Bones of the River

by Edgar Wallace

  “What’s the use?” asked the despairing Sanders, and M’kema, hearing these words in English, shivered, suspecting a new incantation.

  THE BLACK EGG

  There is a new legend on the river, and it is the legend of a devil who came from a black egg and hated its new master so powerfully that it slew him.

  Once upon a time in the Isisi land, the birds ceased suddenly from gossiping at the very height of day, and goats and dogs stood up on their feet and looked uneasily from left to right, and there was in the world a sudden and an inexplicable hush, so that men came out of their huts to discover what was the matter.

  And whilst they were so standing, gaping at a silence which was almost visible, the world trembled, and down the long street of the Isisi city came a wave and a billowing of earth, so that houses shook and men fell on to their knees in their fear. Then came another tremble and yet another billowing of solid ground, and the waters of the big river flowed up in sudden volume and flooded the lower beaches and washed even into the forest, which had never seen the river before.

  Between the first and the second shocks of the earthquake, N’shimba was born, and was named at a respectful distance after that ghost of ghosts – more nearly after one who had been as terrible. M’shimba M’shamba notoriously dwelt in the bowels of the earth, and was prone to turn in his sleep.

  Down the river went three canoes laden with wise men and chiefs, and they came solemnly into the presence of Mr Commissioner Sanders, who, in addition to being responsible for the morals and welfare of a few millions of murderous children predisposed to cannibalism, was regarded as a controller of ghosts, ju-jus, the incidence of rainfall and the fertility of crops.

  “O Sandi, I see you,” said M’kema, chief of the deputation. “We are poor men who have come a long journey to tell you of terrible happenings. For you are our father and our mother and you are very wise.”

  It was a conventional opening, and Sanders, who had felt the earthquake, an infrequent occurrence in these parts, waited, knowing what would come.

  “…and then, lord, the river rose fearfully, washing through the huts of Bosubo, the fisherman, and eating up his salt. And the roof of Kusu, the hunter, fell down whilst he was in bed, and also two canoes were washed away and found by the thieving Akasava, who will not give them to us. Now tell us, Sandi, what made the world rock? Some of my councillors think one thing, some another. One says that it was M’shimba putting up his knees as he slept. Men do this in their sleep, as I know. Another, that it was a fight between two mighty ghosts. Speak for us, Sandi.”

  Sanders was not prepared to give a lecture on seismology, but supplied a plausible, fairly accurate, not wholly fanciful explanation.

  “M’kema,” said he, “in this world what do you see? The earth and the trees upon it, and the rivers that run on the earth. And if you dig, there is more earth. And if you dig deeper, there is rock and more rock, and beneath that – who knows? Sands and rivers and soft earth again. And if the rivers wash away the under earth, then the rocks settle and the ground settles, and there are strange disturbances. As to ghosts, I know M’shimba M’shamba, for he is my friend and well liked by the Government. But when he comes it is with a mighty wind and rains and spittings of fire. He lifts big trees and little trees and carries away huts, and he roars with a loud voice.”

  “Cala cala,” said a grey wise man (Foliti, suspected of witchcraft), “in the days of our fathers this thing happened, and there was born in the midst of the wonder, a man whose name was Death.”

  Sanders knew the legend of the ancient N’shimba, and had fixed the date of his appearance at somewhere in the seventeenth century. This N’shimba, so miraculously born, had been a common man who had no respect for kings or authorities, and by his genius had made himself master of the land between the mountains and the sea. It was said that when he was a youth, a ghost brought him a black egg, and from this egg was hatched a devil, who gave him power so that he was greater than kings.

  “This I know,” he said. “Why do you say this to me, wise man?”

  “Lord, such a child has now been born in our village, and the mother, being mad, has named him N’shimba. And doing this, she made strange faces and died, as the mother of N’shimba of our fathers died. Because of this we have held a palaver for three days and three nights. And some said that the baby must be buried alive before the ghost comes which will give him power, and some that he must be put in the Pool of the Silent Ones, and others that he must be chopped and all of us must put our fingers in his blood and smear the soles of our feet, this being magic.”

  Sanders wrinkled his nose like an angry terrier.

  “Do this,” he said unpleasantly, “and be sure that I will come with a magic rope and hang the men who chopped him. Go back, men, to your villages and let this be known. That I will send a Jesus-man to this child, and he shall take away all that is evil in him, and then will I come and fix to his forehead a certain devil mark which shall be strange to see. Thereafter let no man raise his hand against N’shimba, for my spirit will be powerfully with him. Elaka!”

  Two days after a missionary had formally baptised N’shimba, Sanders came, and in view of all the silent village, pressed a small rubber stamp on the squirming baby’s forehead. It was the stamp that Sanders used when he sent microscope slides to the School of Tropic Medicines for examination, and it said: “Fragile: open carefully.”

  In a sense it was an appropriate inscription.

  “People, I have put my ju-ju upon this child,” said Sanders, addressing the multitude. “Presently it will fade and go away, because by my magic it will eat into his bones and into his young heart. But because my magic is so fearful, I shall know who laid his hand upon this small one, and I shall come swiftly with my soldiers and my gun that says ‘ha-ha-ha.’”

  Such was the potency of the charm that, after many years, a slightly mad woman who struck the child, died in great agony the same night.

  All this happened cala cala, in the days when Sanders was mapping out the destinies of five contentious nations. From time to time he saw the boy, and discovered in him nothing remarkable, except that he was a little sulky, and, according to his father, given to long silences and to solitary walks. He knew none of his own kind; neither played with boys nor spoke frankly to girls. They said that he was looking for the black egg, and certainly N’shimba climbed many trees without profit.

  Then one day, N’shimba, squatting about the family fire before the hut, propounded a riddle.

  “I caught a young leopard and put him in the fine little house, where once I had kept many birds. Did my leopard sing or fly or make ‘chip-chip’ noises?”

  “Boy, you are foolish,” said his unimaginative father, “for you have caught no leopard and you have no fine house where birds are kept.”

  “That is my mystery,” said N’shimba, and, rising, walked away to the forest and was not seen for three days. When he returned, he brought with him a young girl of the Inner lsisi.

  “This is my wife,” he said.

  The father said nothing, for the boy was sixteen and of a marrying age. The new wife, on the contrary, said much.

  “I do not want this man, your son,” she said frankly. “I am a great dancer, and my price is ten bundles of ten malakos in ten heaps ten times ten repeated. A man of my people would give as much salt as would fill a hut if I would be his wife, yet your son comes to me and takes me and gives nothing to my father nor to me. And when I turned from him, he struck me down. Here is the mark.”

  The mark was horridly patent, and N’shimba’s father was troubled and sought his son.

  “Why have you taken this woman?” he asked. “Presently her father will come and demand her price. And Sandi will come and give judgment against me. Let her go, for, even if you are married to her, what does it matter? Is there not a saying that ‘Women marry many times but have one husband’?”

  “I am that man,” said N’shimba. “As to Sandi, I am the child
of his spirit, as all people know, and I take what I need.”

  That evening he beat his new wife, and her father, arriving in wrath to make the best of a bad bargain, was also beaten to his shame.

  “Who is N’shimba?” asked Captain Hamilton curiously when the news came to headquarters, and Sanders, a thoughtful, troubled man, explained.

  “It wouldn’t worry me at all, but the young devil has used the slogan of the old N’shimba, ‘I take what I need’ – and that is a very bad sign. One whisper of black eggs and I will take N’shimba and hang him.”

  He sent a warning, and marked down N’shimba in his diary as one to be interviewed when he next went north. Then one day there came into existence the Blood Friends of Young Hearts.

  In native territories, secret societies are born in a night, and with them their inspired ritual. From what brain they come, none knows. The manner of their dissolution is as mysterious. They come and they go; perform strange rites, initiate secret dances; men meet one another and say meaningless but thrilling words; there is a ferment and thrill in life – then of a sudden they are no more. Sometimes there is a little blood-letting, as when the N’gombi people held a society which was called The Mystery of the Five Straight Marks. Five cuts on the left cheek was the sign of the order. Sanders heard, saw, said nothing. On the whole, he thought the personal appearance of the N’gombi people was improved by the mutilations. But when, at a big palaver of the society, an Ochori girl was beheaded and her skin distributed to the members of the order, Sanders went quickly to the spot, hanged the leaders, flogged their headmen, and burnt the village that had been the scene of the ceremony. Thereafter the Five Marks vanished from existence.

  “Ahmet says N’shimba is behind this new society,” he said, calling Hamilton into his airy little office. “I’m scared lest N’shimba discovers that the mantle of his disreputable namesake has descended upon him. If he does, there will be bad trouble. I think I’ll send Bones to the Isisi with a platoon of young men. The wholesome presence of authority may nip in the bud the activities of the Young Hearts.”

  “Why ‘Young Hearts’?” asked Hamilton lazily.

  “They are mostly young men, and the movement is spreading,” said Sanders. “Bosambo has reported that a branch of this interesting society has been formed in the heart of the Ochori city.”

  “Send Bones,” suggested Hamilton promptly. “I know of no more depressing influence.”

  “What is the matter with him!”

  “If this were a civilised country, and the necessary opportunities existed, I should say that Bones was in love,” said Hamilton. “As it is, I think he’s sickening for something.”

  “It can’t be measles,” said Sanders. “He’s had them twice.”

  Hamilton sniffed. “Bones is the sort of fellow who would have measles three times and never turn a hair. But it isn’t measles. And it isn’t liver. I had him in yesterday morning and insisted on his swallowing three pills. He made a fuss about it, and I had to quote the Army Act. And even now he’s depressed.”

  Sanders stared thoughtfully across the sunburnt parade ground.

  “I think a trip to the Isisi might do him a lot of good,” he said.

  * * *

  There were moments when there came to the soul of Lieutenant Augustus Tibbetts a great unrest. Times when even the pursuit and practice of his latest course of study brought neither peace nor consolation. Bones (for such was his name to his equals) found a melancholy satisfaction in the phenomena, for these conditions of unease usually preceded some flashing inspiration. It was as though Nature in her mysterious way ordained that Bones should only put forth his finest efforts after some (to him) tremendous ordeal. Such a tinge of irritation came to Bones one sunny day in April, and at a moment when he had every reason to be perfectly happy. The mail had brought to him a diploma which certified to his proficiency as an accountant. He had been elected a Fellow of the Society of Accountancy (Wabash), as a result of a course of correspondence lessons conducted by The College of Practical and Theoretical Accountancy (also of Wabash, USA).

  His half-yearly inspection had passed off magnificently, with the trifling exception that his books were out of order and that the sum of three pounds one shilling had in some mysterious fashion crept into the credit column. But this was instantly rectified by the discovery that he had added the day of the month, Bones invariably did this. Generally he added the year. Sometimes he was £192 1s short. Sometimes he had £19 2s 1d surplus. Sanders had praised some work of his; his immediate superior, Captain Hamilton, had been unusually gracious. And Bones was unhappy.

  There was, in truth, an excellent reason. Bones was one of those uncomfortable people who take a passionate interest in every phase of human activity that happens outside their own especial orbit of duty. He was an officer of Houssas. He enjoyed an allowance from a wealthy uncle, he was living the kind of life he would have chosen of all others, and yet Bones was constantly striving toward perfection in professions which had nothing whatever to do with soldiering. He “took up” almost every branch of study that was offered to him through the advertisement pages of the magazines. He learnt elocution, public speaking, newspaper illustration, short-story writing, motor-car construction, law, motion-picture production, engineering, and the after-care of babies, through the medium of weekly questionnaires and test sheets, though without possessing the slightest aptitude for the practice of a single calling which he so assiduously studied.

  And he read. He read the Hundred Best Books and Egyptian History and John Stuart Mill, and books on Inductive and Deductive Logic, and Works of Travel and Sociology. If he did not actually read them, he bought them. Sometimes he read nearly through the first chapter, but generally he read the introduction and put the book away to be read some day “when I can give my mind to it.” That day never dawned. Possibly the introductions were sufficient to assure him that they were books he did not wish to know.

  Bones was passing through a phase of intellectual development when the inequalities of life were all too apparent. He grieved for his fellowmen. He despised wealth and spoke glibly and contemptuously of capitalism. But for Florence, his life would have been intolerable. Florence was the property of Captain Hamilton. She was a hen, and she was of the Plymouth Rock variety. From her chickhood she had conceived a violent affection for Bones, and Bones, to whom all living things had a soul, had returned her love.

  There was an embarrassing side to the friendship, for Florence followed him like a pet dog, and invariably inspected the guard behind him. And the Houssa has a very keen sense of humour.

  Yet even Florence did not wholly compensate for the social conditions which were revealed to Bones from week to week in the pages of a fiery periodical which came to him. Bones grew careless in his attire, and addressed Abiboo, his sergeant, as “Comrade.” Which Sergeant Abiboo reported to Hamilton.

  “It is clear that the young lord Tibbetti has fever,” he said, “for this morning he spoke to me as if he were a common man, and said that all men were equal. Even sergeants with privates. Also he said that the land did not belong to Government, but to me and to his lordship. This I report officially.”

  Finding no traces of fever, Hamilton had given his subordinate three large pills, Bones protesting.

  Summoned to the residency, he heard of his projected trip without enthusiasm. Ordinarily the prospect of assuming control of the Wiggle would have brought him to a high pitch of ecstasy.

  “Thank you, sir an’ excellency,” he said gloomily. “I’ll go because it is my duty. I have a premonition that I may not come back. Instinct, my dear old Ham – I’ve always been like that. I’m physic.”

  “‘Psychic’ is the word you want,” said Hamilton.

  “We always call it ‘Physic’,” said Bones calmly, “and that’s the way it’s spelt, dear old comrade and OC Troops. If a johnny is physic, surely to good gracious heavens he knows how it’s spelt?”

  “What have you a premonition of,
Bones?” asked Sanders.

  Bones made a grimace, lifted his angular shoulders and threw out his hands – gestures indicating his inability to give a plain answer to a plain question.

  “Not wishing to cast a dark old shadow or be a jolly old killjoy, I’d rather not say,” he replied darkly, “but I’ve had this feeling, comrade–”

  “A little less ‘comrade’ would be welcome,” said Hamilton.

  “We’re all comrades, dear old officer,” said Bones gloomily. “We’ve got our jolly old social values mixed up. The condition of society with its naughty old artificial restrictions is positively ghastly. It is indeed, old Ham. Sweinmacher says–”

  “What Sweinmacher or any other Dutch trader says is immaterial,” said Hamilton. “You go to the Isisi this afternoon. And if your premonition comes off I’ll write the nicest little obituary notice you’ve ever seen.”

  Bones inclined his head gravely. “I’ve already written it,” he said. “You’ll find it in my desk, dear old com – officer. You might send it to the Times – I’ve subscribed to that jolly old Thunderer for years, an’ they’ll be glad to put it in. About 20,000 words as near as I can judge, but if you’d like to add anything to it, I’ll take it as a kindness.”

  Sanders came down to see his subordinate leave.

  “N’shimba you will deal with firmly. As yet he is not dangerous. These fellows hold tight to tradition, and until the arrival of the black egg – and the spies say he has been searching for it – there will be no general rising. If necessary, kill N’shimba. You’re not taking Florence?”

  Florence was perched on the rail of the boat, a brooding, sleepy figure. Undisturbed, she remained when the Wiggle cast off and pushed its blunt nose to the rapid waters of the big river.