by Talbot Mundy
“How in the world did you get that letter so soon?” demanded Fred.
“The missionary chap was to mail it in Ujiji, via Salisbury, Rhodesia.”
“I suppose he simply didn’t do that, that’s all,” Monty answered. “The bank manager told me he received it in the mission mail bag — from Ujiji, yes, but by way of Muanza, Tabora, and Dar es Salaam. It reached me in the nick of time. I must have been marching nearly parallel with you chaps for about a week!”
“If coincidence of evidence means anything,” said Will “we’re all on a red-hot scent! That Baganda we have in our outfit is our prisoner. One of Schillingschen’s pet pimps. He swears Hassan — or rather some old native whose name he doesn’t know — was to meet Schillingschen in these parts and lead him to where he actually helped bury the ivory, years ago!”
“We may have difficulty finding him,” said I. “Mount Elgon’s big!”
“What about Brown?” asked Monty. “I hope you haven’t made him partner?
I agree, of course, if you have, but I hope not!”
“Nothing doing!”
“No. Why should we?”
“Brown’s all right, but a present ought to satisfy him.”
We began to tell Monty about Brown’s cattle that Coutlass stole, and the Masai looted from Coutlass and us.
“Were they branded?” asked Monty.
“Branded and hoof- and ear-marked,” said I.
“Then they ought to be traceable, even among the huge herds the Masai have. I think I’ve influence enough by this time with this government to have those cattle traced and returned to Brown.”
“They’re his only love!” said I. “Do that for him, and he’ll never wait to receive a present!”
Dawn found us still recounting our adventures and Monty alternately laughing and frowning.
“I regret Coutlass” he said, shaking the ashes from his pipe at last when Kazimoto brought our breakfast. “I regretted having to throw him out of the hotel in Zanzibar. I wish he could have escaped with his life — a picturesque scoundrel if ever there was one! I’d rather be robbed by him than flattered by ten Schillingschens or Lady Saffren Waldons. I suppose if I’d been with you I’d have killed him. It’s well I wasn’t. I might have regretted it all my days!”
We buried our newly won ivory under a tree, locating the spot exactly with the aid of Monty’s compass, and broke camp, starting sleepless up the mountain. As Monty said:
“No use meandering around the mountain. Hassan might be higher up or lower down. If he is there you may depend on it he’s tired of waiting. He’s looking for a safari. Let’s climb where we can be seen from miles away.”
So climb we did, thousand after thousand feet, until the night air grew so cold that the porters’ teeth chattered and they threatened to desert us. They grew afraid, too, remembering the tales the villagers had told them down below.
“Wow! You are not fat babies!” Kazimoto told them. “Who would eat such stringy meat as you?”
We came to caves that none of the men dared enter — vast, gloomy tunnels into the mountain through which the chill wind whistled like a dirge. Yet the caverns were warmer than the wind, and not bad camping-places if we could have persuaded the boys to take advantage of them.
The earth, too, all over the mountain and the range to eastward of it was warm in spite of the wind. In places there were warm springs bubbling from the rock, and at night and early morning a blanket of white mist that was remarkably like steam covered everything. It was a land of thunderless lightning — lightning from a clear sky, flashing here and there without warning or excuse. On the high slopes there was little or no game, and no signs whatever of inhabitants, until late one afternoon the porters shouted, and we saw an old man racing toward us along the top of a ridge.
He held his hands out, and shouted as he ran — a round-faced, big-bellied man, although not nearly so fat as when we saw him last; unclean, unkempt, in tattered shirt and crushed-in fez — a man with one desire expressed all over him — to see, and touch, and talk with other men. He ran and threw himself at Monty’s feet, clasped his legs, and blubbered.
“Bwana! Oh, bwana! Oh, bwana!”
“Get up, Johnson!” Fred took him by the arm and raised him. “Tell us what’s the matter.”
“Men who eat men! Men who eat men! I had three porters to carry my tent and food. Now I have none. They have eaten them! Now they hunt me!”
“Well, you’re safe,” said Monty. “Calm yourself.”
“But you are not Bwana Schillingschen! I am here to wait for him.
Have you seen him? Where is he?”
Fred answered him. “Dead!”
Hassan threw himself on the ground again at Monty’s feet.
“Oh, what shall I do?” he blubbered. “I am an old man. Who shall take my people out of jail? Who shall go to Dar es Salaam and make Germans give them up?”
“If you’re willing to show us what you intended to show
Schillingschen,” said Monty, “I’ll do what I can for your relations.”
“What can you do? Oh, what can you do? No man but a German can make these Germans cease from punishing!”
Monty beckoned to the Baganda who had once done Schillingschen’s dirty work.
“D’you see this man? This is a German spy. The German will be willing to hand over your relations in exchange for a promise not to make a fuss about this man. Wait a minute, though! Are your relations criminals?”
“No, bwana! No, bwana! My relations honorable folk! Formerly living in Zanzibar — going to Bagamoyo to serve in German family by invitation of person attached to German Consulate — no sooner landed than thrown in jail on charges they know nothing whatever about. Then Schillingschen he finding me, and say to me, ‘You show where is that Tippoo Tib’s ivory, and your relations shall go free!’ And Tippoo Tib, he say to me, ‘You take first step to show any man where is that ivory, and you shall be fed to white ants by my faithful people!’ And Schillingschen he catch two of them faithful people, and feed ’em to white ants when nobody looking that way! Schillingschen terrible! Tippoo Tib terrible! What shall do? Tippoo Tib, he one time making me go long trip with Bwana Coutlass, very bad Greek. Bwana Coutlass wanting ivory — me pretending showing him — leading him wrong way. Coutlass very bad man, beating me ngumu sana.* All the same, me more afraid of Tippoo Tib and Bwana Schillingschen. Not long ago Tippoo Tib sending me with Bwana Coutlass second time, making bad threats against me if I not lead him wrong. Then Schillingschen he send for me and making worse threats! Oh, what shall do! Oh, what shall do!” [* Ngumu sana, very severely.]
“You shall show us where that ivory is!” Monty answered him. “Stop blubbering! Get up! Look here! See this! (Get me that diary, Will.) If the Germans won’t release your relations from jail on account of this Baganda, this is a written book that will make them do it! In this book are the names of men who have broken treaties and the law of nations. When the Germans know the British Government in London has this book under lock and key, they will think it a little thing to release your relations for the sake of avoiding trouble!”
“Promise me, bwana! You promise me!”
“I promise I will do my best for you.”
“Word of an Englishman — promise!”
“Word Of an Englishman — I promise to do my best!”
That was a proud enough moment on the shoulder of a mountain, with wilderness in every direction farther than the highest eagle in the air above could see, to have that helpless, hopeless ex-slave, part Arab, part machenzie, put his whole stock-in-trade — his secret — all he had on earth to bargain with for those he loved — in the balance on the promise of an Englishman. It was a tribute to a race that has had its share, no doubt, of bad men, but has won dominion over half the earth and pretty much all the sea by keeping faith with men who could not by any means compel good faith.
“Then I tell!” said Hassan. “Then I show!”
But now a new fear se
ized him, and he clung to Monty, trembling and jabbering.
“The men who eat men! The men who eat men!”
“Pah! Cannibals!” sneered Fred. “They’re always cowards!”
“Tippoo Tib, he afraid of nothing — nobody! He is hiding the ivory where men who eat men can guard it and none dare come!”
“Lead on, McDuff!” Fred grinned, shouldering his rifle.
All of us except Monty had beards by that time that fluttered in the wind, and looked desperate enough for any venture. Considering the rifles and our uncouth appearance, Hassan took heart of grace. He insisted on an armed guard to walk on either side of him, and nearly drove Kazimoto frantic by ducking behind rocks at intervals, imagining he saw an enemy; but he did not refuse any longer to show the way.
It seemed that in expectation of Schillingschen’s early arrival he had camped within a mile of the place where the stuff was hidden, taking unreasoning courage from the bare fact of having the redoubtable Schillingschen for friend. But the cannibals (who must have been a hungry folk, for there were no plantations, and almost no animals on all those upper slopes) had pounced on his three lean porters, missing himself by a hair’s breadth.
In hiding, he had watched his three men killed, toasted before a fire in a cavern-mouth, and eaten. Then he had run for his life, following the shoulder of the mountain in the hope of meeting Schillingschen, munching uncooked corn he had in a little bag, hiding and running at intervals for a day and a night until he chanced on us. For an old man almost sick with fear he was astonishingly little affected by the adventure.
We took longer over the course than he had done, because he wanted to find cannibals, and teach them, maybe, a needed lesson. Fred’s theory was that we should surprise them and pen them into a cavern, discovering some means of talking with them when hunger brought them out to surrender and cringe.
So we threw out a line of scouts, and pounced on cave-mouths suddenly, entering great tunnels and following the course of them in ages-old lava until sometimes we thought ourselves lost in the gloom and spent hours finding the way out again.
Time and again we found bones — bones of wild animals, and of birds, and of fish; now and then bones that perhaps had been monkeys, but that looked too suspiciously like those of the fat babies mothers mourned for in the villages below for the benefit of the doubt to be conceded without something more or less resembling proof. But never a human being did we see until we rounded the northeastern hump of the mountain in a bitter wind, and spied half a hundred naked men and women, thinner than wraiths, who scampered off at sight of us and volleyed ridiculous arrows from a cave-mouth. The arrows fell about midway between us and them, but threw Hassan into a paroxysm of fear, out of which it was difficult to shake him.
“Those are the people who ate my men! That is the cavern where Tippoo Tib hid the ivory! That is where my men’s bones are! See — they have torn my tent for clothing for their naked women!”
We put Hassan under double guard for fear lest he bolt again and leave us. And all that day, and all the next we hunted for cannibals through mazy caverns that seemed to extend into the mountain’s very womb. There were times when the stench was so horrible we nearly fainted. We stumbled on men’s bones. We collided with sharp projections in the gloom — fell down holes that might have been bottomless for aught we knew in advance — and scrambled over ledges that in places were smooth with the wear of feet for ages. Everlastingly to right, or left of us, or up above, or down below we could hear the inhabitants scampering away. Now and then an arrow would flitter between us; but their supply of ammunition seemed very scanty.
At night we camped in the cavern mouth to cut off all escape, and resumed the hunt at dawn. But the caverns were hot — hotter by contrast with the biting winds outside; and when in the afternoon of the second day we all came out to breathe and cool off the running sweat, we saw the whole tribe — scarcely more than fifty of them — emerge from an opening above, whose existence we had not guessed, and go scampering away along a ledge like monkeys. Some of them stopped to throw stones at us — impotent, aimless stones that fell half-way; and Fred sent three bullets after them, chipping bits from the ledge, after which they showed us a turn of speed that was simply incredible, and vanished.
“Now for the great disillusionment!” laughed Will. “Hassan! Go forward, and show us where that hoard of ivory ought ta be!”
We all expected disillusionment. Brown, who was under no delusion as to his share in the venture, scoffed openly at the idea of finding anything buried, in a land where every living “crittur,” as he put it, was a thief from birth. But Hassan led on in, fearless now that the cannibals were gone, and positive as if he led into his own house and would show his house-hold treasures.
He stopped before a black-mouthed chasm, two or three hundred yards along the smallest subdivision of the cavern, and called for lights and a rope. We lit lanterns, and he showed us men’s bones lying everywhere in grisly confusion.
“Tippoo Tib his men!” he remarked. “They throwing ivory in here, then byumby men who eat men kill and eat them. I alone living to tell! Plenty men who eat men in those days — all mountains full of them!”
He tied a lantern to a rope and lowered it down what looked like an old vent-hole in the lava. But the little light was lost in the enormous blackness, and we could see nothing.
“Send a man down!” he counseled.
We leaned over the edge and sniffed. There was a faint smell of what might be sulphur, but not enough to hurt.
“Who’ll go?” asked Monty, and I thought he was going to volunteer himself.
“I go down!” announced Kazimoto cheerfully, and promptly proceeded to divest himself of every stitch of clothing.
We made our stoutest line fast under his arm-pits, gave him a lantern and lowered him over the edge. For fifty or sixty feet he descended steadily, swinging the lantern and walking downward, held almost horizontally by the slowly paid-out rope. Then he stopped, and we heard him whistling.
“What do you see?” we called down.
“Pembe!” (Ivory.)
“Much of it?”
“Teli!” (Too much!) “Oh, teli, teli! Teli, teli, teli, TELI!”
His voice ended with the very high-pitched note that natives use when they want to multiply superlatives. Then he whistled again. Next he called very excitedly.
“Very bad smell here, bwana! Pull me out quickly!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
L’ENVOI
The dry death-rattle of the streets
Asserts a joyless goal —
Re-echoed clang where traffic meets,
And drab monotony repeats
The hour-encumbered role.
Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams
Outshine the evening star
Where puppet-show and printed lie,
Victim and trapper and trap, deny
Old truths that always are.
So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs!
The syren warns the shore,
The flowing tide sings overside
Of far-off beaches where abide
The joys ye know no more!
The salt sea spray shall kiss our lips —
Kiss clean from the fumes that were,
And gulls shall herald waking days
With news of far-seen water-ways
All warm, and passing fair.
They’ve cast the shore-lines loose at last
And coiled the wet hemp down —
Cut picket-ropes of Kedar’s tents,
Of time-clock task and square-foot rents!
Good luck to you, old town!
Oh, Africa is calling back
Alluringly and low
And few they be who hear the voice,
But they obey — Lot’s wife’s the choice,
And we must surely go!
So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs!
The stars and clouds and trees
In place of you! T
he heaped thorn fire —
Delight for the town’s two-edged desire —
For thrice-breathed breath the breeze!
For rumble of wheels the lion’s roar,
Glad green for trodden brown
For potted plant and measured lawn
The view of the velvet veld at dawn!
Good-by to you, old town!
If all is well that ends well, and only that is well, then this story fails at the finish, for we never caught the cannibals, so never taught them the lesson in housekeeping and economics that they needed. But there is no other shortcoming to record.
It is no business of any one’s what terms we made in the end with the Protectorate Government; but thanks to Monty’s tact and influence, and to their sense of fair play, we were treated generously. And if, when the world war at last broke out and the Germans undertook to put in practise the treachery they had so long planned, there was a secret fund of hugely welcome money at the disposal of the out-numbered defenders of British East, its source will no doubt be accounted for, as well as its expenditures, to the proper people, by the proper people, at the proper time and place.
But those who are curious, and are adept at unraveling statistics might learn more than a little by studying the export figures relating to ivory during the years that preceded the war. They say statistics never lie; but those who write them now and then do, and it may be that camouflage was understood and went by another name before the great war made the art notorious and popular.
Some of the ivory in that huge hole was ruined by the heat that still lives in Elgon’s womb. Some of it was splintered by the fall when yoked slaves tossed it in. Rats had gnawed some of it, to get at the soft sweet core.
But the men who keep the keys of the bursting ivory vaults by London docks could tell how much of it was good, and what huge stores of it reached them. For some strange reason they are not a very talkative breed of men.