

"A regular potentate," said Talbot. "I fancy we have enough rifles to
deal with him."

"Without a doubt, Captain. And there is much water coming down the river
at present."

"You mean?" asked the Captain.

"Now is the time to get the steamboat up the cataract."

"Now if ever," agreed Talbot.

He resented having to rouse himself to action. Getting the steamboat up
the cataract would be a laborious and ticklish operation. Yet the
approaching campaign would be much facilitated by command of the river;
and there had been a good deal of sting in the last batch of orders from
the Baron. He would have to act soon--he would have to act immediately.
If he found excuses Sergeant Fleuron might make a secret report on him.
He groaned as he shifted in his chair.

"Are the prisoners still alive?" he asked.

"Yes, Captain. And they will live. I can put them to work. But I
thought--"

"What did you think?"

"I thought we could use their ears. For our next report for the Baron.
They would be useful."

"Oh, do as you like about that. Why ask _me_?"

Fighting a war of conquest for a miserly old blackguard in Brussels led
to some curious complications. Any ordinary government in wartime never
stopped to count the cost, but Leopold never stopped counting it. Every
cartridge that was used meant several centimes out of his pocket, and he
insisted on proof that as high a proportion of cartridges as possible
had been expended to good purpose. He was so determined about it that
his subordinates locally had to insist too. The Baron to whom Talbot
reported used to ask for ears, and wrote irritating reprimands when the
number of right ears sent in was less than half the number of cartridges
expended. The prisoners Fleuron had been examining would each provide a
right ear without the expenditure of a single cartridge, and even after
that would still be available for the labor of collecting rubber.

"I'll attend to it, Captain," said Fleuron.

Talbot groaned again as he hoisted his wasted and disease-racked body
out of his camp chair.

"I'll come down and look at that damned cataract," he said.

So the next operation of that portion of the Army of the Independent
State of the Congo under Talbot's command was the warping of the
stern-wheeler _Lady Stanley_ and her subsidiary barges up the cataract.
The racing currents there were far too strong for the _Lady Stanley's_
feeble engines--her boiler had had to be carried on men's backs through
the forest round the lower falls, so that it could not boast much
thickness of metal--but ingenuity and patience and the labor of a
thousand men took her up in time. There were back eddies against the
banks which sometimes gave them as much as a hundred yards of ascent at
a time. At other times a cable had to be carried out ashore and attached
to a stout tree. Then the _Lady Stanley_ would wind herself up towards
it--aided by five hundred men at the tow ropes--and drop an anchor to
help hold her while another cable was carried up to another tree higher
up. It was not an inexpensive operation, for the Army was always
stepping into potholes in the river bottom and being swept away, or
breaking legs and arms in wrestling with the cables--forty men were
drowned when one of the cables parted against a sharp rock--and there
was always disease to carry off the weaklings.

A thousand men, Talbot disposed of, of all shades of black and brown;
men with teeth filed to needlepoints, men with shields of plaited reed,
men with shields of hippopotamus hide, men armed with spears, with
clubs, with bows, with axes--and two hundred men armed with Remington
rifles for whom the _Lady Stanley_ carried two hundred cartridges per
man. The Baron would want to see twenty thousand right ears by the time
those cartridges were all used up! (He had not yet laid down any
anatomical equivalent for the six-pounder shells for the gun which was
mounted on the _Lady Stanley's_ strengthened bow.) A thousand men were
under Talbot's command, with a white sergeant and eight white
corporals--his two lieutenants had died of fever--and a couple of
drunken white engineers to attend to the boiler of the _Lady Stanley_.
One of them was a white-haired old reprobate who--according to his own
account--had shipped with Semmes in the _Alabama_ and had gone down with
her when the _Kearsarge_ sank her off Cherbourg. Neither engineer ever
paid any particular attention to Talbot's orders. They both knew their
own value too well, and the _chicotte_ and the hangman's rope which
maintained a savage discipline among the colored troops were not for
them.

Talbot stood beside the cataract, watching a working party bringing up
the lower warp for attachment to the tree by which he stood. They had to
wade in the shallows with their burden, slipping and stumbling, but
doing their best to keep their footing, not merely in fear of their
lives but in fear of the whip in the hand of the white corporal wading
beside them. Talbot could trust nobody beside himself to supervise the
actual fastening of the cable to the tree--experience had taught him a
good deal to supplement the sketchy knowledge acquired during his
instruction in field engineering at Sandhurst. He stood moodily looking
on as the working party splashed towards him; there were the two barges
to be dragged up the cataract after the _Lady Stanley_ had made the
ascent, and time was passing and losses were mounting.

From the forest some way lower down on his side of the river came the
distant report of a rifle, flattened and distorted in its journey to his
ear through the heated air between the trees. Talbot scowled; one of
Fleuron's sentries, half asleep, must have pulled the trigger, wasting a
cartridge without an ear to show for it. Well, whoever it was had an
ear, anyway. But he had hardly thought this all out when there were
further reports, a regular fusilade, climaxed by the rapid fire of a
revolver. Fleuron was the only person in that direction armed with a
revolver. The natives must be attacking there, and fiercely, too, for
Fleuron to be personally engaged. Talbot's own guard sprang into
attitudes of attention, their fingers on their triggers, chattering to
each other and peering into the twilight of the forest towards where
their sentries were posted. But Talbot stood fast where he was--Fleuron
would have to fight it out or fall unassisted; Talbot had had too much
experience of forest warfare to attempt to hurry to his relief in a rash
movement through the forest, which might well lead into an ambush. The
working party came hastily up with the warp, glad to be under the
protection of Talbot's riflemen, and would have joined in the chatter if
Talbot's harsh orders to the corporal had not put them to work carrying
the cable round the tree while Talbot saw to the knotting of it.

The firing down the river died away with startling suddenness;
everything was quiet. Talbot glanced down to the _Lady Stanley_ lying to
the lower warp and her anchor, the current foaming round her bow as
though she was tearing along although she was stationary. Everything was
ready for the next move provided the fighting had ceased, so he picked
up the white signal flag and stepped to the water's edge and waved it.
He saw the French engineer wave a red flag in reply from the _Lady
Stanley's_ deck. Then down the river a black crowd of men emerged from
the trees at the water's edge and split into two, each half taking one
of the two man-power ropes and moving up the stream to take the strain
on them. A white man directed their movements, and by his helmet and his
fragments of uniform Talbot recognized Fleuron, who had evidently
survived the attack, whatever it was.

When the man-power ropes were taut and the men braced ready a white flag
fluttered beside Fleuron, and Masson answered it with a white flag.
Talbot saw him step to the steam capstan. The warp by which Talbot stood
began to tighten, rising out of the river in an ever-flattening arc from
which the water spouted in fountains, while the coils round the tree
groaned and creaked. There was always desperate anxiety in Talbot's mind
at this moment in case the warp should part. But the men at the ropes
hauled away lustily under the lash of their headmen's whips, and the
_Lady Stanley_ slowly crawled up against the current. She picked up her
anchor as she came up to it, crept on, with Masson at the wheel battling
to keep her bows pointing outwards against the tug of the warp. She had
made a full hundred yards' gain before she was so nearly up to Talbot's
tree that it was useless to haul farther on the warp. Her whistle
sounded as Masson pulled the lanyard, and the men at the ropes lay back
against the strain as he dropped the anchor, necessarily wasting a few
precious yards as he allowed the boat to drift back a trifle so that the
anchor could bite and divide the strain with the warp. Then, and only
then, did Masson wave his white flag again as a signal for those in
charge of the lower warp to cast off and begin to carry it up above the
one Talbot stood beside, and for the men who towed to relax their
efforts and fall gasping on the bank.

Here came Fleuron with the sentries and guards who had been stationed in
the forest farthest downstream; now they were to be sent on ahead to
cover the further advance of the warps--the expedition was like a
caterpillar or a measuring-worm, bringing up its tail to its head in
readiness for a fresh move. Fleuron had with him his detachment of
riflemen and his bearers.

"What was that firing, Sergeant?" asked Talbot.

"They tried to rush in upon us," replied Fleuron. He made free use of
anatomical and zoological expressions to describe his enemies, so that
his Belgian-French would have been almost unintelligible to anyone who
had not long been associated with him.

"How many of them?"

"A full hundred. Maybe more. It was a well-timed rush--they came at us
all at once and from all points in the forest. One sentry got a poisoned
arrow--he was dead before I left him. My Hausa headman got a spear in
his belly. He's dead too. We'd have all been dead if the sentries had
not given plenty of warning. The rifles stopped them when they came out
of the trees."

Fleuron waved a hand towards one of his bearers who was carrying a
length of creeper. Upon it were strung, like pieces of meat on a skewer,
a large number of human ears.

"We killed thirty-four of them," said Fleuron. "I got five of them
myself in five shots. Then they turned and ran back, what was left of
them. Oh yes, I brought this..."

He turned to another of his bearers, who opened the bag he was carrying,
crudely made from big leaves, and shook out its contents with a thump on
the ground. It was a human head, the eyes glaring and the mouth
grinning.

"This was the leader," explained Fleuron: "the man who headed the rush.
He got a bullet through the heart, luckily, as soon as he came out from
the trees. He was wearing a spiral iron collar and armlets, so I think
he was a chief."

"A young man to be a chief," said Talbot, looking at the unwrinkled
features.

"Yes. It occurred to me that he might be one of those young twins they
all talk about, Captain. All the legends say they are as like as two
peas; so I thought I would pickle this head in salt and see if we ever
get the duplicate of it."

"As you will," said Talbot. "It will be an interesting anthropological
study."

There was bitterness in his tone as he spoke; there was something
fantastically odd about Captain Victor Augustus Talbot, late of the
Green Jackets and once the darling of London drawing rooms, standing
beside a tropical river callously looking over human heads and ears,
even black ones.

"Thank you, Captain," said Fleuron.

At his gesture the head was bundled back into the bag again, and his
scouts began to push cautiously into the forest to cover the further
advance up the river to the point to which the lower warp would then be
conveyed. Cautiously indeed they went, their rifles held ready across
their breasts, halting long and peering round the trees for fear of the
death which might come winging at them through the twilight. Talbot
watched them go on ahead. Now the lower warp was being unfastened and
carried up the river by a corporal's working party splashing through the
shallows. He would accompany it in its further journey to the next
suitable tree for its attachment. He was about to give the word to his
party when a shadow passed before his eyes and something struck the tree
beside him with a sharp rap. He looked, and there, lying at the foot of
the tree, was a long arrow, feathered with a couple of leaves. The long
slender head of the arrow had broken against the tree and lay in pieces
beside the shaft, but Talbot could see the barbs that had edged the
head, and in the notches of the barbs the thick greenish-brown poison.
The arrow, bearing death with it, had passed within two inches of his
face. He wheeled to face the forest, his revolver in his hand, but there
was nothing to be seen among the trees, nothing save the backs of his
sentries stationed out there with their rifles to guard against attacks
of this very sort. A fine watch they were keeping! Talbot's lips
wrinkled into a feeble snarl. Whoever it was who had sped the arrow had
ignored those sentries, and had crept up and singled him out for a
target. The sentries were still ignorant of the danger to which he had
been subjected. There was only the inscrutable forest before him.

Talbot's headman saw his captain's gestures, saw the broken arrow lying
on the ground, and guessed what had happened. Vociferously he berated
the sentries for their negligence, and under his urgings some more of
Talbot's escort advanced a little way into the forest in search of the
assassin, but in a few moments Talbot himself called them off. It was
only a waste of time to seek a single enemy among the trees. Once let
him get the _Lady Stanley_ and the barges up this infernal cataract and
he would be able to deal adequately with these devils. He would make
them pay for the misery and danger he was enduring.




CHAPTER XVIII


The _Lady Stanley_ had completed the ascent of the cataract, and now she
lay at anchor in the midst of the wide river. Beside her lay one of the
two barges, hauled up the cataract by the aid of the _Lady Stanley's_
steam capstan and by the efforts of five hundred men at the ropes. It
only remained to haul up the second barge, and Talbot would be master of
all the reach of river between the cataract and the upper fall. Five
hundred men with their equipment and food could be packed into those
barges and transported about the river faster than any man could walk in
the open--far faster than any large body could move through the
forest--while the six-pounder cannon at the _Lady Stanley's_ bows would
show her enemies something they knew nothing of as yet. Masson and
Carver, the French-speaking and English-speaking engineers, were
relaxing after their labors with the aid of some bottles of trade gin on
board the _Lady Stanley_, while the sun plunged down into the forest,
lighting the broad steamy surface of the river a sullen red. Talbot was
on board as well, having had himself paddled out to her in a canoe, but
he had not yet begun upon the gin. He was leaving that until after
sunset; tonight he would drink himself into a stupor, maybe, but first
he would enjoy the amenities of the steamboat. On the wide river here
there would be a breath of air, different from the stifling atmosphere
of the forest. There would be no ants to creep into his clothes. He
could have a properly adjusted mosquito net under which he could lie
naked and enjoy a more comfortable night--in fact he might not even
avail himself of the gin at all, for Talbot was of that self-centered
type to whom alcohol often makes no appeal. A night amid quiet and
comfortable surroundings meant more to him than a debauch, and out here
in the middle of the river there was no chance of assassination.

He would get the second barge up the cataract tomorrow, and move direct
upon this town of Loa's, or Lanu's, or whatever the name of the chief
might be. They would stand and fight for their capital and their sacred
grove, and he could crush them then--there would be no need to pursue
them through the forest trying to bring an elusive enemy to action,
losing men all the time through ambushes and booby traps and disease,
only to find in the end that shortage of supplies would necessitate a
retreat without a victory. Talbot in two years of continuous active
service had learned much about forest warfare.

The sun had reached the forest, and black night was close at hand.
Talbot walked forward and spoke to the two Coast Negroes who supplied
the anchor watch. It was their easy duty to stay awake during the night
and keep a lookout in case the _Lady Stanley_ should drag her anchor, or
in case the current should bring some floating tree down across her
cable, or a prowler should come alongside in a canoe determined upon
theft. He warned them to keep a good lookout. In the barge alongside,
half a dozen men were caterwauling their native songs, as was their
habit when not kept busy; Talbot leaned over the side and sharply told
them to be quiet--he did not want that howling to keep him awake. The
twenty riflemen of his bodyguard were already sleeping by the taffrail,
and down below in the stifling cabin Masson and Carver were drinking
together; the sweat gleamed on Carver's bald head with its fringe of
white hair. At present they were amicable, even demonstratively
friendly. Later they might quarrel, but on the other hand they might
sleep without disturbing him. He bade them good night civilly and
returned on deck to where Kamo his servant had made up his bed. The fool
had laid the mattress so that his head would be under the low part of
the mosquito net, so he walked aft to where Kamo was asleep on the bare
planks beside a bollard and kicked him awake and made him do it over
again. Then at last with the ease of long practice he slipped in under
the net, which he tucked in under the mattress all round, and laid
himself down with a sigh of relief and fatigue, secure from insect
plagues. The last thing he did before falling asleep was to unbuckle his
pistol belt; he took his revolver from its holster and laid it on the
mattress convenient to his hand.

****

The tropical night is twelve hours long. After Talbot had been asleep a
couple of hours the evening thunderstorm broke overhead; the thunder and
the lightning and the roar of the rain on the awning above him only
slightly disturbed him. He woke no more than to assure himself that his
revolver was still at hand, and then he slept again, deeply, reveling in
the coolness and the unaccustomed feeling of security. So he was wide
awake and fully rested long before dawn, even a little chilled by the
small wind that stirred the damp air. Under the awning, lying relaxed
and comfortable, he could see nothing of the late rising moon, and could
not guess at the time. He thought of all that had to be done during the
coming day; to begin with it would not be a bad idea to take the
opportunity of seeing if the men on watch were awake. He strapped on his
revolver again and with a sigh slipped out from under the mosquito
net--his joints ached when he moved and he felt the fleeting feeling of
well-being deserting him. It was too good to last. Walking quietly
forward he found, as he expected, the anchor watch sound asleep, one man
stretched out snoring and the other sitting with his forehead on his
knees, equally unconscious. Two well-placed kicks woke them up, and they
grabbed for their rifles while Talbot turned away smiling grimly to
himself at the thought of how they would pay for their slumbers in the
morning. He stood by the rail and breathed the velvet night; the little
breeze had wakened small waves on the broad surface of the river, which
lapped against the _Lady Stanley's_ side in harmony with the gurgle of
the current round her bows. Low in the sky the moon in her last quarter
shed a faint light on the black water surface.

A long, long way off the water surface was blacker still--a solid
nucleus in the velvet darkness. Talbot peered at it idly, and then with
growing attention. There was a large black mass over there. Then he
started, and gripped the guardrail as he concentrated his attention on
what he saw. There had been a faint gleam of reflected light over there,
and soon after he saw it repeated at another point--moonlight gleaming,
perhaps, on a wet canoe paddle. He saw it again and his suspicions were
confirmed. He had his pistol in his hand on the instant, without willing
it. There were three--four--many canoes paddling towards the _Lady
Stanley_, closing in on her. Talbot fired a shot from his revolver as
the quickest way of rousing the ship. He fired again and shouted,
stamping on the deck to wake Carver and Masson down below. Yells of
defiance reached his ears from across the river; round the canoes the
water was churned white by paddles in furious action. From forward came
the reports of rifles and stabbing tongues of flame as the lookouts
opened fire, and Kamo came running up to him beside the rail; Kamo's
rifle went off into the air--pure waste in the excitement, and Kamo was
yelling weirdly as he snatched open the breach and reloaded.

More black figures appeared on deck as the crew awoke, and overside the
fellows asleep in the barge came to their senses with loud cries. Tense
and nervous with excitement, Talbot was still able to think. He put away
his revolver, snatched the rifle from Kamo, and leveled it with careful
aim at the leading canoe. The shot went home, and he grabbed a cartridge
from Kamo, reloaded, and fired again. By now his bodyguard was awake,
and, lining the rail, were firing away enthusiastically into the mass of
the canoes. Some of the bullets must be hitting the target, enough at
least to hinder the rush, and at that moment came a decisive
intervention. From behind him came a deafening report, a blinding flash
of light; someone, Masson or Carver, had roused himself and reached the
six-pounder forward, trained it round, and fired. Talbot saw the shell
burst among the canoes, and he heard an outburst of screams, but for
several seconds after the flash he could see nothing. The cries and the
firing in the barge redoubled; a canoe had run alongside and boarded it
in the darkness, and now a death struggle was being fought out hand to
hand there. As he looked down into the barge he could see black figures
glistening in the light of the rifle-flashes. Again the cannon went off
and blinded him, but wild yelling behind him made him swing around. As
his eyesight returned he saw, dimly, dark figures swarming over the
guardrail on the starboard side--another canoe must have run alongside
the steamer there. He felt fear within him, but he was like a cornered
animal and could only decide to fight it out to the last. His voice
cracked as he tried to shout, and he ran across the deck at these new
invaders, reversing his grip on the rifle as he ran. He brought down the
butt on a black head with a crash, and around him the crew and his
bodyguard rallied and flung themselves on the enemy. Someone was
standing on the guardrail about to leap down--Talbot's whirling rifle
butt dashed him overside again. There could not have been more than five
or six men, a single canoe load, engaged in this attack, and soon they
were all dead, and Talbot had a breathing space as he stood beside the
rail almost alone. On the other side of the ship a rifle was now firing
rhythmically and steadily down into the barge, and the flashes
illuminated Carver's bald head--already there was more light than came
from the rifle-flashes, and dawn was at hand. Talbot walked across and
stood by Carver, who was systematically killing every man in the barge,
for he did not know which was friend and which was foe, and he was
taking no chances. Carver was cursing filthily between each shot; he was
wildly agitated about these "wretched niggers" attacking at dawn like
any white army, and also about their having the sense and insolence to
choose for their objective the _Lady Stanley_. There were indeed
frightening implications about all this; if the attack had been
successful, if the _Lady Stanley_ had been captured by the enemy and
wrecked or burned, any further advance would have been delayed for at
least a year. And--Talbot thought of this with a tremor--if it had
succeeded he would be dead like the inanimate corpses all round him, and
his skull would go to decorate the crucifixion tree in Loa's grove--if
indeed he were not taken alive, to shriek his life away on that same
tree. With the dying-away of his excitement Talbot felt an unhappy cold
fit overcoming him. He had come here to Central Africa because otherwise
he would have had to beg his bread in a London gutter, and at this
moment he regretted his choice. He would live longer in a gutter than he
would here; nor would life in a gutter possibly be as hideous as this. A
shout from Masson, forward, made him swing round.

"I have them, the assassins!" he shouted.

He was training round the six-pounder gun on its pivot, looking along
the sights and bracing himself against the shoulder-piece. There was a
gray light over the water now, and streaks of gray mist drifted over its
surface. From out of one of the gray streaks emerged a dark shape,
distorted in the faint light, but just recognizable as a canoe paddling
furiously away from the steamer, and a good half-mile away from it.
Talbot went over and stood behind Masson as he sighted the gun. When the
gun bellowed out Talbot saw a momentary black pencil-mark against the
gray; it was the path of the shell speeding on its low trajectory.
Straight to the canoe it went, to burst in smoke and spray, out of which
for a second rose one end of the canoe standing vertically out of the
water.

"A good shot, eh, Captain?" said Masson, turning so that Talbot was once
more aware of how white Masson's teeth gleamed amidst the black of his
mustache and beard.

Masson now had a telescope to his eye and was sweeping it round over the
river.

"A canoe bottom up there," said Masson. "And another beside it. Ha! No,
that one is empty. Not a soul alive in it. Not a damned soul. That was
another good shot of mine, Captain, was it not? The first I fired--the
shot that struck in the midst of the canoes."

"It was that which stopped them," agreed Talbot. "It would have been
hard to keep them out of the steamer if they had all got alongside."

Masson walked to the rail and looked over, Talbot along with him.

"One empty canoe there," said Masson. "Another full of water and
corpses."

"There were some which got alongside the barge," said Talbot.

"And not a man left," said Masson. "They have had a lesson, these men of
Loa."

The soft lead Remington bullets made severe wounds at point-blank range,
but there were yet some men alive who had been struck by them, in the
barge and on the deck, and they could be prevailed upon to speak--Talbot
sent ashore for Sergeant Fleuron to carry out the interrogation. But
Fleuron had hardly to make use of his peculiar talents, for a man torn
by a fearful wound would readily answer questions if a bowl of water
were withheld from him only a few inches from his dry lips. He would
gasp out all he knew, for Fleuron to interpret it to Talbot.... Yes,
the attack on the _Lady Stanley_ had been made by Loa's whole fleet.
That did not mean all Loa's fighting men--Lanu was still on shore at the
head of a great army. The fleet had been led by one of the twins...
at that information Fleuron showed annoyance, for if the other twin were
dead and at the bottom of the river all his trouble in pickling that
head in order to compare likenesses was wasted.... Loa's town was up
the river here, a long two days' journey by canoe in calm weather. The
port stood beside the river, on that bank, and Loa's town was only a
short distance away from it. Yes, the speaker knew the port when he saw
it--he actually lived there....

The two men who survived their wound and their examination both knew the
port; with Talbot's permission Fleuron had their wounds bandaged to keep
them alive, and he had them laid on deck, secured to the guardrail, for
their guidance might save a good deal of trouble when the final advance
should be made. They lay on the deck looking round with frightened eyes
at everything about them. They were terrified at being aboard this
immense devil-driven canoe. Even the wealth of iron all about them
frightened them; so did the strange white men--so did the strange black
men. The shriek of the steam whistle, the clank of the capstan as the
second barge was slowly wound up the last of the cataract, and the roar
and bustle when it was drawn alongside, set their white eyeballs
rolling. Talbot spared them a glance. These men, shaking with fright,
were probably fair specimens of the men who had attacked them. Their
fear only proved the fanaticism that must animate them. The attack had
been boldly made, even against these frightful machines. They had come
on in the face of rifle fire and even of shellfire, and the three or
four surviving canoes had flung themselves in a forlorn hope against the
steamer's sides. Such wild courage could only be the result of a frantic
belief in their own cause. And there was still an army of such fanatics
awaiting them on the riverbank, under the command of this Lanu. Well, in
that case they would stand and fight, and not have to be pursued through
the forest. That would mean a quick finish to the campaign.

The barges were both alongside now, both jammed full of chattering black
soldiers. Even to them, who had served the white invaders for some time,
the prospect of this trip by water was exciting and a little
frightening. The deck of the _Lady Stanley_ was heaped with wood for
fuel, so much that Talbot could confidently rely on going all the way up
against the current to the next fall and back again if necessary without
having to risk a working party ashore to cut more. There were great bags
of food; not quite enough to make him feel at ease regarding the supply
problem, but all that could be swept up from the country behind him
despite the protests of the civil authorities. There were cartridges in
plenty for the business in hand. So every possible precaution had been
taken, and it was time to start. Talbot shouted an order to Sergeant
Fleuron, and Fleuron, with many exasperated orders, set about the
business of casting off the barges and stationing men at the anchor
windlasses. Talbot caught Masson's eye, and Masson nodded, and sent down
a bell signal to Carver below to admit steam to the cylinders. Slowly
the current took the _Lady Stanley_ astern; another note on the bell and
she forged ahead, turning to push her nose accurately between the sterns
of the two barges. The beat of the stern wheel quickened and the _Lady
Stanley_ headed upstream at several miles an hour through the water, at
nearly two miles an hour over land. The barges wallowed along ahead of
her--Talbot, and the Belgians and Frenchmen too, felt they would never
grow used to this method of pushing a tow instead of pulling it, but it
was necessary with a stern-wheeler, and was no novelty to Carver, who at
some time had worked in a Mississippi steamer. Beside Talbot the wounded
prisoners clasped each other's hands in terror at the vibration of the
monster beneath them.

In due course the _Lady Stanley_ and the barges she was pushing arrived
in the river opposite the port of Loa's town. The two wounded prisoners
pointed the place out eagerly enough--they seemed to be glad to see
their home again--but it was really hardly necessary, for anyone could
know it for what it was at a glance. The _Lady Stanley_ hung in
midriver, her stern wheel just pushing her against the current, while
Talbot surveyed the place through his telescope. It was like a number of
other Central African towns, perched upon a rocky bluff overlooking the
river; the houses a little strange to Talbot's eyes in that they were
long and rectangular, instead of circular as they usually were lower
down the river. Even through his telescope Talbot could make out no sign
of life; not a soul was stirring although he had a good view into much
of the village street. The path down the bluff was clearly visible, and
on the beach at its foot lay a single canoe, while beyond the village
Talbot thought he could just make out signs of the usual banana groves
on the outskirts. But there was no movement, not even a wreath of smoke.

"Try a shot at 'em and see if you can wake 'em up," suggested Carver,
who had left the engineroom to come up on deck and watch the course of
events.

"All right," said Talbot, and Carver walked forward to the six-pounder.

He trained the gun round and sighted it; the gun went off with a loud
bark and a shout went up from the massed soldiers in the barges as, amid
the smoke and dust, they saw the side of the most prominent house
crumple outwards. Carver swung open the breech and inserted another
round.

"That will do," said Talbot; he was accountable to the Baron for those
six-pounder shells.

There was no point in wasting further time; it was hopeless to think of
trying to exhaust the patience of Africa. If the town were going to be
defended he must force the defenders to show their hand. A brief
colloquy with Carver settled the details of the landing, and Talbot went
into the bows to give Sergeant Fleuron his orders. Then he came back to
line his riflemen up along the guardrail. The _Lady Stanley_ dropped
back down the river to give herself room to get up speed, and then came
forward again, pushing the barges valiantly ahead of her. She backed her
stern wheel momentarily, and the barges were cast off, heading on up the
river under their own momentum with Fleuron and a corporal at the
tillers taking them diagonally across to the beach. Up onto the beach
they ran side by side, with a grinding of the pebbles beneath them, and
amid wild yells from the black soldiers. They had captured towns before,
and if they could not look forward to loot they could at least expect an
orgy of cruelty and rape. Over the bows tumbled the leading men, and it
was at that moment that the defenders showed themselves. There was an
answering yell, and dark figures showed themselves everywhere on the
bluff, some leaping down with brandished weapons, and others standing,
feet braced wide apart, drawing their bows to send their arrows down
into the crowd on the beach. But there were rifles awaiting them--Talbot
himself was kneeling on the deck of the _Lady Stanley_ along with his
picked shots, the guardrail forming a convenient rest for his rifle. The
range was a mere hundred yards, and he could not miss, sending shot
after shot home; from the deck of the _Lady Stanley_, from the barges
and from the beach, a hail of lead met the charging men. Even so, some
of them got through, and plunged into a bloody melee on the beach with
those men who had landed. But numbers as well as weapons were against
them. The whole force which had attacked amounted to less than a couple
of hundred men, and there were more than five hundred in the barges. It
had been a forlorn hope, a bold attempt to beat back the invaders by
assailing them at the most favorable moment--not favorable enough.
Fleuron's soldiers poured ashore and club and ax and spear fought out
the battle on the beach, while Talbot and his riflemen picked off the
archers on the bluff above. On the beach the battle was won, and the
invaders began to push forward; but many more of the defenders died on
the beach than turned to try to make their escape up the bluff, running
the gantlet of the rifle fire from the steamer. The yelling victors
swarmed up the bluff after them, mad with victory; Talbot saw them start
the ascent, but he could not watch them enter the town, for his
attention was distracted.

Fleuron's barge, freed from the weight of the hundreds of men crammed
into her, had come adrift from the beach and was rapidly being carried
downstream again; moreover, as Fleuron agitatedly shouted to his
captain, her bottom had been damaged when she went aground and she was
leaking badly. The _Lady Stanley_ had to go down the river after her,
imperiling herself amid the shallows close inshore, and heave her a line
to bring her fussily back and beach her again to save her from sinking.
Talbot and Fleuron hastily landed and went up the path to the town, the
sweat streaming down them with their hurry as they went past the many
dead. In the town five hundred mad men were raging through the houses,
finding little enough on which to vent their fury. There had been three
old women in the town, and they had been killed by the first arrivals
without a thought for the sport they might have afforded to the cooler
heads. Otherwise the place was deserted, abandoned. There were a few
poor cooking utensils, the usual domestic gear, but no ivory, no
treasure house, nothing worth saving for the benefit of His Majesty the
King of the Belgians. But as Fleuron remarked, all the reports they had
gathered indicated that this was no more than a suburb of Loa's town,
which lay somewhere not far inland. It only remained to count the dead
and see if among the wounded there were any who could increase their
information, and so Fleuron and Talbot, surrounded by their guard, made
their way back to the beach.

Halfway down the bluff Fleuron stopped beside a dead man, face downward
on the slope. He lay in a pool of blood, his back, below his right
shoulder blade, torn wide open by the exit of the soft-nosed .45 bullet
which had entered his breast. But on his head there was still a
headdress of twisted iron, and about the arms and neck there were spiral
iron ornaments, while beside the body lay an ax--Talbot noticed the
excellence of the workmanship.

"A chief, I fancy, Captain," said Fleuron.

He poked the body with his foot, and then at his order two of his men
turned it over for them to examine it further. It was not the face of a
young man, but that of a man of middle age at least. The breast was
scarred with tattooing, but the face was hardly disfigured; the closed
eyes and relaxed muscles conveyed an impression of peace.

"He must have been killed in the first moments of the attack," said
Fleuron, looking round him at the comparative distances from the brow
and the beach.

"I expect I killed him myself," supplemented Talbot--he remembered
stopping more than one warrior in mid-career on the bluff; he smiled
deprecatingly as he said this, for the English gentleman's habit of not
calling attention to personal exploits was still strong.

"I expect you did, Captain," said Fleuron.

"I wonder who he is," speculated Talbot.

"That we shall soon know. I intend to find out," answered Fleuron.

The wounded man who was carried up the bluff to the corpse--groaning as
his shattered thighbone was jarred by his bearers--enlightened them
instantly, the moment he set eyes on the dead face.

"Lanu," he said. "Lanu. Lord."

Even with Lanu dead the awe and respect in his voice were quite
unmistakable.

"Oh, it's Lanu, is it?" said Fleuron.

He asked further questions and turned back to Talbot when the wounded
man had answered them.

"This," he said--with a wave of his hand to the corpses littering the
bluff and the beach--"This was the only army left. It was as I thought;
the other twin was killed when they attacked us in canoes. Every man was
killed then--not a single one came back. So Lanu stood to fight here
with all the soldiers left and the old men--look at that gray head over
there. And Lanu is dead, and you saw how many fighting men escaped from
here."

"If the twins are dead, and Lanu is dead, we ought not to have any more
trouble," said Talbot.

Fleuron turned back to the wounded man with a further question, and
received an almost voluble reply. Twice at least Talbot caught the word
"Loa."

"No," said Fleuron at length. "We shall still have to fight. There is
this Loa still alive. He is undoubtedly a man, although whether Loa is
his name or his title I still cannot say. He is at his town, up there,
with his wives and the women of the country."

"And his ivory too, please God," said Talbot.

"Without doubt."

Talbot looked round about him at the dead again.

"Too many men have been killed," he said. "Who will gather rubber? The
Baron will not be pleased."

"The Baron?" Fleuron's gesture indicated deep contempt for the Baron's
displeasure. "He ought to know, even if he does not, what we have been
through here. And there will be the women left. We must restrain these
devils when we reach the town. No killing--not too much, at least. From
the women we can breed. Thanks to polygamy in twenty years we can have
this forest as full of men as a sausage is full of meat."

Twenty years? The suggestion started Talbot on an unfortunate train of
thought. Twenty years of discomfort, of loneliness, of misery and of
bloodshed--twenty years in the service of King Leopold. Talbot hated the
thought of twenty years more of Africa; and yet if he were not to have
to endure them it could only be because he was dead, and Talbot did not
want to die. During the past two years he had once or twice touched the
revolver at his belt, meditatively, and then withdrawn his hand, for
Talbot was sufficiently afraid of the unknown to dread hurling himself
through the dark portals of another world. He felt suddenly and
desperately unhappy. To shake himself out of the mood he occupied
himself with his task again.

"We must make ready, then," he said, "for this move on Loa's town."




CHAPTER XIX


The way through the forest from the port to the town was clearly marked;
it was something more like a road than anything else Central Africa
could show. Clearly there had been a great deal of coming and going
between the two places, with armies going out, and armies returning with
plunder and slaves, with trading parties and messengers. But that
portion of the Army of the Independent State of the Congo under Talbot's
command made the advance from one place to the other with considerable
caution, extended on a wide front, and scanning carefully every yard of
the way ahead. The necessity for care was early borne in upon them, for
there were pitfalls everywhere, and poisoned skewers concealed beneath
the leafmold, and bent bows hidden in the undergrowth ready to let loose
poisoned arrows at a touch on a strand of creeper. The forest had its
human defenders, too; not many of them, but a few who flitted from tree
to tree ahead of the advancing line and who sought opportunities of
launching poisoned arrows from safe cover. The soldiery fired at these
people whenever an opportunity presented itself, and often indeed when
one did not. Sometimes the whole advancing line would break out into
desultory firing, while Talbot raved furiously at this waste of
ammunition on shadows that had no ears. Hardly any of the bullets
discharged found a billet in a human target; only one or two lucky shots
brought down bowmen who had incautiously exposed themselves.

Talbot, with his bodyguard about him, walked along after the skirmish
line. He made use of his eyes as he walked, and he saw that his guard
did the same; besides traps and pitfalls there was always the chance
that one of those bowmen ahead had managed to creep through the line and
was lying in ambush, arrow on string, waiting for a white man to shoot
at. Although his pace was perforce leisurely, so as not to overtake the
firing line, rivers of sweat ran down his skin in the stifling steamy
air of the forest. Talbot looked back with regret to his sojourn in the
_Lady Stanley_, under the open sky, with the chance of an unimpeded
breeze. This gloomy forest, with the tree trunks standing like ghosts in
the twilight, oppressed him the more forcibly because so much of the
campaign up to now had been waged on the banks of the open river. He
hated this forest, with its darkness and silence. Holding his revolver
ready in his right hand, he mopped his face and neck continually with
the grubby rag which had once been a handkerchief in his left.

Cries echoing back from ahead of him told him of a new development in
the situation, and, continuing along the path, he soon discovered the
reason for them. They had reached the outskirts of the town. But here
there was something a little unusual for Central Africa--a deliberate
attempt to fortify the place. The path entered the abandoned clearings
that ringed the town, as they did every town in this area, but the
well-trodden and well-marked point of entrance was blocked by a stout
palisade. The tangle of small growth and creepers, where it existed, was
the best of defense against a surprise attack, but the belt round most
towns was never continuous. It was always intersected by footpaths, and
there were frequent broad gaps where the banana groves and manioc
gardens were under cultivation. Always before it had been easy to force
a way into a town by one route or another; this was the first time
Talbot had ever seen any artificial obstruction to an entrance.

The palisade was lofty and dense; examining it from behind the cover of
the nearest tree Talbot could see that there was another one twenty
yards in the rear of it--a remarkable precaution against surprise. The
uprights were driven into the earth, and clearly extended into the
undergrowth on either side of the gap, while the horizontal members were
bound stoutly to the uprights by split cane; Talbot could see a kind of
wicket gate in the palisade, but the split cane fastenings around it
were so dense and numerous that it was obvious that it did not
constitute a weak point in the defenses. There was no glimpse to be got
of any human defenders of the gate, but one of his Batetela headmen
showed Talbot a long arrow with a jagged wooden head--with poison in the
barbs as usual--which had come sailing over the palisade, from some
point in the undergrowth. There could be no doubt that at least a few
archers were waiting, hidden, within sight of the palisade, so that any
attempt to storm the defenses without preparation would incur severe
loss.

Fleuron came up to report; he had been with the advanced guard and on
reaching the gate had moved along the defenses to his right in search of
a weak point.

"Dense undergrowth--undergrowth of a difficulty quite incredible--as far
as I can see, Captain," said Fleuron. "At the only weak point there was
a palisade like this one. That was when I turned back. I left half my
guard there. This Loa will have palisaded all points, one may be sure. I
will try in the other direction if you wish."

"There would be no advantage to be gained by that, I fancy," said
Talbot.

He could send a note back to the _Lady Stanley_ and have the six-pounder
sent up to him. A few rounds from the gun would make short work of those
palisades. But the day was already far advanced; to unship the gun and
bring it ashore, and mount it on its traveling carriage and drag it
along the path, would take hours, days perhaps. Or he could make use of
a more primitive method of attack; burning faggots piled against the
palisades under a heavy covering fire from rifles would burn the
palisades down. But that would take time too; he would have to wait for
the embers to cool at first one barrier and then at the other.

"Oh, damn it all to hell," said Talbot in a fit of pettish irritation.

He wanted to end this business quickly. He had enough men--too many of
them, for that matter. Why should he trouble to keep them alive? There
could not be more than a few old men left to defend the town. He issued
his orders harshly and savagely; and Fleuron, noticing the expression on
his face, bit off short the protest he automatically had begun to raise
at his first realization of what was in Talbot's mind. A hundred
riflemen, strung among the trees, prepared to cover the attack. Fleuron
and Talbot took rifles, too, but that was not for the same purpose. The
Batetela headman and the twenty men with axes who were selected for the
attempt looked at the rifles in the white men's hands. Those rifles, if
they refused to move, meant certain and immediate death; the poisoned
arrows from the defenses meant death not quite so certain and not quite
so immediate. Their teeth and eyeballs gleamed in the twilight as they
chattered to each other debating the hideous choice. An angry word and
an impatient gesture from Talbot settled their decision. They gripped
their axes and they ran with despairing haste up the broad path. A shaft
of sunlight reached over the tops of the trees and illuminated the
little crowd as they came to the foot of the menacing palisade. Their
axes rang against the stubborn cane fastenings. They hacked and hewed
feverishly, with excited cries.

Here came the arrows, surely enough. Two men backed away, with feathered
shafts hanging from the barbed heads driven deep into them--the whole
group followed their example and broke back again, but Fleuron stepped
forward and shot one of them mercilessly, and they turned back again to
their task. The rifles helped them; the Remington bullets went crashing
through the undergrowth in search of the bowmen hidden there who
launched those arrows. Fleuron shouted an encouragement--or a warning.
It reached the ears of the axmen and added to their exertions.
Frantically they hacked and pulled, treading their dead and wounded
underfoot. One man reached up and clutched the upper horizontal bar,
flung his weight on it and was joined by two others, and their united
exertions tore the thing down. Two uprights were dragged aside so that
they leaned drunkenly in opposite directions. There was a passage of
some sort through the first palisade, and Fleuron, yelling loudly,
recalled the survivors of the axmen. By giving them a chance of life he
could expect greater enthusiasm from those that would have to follow
them.

The arrangements for the final assault were quickly made. A hundred
spearmen on either side of the entrance were to attack straight before
them, plunging directly into the undergrowth and struggling through as
best they could. They might turn the flank of the defense should it be
prolonged. Another body of axmen was collected to deal with the farther
palisade. A hundred spearmen were to follow on their heels, and turn to
right and left after passing the nearer palisade and seek out the
defenders who might be hidden in the undergrowth along the entrance
path. Spearmen, newly brought into the ranks of the Army from the
forest, were cheaper than the riflemen who had been given training in
the use of firearms. Along the path was ranged the main assaulting
column, destined to burst through when the way should be cleared for
them. They were excited and eager, keyed up at the thought of entering
into the legendary mysteries of Loa's town.

Sweating and shouting, Talbot and Fleuron hastened about to get all in
order.

"Go!" shouted Fleuron at last, and the attackers hurled themselves
forward.

Talbot watched the axmen burst through the first palisade. The spearmen
followed them. Throughout the belt of undergrowth came muffled shouts as
the assaulting spearmen plunged and struggled in the entangling mass. As
he had expected, the entrance path was sown thick with poisoned skewers,
but he had sent in enough men to be able to bear losses. He saw one of
the axmen climb straight up the second palisade, poise himself for a
moment, and then leap down beyond it. Mad with excitement, the man did
not delay a moment, but rushed straight ahead, waving his ax, towards
the town. It was time.

"Go!" roared Fleuron again, and the waiting column charged yelling up
the path.

For a while the whole entrance was jammed as they forced their way
through the wreck of the first barrier; then they flowed on to reach the
second one just as it began to give way. Talbot saw them pouring forward
and nodded to his escort. They closed round him as they had been drilled
to do; there was less chance of a poisoned arrow reaching him when he
was surrounded by human bodies. They were wild with excitement,
chattering and shouting as they hurried forward with Talbot in their
midst. They entered the narrow path through the undergrowth, so narrow
that the files on each side of him pressed up against him so that his
nostrils were filled with the smell of their sweating bodies, and they
picked their way through the shattered barrier while the undergrowth
round them still echoed with the cries of the attackers plunging about
after the last few defenders. They hurried up the path and through the
second barrier, emerging into the main street of the town, the sunshine
blazing down upon it.

Their point of entrance was about the middle of it; at the ends to the
left and right it widened out into something like open squares; street
and squares were lined with large substantial houses constructed of
split boards thatched with leaves. At the far end to the right Talbot's
eye was caught by a large area of greenery, with straggling trees
emerging out of it, filling the whole center of the square. That must be
the sacred grove, and near it must be the chief's house and the treasury
and the important buildings. It was thither that he directed his escort,
hurrying down the street while around him he saw and heard the hideous
sights and sounds of a town taken by assault. He would have to beat
these fiends off their prey, but first he had better secure the treasury
and put a guard over it.

But round about the grove there was no sign of any chief's house. This
looked like the poorer end of the town, as one might say. Here were the
forges with their stone anvils, a small heap of charcoal yet remaining,
the boxlike bellows lying beside it, and everywhere inches deep in the
dead sparks of a thousand years' of smith's work. The houses contained
nothing except poor domestic utensils and moaning women. The sacred
grove was not at all impressive on close inspection. It was small; a
single short path led to a little clearing in the center, and in the
clearing there were a few human bones, but not very many, and no
treasure whatever.

The palace of this Loa must be at the other end of the town after all.
Talbot cursed and hastened back up the street. Halfway along he met
Fleuron, busily engaged in the organization of conquest. His escort
stood guard over a herd of frightened women who crouched and huddled
together with rolling eyes as they heard the shrieks of those whom
Fleuron had not been able to protect.

"Have you seen this Loa, Sergeant?" demanded Talbot.

"No, Captain. Unless he is among those old men, and I am sure he is
not."

None of those trembling gray heads could belong to the man who had
conquered all this area of Africa and who had inspired the devotion
which had caused his army to annihilate itself in his defense. Talbot
pushed on up the street towards the farther open space. Of course. He
had been a fool not to see the large houses there. That most distant
one, with the decorated gable ends, must be Loa's palace. There were
herds of frightened women here, too, women with babies in their arms,
women standing weeping with little children thrust behind them. The tide
of the assailants was only just beginning to lap up as far as here. The
sun blazed down into the open space as Talbot strode up it, with his
disorganized escort hastening after him.

There was an eddy among the women clustering round the big house. They
parted, and two people advanced from among them. Talbot knew Loa when he
saw him; there could in fact be no mistaking him. He had been tall,
although his height was lessened because his back was a little bent. He
walked stiffly but with immense dignity, his head back despite his bent
shoulders. He was corpulent without being obese--maybe advancing years
had already removed the fat of middle age. Over his shoulders hung a
leopardskin cloak, vivid in the sunshine; about his neck and arms were
spiral ornaments of iron, and in his right hand glittered an ax,
brightly polished to reflect the sunlight. Beside him hobbled a skinny
old woman, her thin breasts swinging with the exertion of keeping up
with him. As she hastened along at his side she never took her eyes from
his face, craning forward and peering up to see it.

Talbot sorted hurriedly through his memory for words.

"Stop!" he shouted, in one of the few dialects in which he had any
mastery.

He threw his left hand up, palm forward, in the universal gesture
commanding a halt; his right hand held his revolver ready. Loa did not
appear to hear him--certainly he did not look at him. He continued to
stride forward, his eyes directed at a point over Talbot's head. One of
Talbot's escort dropped on one knee beside him, and leveled his rifle.

"Stop!" shouted Talbot again.

This Loa, if he could by any lucky chance be won over, might be useful,
seeing the devotion he could inspire. With him as a local
under-governor, it would not be nearly so difficult to organize the
district for rubber collecting and ivory hunting. But Loa only walked
forward, with the pitiless sky overhead looking down at him, the
friendly forest far away, beyond the houses. Talbot's revolver was
cocked and pointed at his breast, but apparently Loa did not see it, nor
the leveled rifle of the kneeling escort. Then at the last moment Loa
sprang, whirling back the ax for a last blow.

But the stiffness of his fifty years betrayed him; he could not leap
fast enough to catch the white man entirely off his guard. Talbot just
managed to leap aside, in a most undignified fashion, without even time
enough to pull the trigger. But the rifle of the kneeling escort had
followed Loa's movements, and the bullet struck Loa in the side as he
poised on one foot with the ax above his head. From side to side the
heavy bullet tore through him, from below upwards, expanding as it went.
It struck below the ribs on his right side. It pierced his liver, it
tore his heart to shreds, and, emerging, it shattered his left arm above
the elbow. So Loa died in that very moment, the ax dropping behind him
as he fell over with a crash. The rifleman tore open the breech, slid in
another cartridge, and slammed the breechblock home. The skinny old
woman saw Loa fall, and looked down at his body for one heartbroken
moment. She uttered a shrill scream, and then raised her spider arms. It
was as if she were going to attack Talbot with her fingernails; perhaps
that was in her mind, but there could be no certainty about it, for the
rifleman pulled the trigger again, and the skinny old woman fell dying
beside the body of her Lord.






[End of The Sky and the Forest, by C. S. Forester]
