"Bones": Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country by Wallace (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📖
- Author: Wallace
Book online «"Bones": Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country by Wallace (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📖». Author Wallace
All the Lombobo people, the warriors and the hunters, the wives and the maidens, and even the children of tender years, lined the steep slopes of the Cup of Sacrifice. For Lamalana, deaf and blind to reason, knew that her hour was short, and that with the sun would come a man terrible in his anger ... and the soldiers who eat up opposition with fire.
"O people!" she cried.
She was stripped to the waist, stood behind the Stone of Death as though it were a counter, and the two squirming infants under her hands were so much saleable stock: "Here we bring terror to all who hate us, for one of these is the heart of Bosambo and the other is more than the heart of the-man-who-stands-for-Sandi——"
[Pg 178]
"O woman!"
The intruder had passed unnoticed, almost it seemed by magic, through the throng, and now he stood in the clear space of sacrifice. And there was not one in the throng who had not heard of him with his leopard skin and his belt of brass.
He was as black as the strange Ethiopians who came sometimes to the land with the Arabi traders, his muscular arms and legs were dull in their blackness.
There was a whisper of terror—"The Walker of the Night!—" and the people fell back ... a woman screamed and fell into a fit.
"O woman," said M'gani, "deliver to me these little children who have done no evil."
Open-mouthed the half-demented daughter of B'limi Saka stared at him.
He walked forward, lifted the children in his two arms and went slowly through the people, who parted in terror at his coming.
He turned at the top of the basin to speak.
"Do no wickedness," said he; then he gently stooped to put the children on the ground, for mouthing and bellowing senseless sounds Lamalana came furiously after him, her long, crooked knife in her hand. He thrust his hand into the leopard skin as for a weapon, but before he could withdraw it, a man of Lombobo, half in terror, fell upon and threw his arms about M'gani.
"Bo'ma!" boomed the woman, and drew back her knife for the stroke....
[Pg 179]
Bones, from the edge of the clearing, jerked up the rifle he carried and fired.
"What man is this?" asked Bones.
Bosambo looked at the stranger.
"This is M'gani," he said, "he who walks in the night."
"The dooce it is!" said Bones, and fixing his monocle glared at the stranger.
"From whence do you come?" he asked.
"Lord, I come from the Coast," said the man, "by many strange ways, desiring to arrive at this land secretly that I might learn the heart of these people and understand." Then, in perfect English, "I don't think we've ever met before, Mr. Tibbetts—my name is Sanders."
[Pg 180]
CHAPTER VIII A RIGHT OF WAYThe Borders of Territories may be fixed by treaty, by certain mathematical calculations, or by arbitrary proclamation. In the territories over which Sanders ruled they were governed as between tribe and tribe by custom and such natural lines of demarkation as a river or a creek supplied.
In forest land this was not possible, and there had ever been between the Ochori and the Lombobo a feud and a grievance, touched-up border fights, for hereabouts there is good hunting. Sanders had tried many methods and had hit upon the red gum border as a solution to a great difficulty. For some curious reason there were no red gum trees in the northern fringe of the forest for five miles on the Ochori side of the great wood; it was innocent of this beautiful tree and Sanders' fiat had gone forth that there should be no Ochori hunting in the red gum lands, and that settled the matter and Sanders hoped for good.
But Bosambo set himself to enlarge his borders [Pg 181]by a single expedient. Wherever his hunters came upon a red gum tree they cut it down. B'limi Saka, the chief of the sullen Lombobo, retaliated by planting red gum saplings on the country between the forest and the river—a fact of which Bosambo was not aware until he suddenly discovered a huge wedge of red gum driven into his lawful territory. A wedge so definite as to cut off nearly a thousand square miles of his territory, for beyond this border lay the lower Ochori country.
"How may I reach my proper villages?" he asked Sanders, who had known something of the comedy which was being enacted.
"You shall have canoes at the place of the young gum trees and shall row to a place beyond them," Sanders had said. "I have given my word that the red gum lands are the territory of B'limi Saka, and since you have only your cunning to thank—Oh, cutter of trees—I cannot help you!"
Bosambo would have made short work of the young saplings, but B'limisaka established a guard not to be forced without bloodshed, and Bosambo could do no more in that way of reprisal than instruct his people to hurl insulting references to B'limisaka's as they passed the forbidden ground.
For the maddening thing was that the slip of filched territory was less than a hundred yards wide and men of the Lombobo, who went out by night to widen it, never came out alive—for Bosambo also had a guard.
Sometimes the minion spies of Government would [Pg 182]come to headquarters with a twist of rice paper stuck in a quill, the quill inserted in the lobes of the ear in very much the same place as the ladies wore their earrings in the barbarous mid-Victorian period, and on the rice paper with the briefest introduction would be inserted, in perfect Arabic, scraps of domestic news for the information of the Government.
Sometimes news would carry from mouth to mouth and a weary man would squat before Hamilton and recite his lesson.
"Efobi of the Isisi has stolen goats, and because he is the brother of the chief's wife goes unpunished; T'mara of the Akasava has put a curse upon the wife of O'femo the headman, and she has burnt his hut; N'kema of the Ochori will not pay his tax, saying that he is no Ochori man, but a true N'gombi; Bosambo's men have beaten a woodman of B'limi Saka, because he planted trees on Ochori land; the well folk are on the edge of the N'gomb forest, building huts and singing——"
"How long do they stay?" interrupted Hamilton.
"Lord, who knows?" said the man.
"Ogibo of the Akasava has spoken evilly of his king and mightily of himself——"
"Make a note of that, Bones."
"Make a note of which, sir?"
"Ogibo—he looked like a case of sleep-sickness the last time I was in his village—go on."
"Ogibo also says that the father of his father was a great chief and was lord of all the Akasava——"
[Pg 183]
"That's sleeping sickness all right," said Hamilton bitterly. "Why the devil doesn't he wait till Sanders is back before he goes mad?"
"Drop him a line, sir," suggested Bones, "he's a remarkable feller—dash it all, sir, what the dooce is the good of bein' in charge of the district if you can't put a stop to that sort of thing?"
"What talk is there of spears in this?" asked Hamilton of the spy.
"Lord, much talk—as I know, for I serve in this district."
"Go swiftly to Ogibo, and summon him to me for a high lakimbo,[8]" said Hamilton; "my soldiers shall carry you in my new little ship that burns water[9]—fly pigeons to me that I may know all that happens."
"On my life," said the spy, raised his hand in salute and departed.
"These well people you were talkin' about, sir," asked Bones, "who are they?"
But Hamilton could give no satisfactory answer to such a question, and, indeed, he would have been more than ordinarily clever had he been able to.
The wild territories are filled with stubborn facts, bewildering realities, and extraordinary inconsequences. Up by the N'gombi lands lived a tribe who, for the purposes of office classification, were known as "N'gombi (Interior)," but who were [Pg 184]neither N'gombi nor Isisi, nor of any known branch of the Bantu race, but known as "the people of the well." They had remarkable legends, sayings which they ascribed to a mythical Idoosi; also they have a song which runs:
O well in the forest!
Which chiefs have digged;
No common men touched the earth,
But chiefs' spears and the hands of kings.
Now there is no doubt that both the sayings of Idoosi and the song of the well have come down from days of antiquity, and that Idoosi is none other than the writer of the lost book of the Bible, of whom it is written:
"Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the history of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the vision of Idoo the seer?"[10]....
And is not the Song of the Well identical with that brief extract from the Book of Wars of the Lord—lost to us for ever—which runs:
"Spring up, O well: sing ye unto it: The well, which the princes digged, Which the nobles of the people delved, With the sceptre ... with their staves."[11]
Some men say that the People of the Well are one of the lost tribes, but that is an easy solution which suggests itself to the hasty-minded. Others say [Pg 185]that they are descendants of the Babylonian races, or that they came down from Egypt when Rameses II died, and there arose a new dynasty and a Pharaoh who did not know the wise Jewish Prime Minister who ruled so wisely, who worshipped in the little temple at Karnac, and whose statue you may see in Cairo with a strange Egyptian name. We know him better as "Joseph"—he who was sold into captivity.
Whatever they were, this much is known, to the discomfort of everybody, that they were great diggers of wells, and would, on the slightest excuse, spend whole months, choosing, for some mad reason, the top of hills for their operations, delving in the earth for water, though the river was less than a hundred yards away.
Of all the interesting solutions which have been offered with the object of identifying the People of the Well, none are so interesting as that which Bones put forward at the end of Hamilton's brief sketch.
"My idea, dear old officer," he said profoundly, "that all these Johnnies are artful old niggers who've run away from their wives in Timbuctoo—and for this reason——"
"Oh, shut up!" said Hamilton.
Two nights later the bugles were ringing through the Houssa lines, and Bones, sleepy-eyed, with an armful of personal belongings, was racing for the Zaire, for Ogibo of the Akasava had secured a following.
[Pg 186]
IIThe chief Ogibo who held the law and kept the peace for his master, the King of the Akasava, was bitten many times by the tsetse on a hunting trip into the bad lands near the Utur forest. Two years afterwards, of a sudden, he was seized with a sense of his own importance, and proclaimed himself paramount chief of the Akasava, and all the lands adjoining. And since it is against nature that any lunatic should be without his following, he had no difficulty in raising all the spears that were requisite for his immediate purpose, marched to Igili, the second most important town in the Akasava kingdom, overthrew the defensive force, destroyed the town, and leaving half his fighting regiment to hold the conquered city he moved through the forest toward the Akasava city proper. He camped in the forest, and his men spent an uncomfortable night, for a thunderstorm broke over the river, and the dark was filled with quick flashes and the heavens crashed noisily. There was still a rumbling and a growling above his head when he assembled his forces in the grey dawn, and continued his march. He had not gone half an hour before one of his headmen came racing up to where he led his force in majesty.
"Lord," said he, "do you hear no sound?"
"I hear the thunder," said Ogibo.
"Listen!" said the headman.
[Pg 187]
They halted, head bent.
"It is thunder," said Ogibo, as the rumble and moan of the distant storm came to him. Then above the grumble of the thunder came a sharper note, a sound
Comments (0)