Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  I was not sure whether or not he was playing with me on the cat-and-mouse plan. He seemed to be amusing himself at my expense, and I did not question that the mere chance of being cruel would be sufficient excuse in his eyes. But there was a suggestion of ulterior motive, and I rather suspected he was probing in his own way for information.

  “There are worse towns than this one,” I answered, because that was the most colorless statement I could think of.

  “Perhaps,” he retorted, “and perhaps not.” There was a cold gleam in his eye. “But there are no worse jails than this one! It’s lousy, and they starve you, and it’s dark, and it stinks! And when you’ve been in there a while so that every one has forgotten you, d’you know what they do?”

  “Can’t imagine,” I said, interested against my will.

  “They sneak you out in irons at night onto one of their lousy little coastwise steamers and nobody ever hears of you again.”

  “Drown you at sea?” I suggested, for he waited for me to hazard some kind of guess.

  “Drown you at sea!” He laughed like a hyena. “Not they; they’re a practical gang. They ship you to the West Coast — the Portuguese West Coast — and put you to work with the coco slave gangs, bossing up natives. Refuse to drive natives and they shoot you!”

  I thought I saw through the weakness of that proposition, and was swift to point it out, being yet inexperienced in the practical wisdom of keeping such thoughts to myself.

  “Nobody could make a decent fellow do a dirty act by threatening to shoot him. He’d let them shoot and be —— !”

  Du Maurier threw his head back and cackled like a champion egg-laying hen.

  “You think they’re —— fools, don’t you? Why you — you chicken! They keep a man everlastingly hoping to escape! They keep him believing each trip with a new gang is his last one! He has to drive the natives to save the natives’ lives. And he hopes to get away in order to expose conditions! They work on a bad man’s badness, and on a good man’s goodness — get you both going and coming. Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  “If this is such an awful place — such a bad Government,” I answered, “why do you stay here? Why don’t you go to British territory, where law is law, and the king’s writ runs, as they call it?”

  At that his face darkened as if I had deliberately insulted him, and the steely glint in his cold eyes reminded me — although I can’t imagine why — of butchers’ shops.

  “I guess you don’t know I had a little difference with the British?” he said, patting his rifle, and eying me like a chisel.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” I answered frankly.

  He judged I was telling truth, and nodded. The storm died as swiftly as it came, and he was all smiles once more — hard, merciless smiles, finding humor in the stones where none was.

  “There are tales, and all kinds of tales about me,” he said. “Believe ’em or not, as you like. I’ll tell you this, though: the Portuguese let me alone! They arrested me once, up in Chai Chai.”

  “Where is Chai Chai?” I asked him.

  “Capital of Gazaland — up the Limpopo a day from here by steamer, or rather a night and part of a day. There’s the steamer — look at her!”

  He pointed out a small seagoing tug — that lay alongside the nearest quay, busily filling her shallow hold with barrels.

  “They wanted me for murder, or so they said. I guess they just wanted me, and the heaviest charge was the best excuse. At any rate, they came and took me by surprise in my tent at dawn, and locked me up in Chai Chai fort. But I had my best natives along, and one of them gave the Portuguese the slip.

  “They’d reckoned without my eleven brothers, all living, and five cousins within call. The morning after, all my brothers and cousins rode in from the Libomba Hills — sixteen men. They disarmed the soldiers, burned the fort — loosed me — and tied the fort commandant hand and foot. Then they hitched him to a tree with a rope about his neck, and hauled on the rope until he stood on tiptoe. I was for flogging him, but my brothers said that would bring about counter reprisals; so we left him in that position and rode away.

  “Since then the Portuguese treat me with respect. They no more dare take me again than they dare invade British territory with their tin-pot army! I’m King of Gazaland, I am, from the edge of the Lourenço Marques swamps to Pearson’s Place, and I’d like to meet the Portugee who dare deny it!”

  “Tell me about Chai Chai,” I said, since he seemed disinclined to go away.

  “It’s a rotten hole. Sharks, crocodiles, and hippos — drunken natives, mosquitoes, flies, malaria, mangrove swamps, pineapples, and the worst officials in the country! But it’s on the way to my place, if you care to take the longest route. And it’s on the way to Inambane and other places. A man can walk from Chai Chai to Inambane in three weeks; and if he hasn’t any money or baggage the blacks and Portuguese won’t rob him!”

  “Anything doing at Inambane?” I asked, and he laughed as if I had made a good joke.

  “Less than here, unless you want death and corruption. There’s more of those!”

  “Does the steamer go there today?” I asked, and he laughed again.

  “Sure enough. Today’s the day. Say — listen!” He patted his rifle again. “You’re broke — I can tell that with half an eye. You’re minded to look at Chai Chai — a blind man could see you are. Well — when you get there you’ll see I told the truth. From there to my place in the Libomba Hills is roughly a hundred miles. All the natives know my place. Ask them for Charlie du Maurier and they’ll point you the way. It’s a mean way. It runs ‘round the edge of the swamps; and there are lions, and snakes — mosquitoes — flies — all the fun of the fair.

  “But if you’re a genuine white man you can make it! The natives’ll let you sleep in their huts, and they’ll feed you locusts and wild honey same as John the Baptist ate — there’s a famine all through Gazaland and mealies are scarce, but there’s plenty at my place. If you dare, and win through — you’ve got guts! If you’ve got guts, I can use you! If you reach my place in the Libomba Hills I’ll put you in the way of making a good living!”

  “I’ll remember,” I answered, turning to go, and he swung along beside me, whistling and nodding in time to the tune as if his thoughts were of Springtime and merry-making. Nor could I shake his company.

  He walked with me to the Greek’s place, and thence to the steamer office, where he roundly abused the Portuguese clerk until that unhappy individual sold me a one-way ticket to Chai Chai at half price. Then he went with me to the little steamer, making one of his own native servants carry my belongings and he bullied the Goanese steward until I had one of the minute cabins to myself.

  “Mind you!” he said again, as they poled the old tug away from the quay. “It’s a hundred miles to my place! If you should ever reach there, I’m your friend! I’ll give you a week’s start, and go the short way up the Tembe River. Bet I’ll beat you!” And he stood watching me until he seemed only a speck on a wall in the distance.

  It was a weird sensation, being appraised and, so to speak, appropriated by that cold-blooded brute. I had no idea of ever seeing him again, and would have walked a thousand miles in the wrong direction rather than deliberately cross his trail. My secret plan was to walk to Inambane, in hope of meeting luck either there or on the way, calculating that the eight pounds odd that I had remaining would in any case take me on from Inambane to Beira, where there would be a different consul, and other ships in the offing than the decrepit Heatherbell. But I felt creepy at the thought of having accepted even information from du Maurier, and before we reached the river mouth I had checked up every detail of it by talking with the other passengers.

  And that was a weird voyage — a wonderful voyage if only the dread of destitution had not so overhung the venture. We steamed close inshore by mangrove swamps to the shallow Limpopo mouth, and lay for a night there on the thundering bar with the noises of a neolithic age about us. Once a lion roare
d on the high bluff over the far bank; and from among the mangroves there came crashing, and wild screams, plunging and tearing, ripping and thrashing, and — at intervals — a silence so complete and unexpected that it hurt the ear-drums.

  The cockroaches drove me out of the cabin and the mosquitoes sought to drive me in again. Of the two evils I chose the deck and the beauty of moonlight and cool air, and watched until dawn sucked up the mists and showed a military hospital, white and lonely, hugging the shore by the bar. Who chose that site for such a place, and why, is a mystery I never solved.

  We dropped a dozen barrels of the stuff they call red wine, and passed on up-river. Great sharks followed us for miles — one followed all the way to Chai Chai, where the hippos thought the water fresh enough and wallowed down to meet him. There were crocodiles in hundreds sunning themselves on rocks and logs, and birds of every color and size and cry perching on mangrove poles, or wheeling to scream abuse at us.

  But the chief interest was the atmosphere of mystery. It was up this river that King Solomon’s adventurers most likely came to make the old diggings in the distant hills, and the sensation was of being present at the dawn of history. Barring the mangrove stakes set at uncertain intervals to mark the drift of sand, there was no trace of man’s handiwork — not a native in sight — not a boat — not a beast.

  The other passengers were three hundred Kafirs crowded on the lower deck, on their way back from the Transvaal gold-mines; four Goanese Government clerks, nearly bursting with the pride of having “first-class” cabin berths; and a Portuguese tax-gatherer, with his black wife and a swarm of their half-breed children.

  He assured me he was married to the lady, and introduced me to her with punctilious ceremony; but he treated the Goanese as if they were dogs without licenses, and objected loudly to being obliged to eat in the same saloon with them.

  He asked me my business, and I wasted an hour in an effort to deceive him without telling out-and-out lies. I might as well have tried to deceive myself as to what the breakfast hash was made of — I, who with my own eyes had seen the poor goat killed.

  “I, Eduardo Lopez,” he assured me at last, “can tell you more about Gazaland than any other man. There are three authorized occupations for a European who is not an official. Prospector you are not, for you have no license. It is I who sign the licenses. I know. Hunter you are obviously not, for you have no guns, no tent, no servants, and — again, no license! It is also I who sign the hunters’ licenses! Trader in mealies you are also evidently not, and for two reasons — it is not the season; there are no mealies. And again, you would require a license, and I — whose business that would be — have issued none! Here is my book of licenses — here is another. Here are yet others. Your name is in none of them!”

  “Surely,” I said, “a man needs no license to travel and look about him?”

  “In Gazaland,” he answered smugly, “it is always well to have a permit of one sort or another. It confers a sort of semi-official standing. It ranks one above the native, and the Indian, and the Goanese. It entitles one to respect, and to a certain measure of confidence. It is presumptive evidence of bona fides.

  “Let me issue one to you. My services will cost you nothing, and a trader’s permit, let us say, would be only twenty-five pounds — a bagatelle — good for six months. Taxes are payable in Portuguese money, but you may pay me in English gold and I will make the exchange when I return to Lourenço Marques.”

  I thanked him for the advice, and promised to think it over.

  “If you were wise, you would jump at the opportunity!” he answered, with rather a sneer under his black mustache and a mean look in his eye. “That man du Maurier I saw you with is a low person of very bad reputation. You would better bolster yourself up with semi-official standing! Englishmen who have no permits are not welcome in Gazaland!”

  “I’ll think it over!” I assured him, and he sneered again and left me, to go and talk in undertones with the Portuguese captain, who was drunk and steered atrociously. Every time we missed a corner of the winding river by a margin of six inches the Kafirs on the lower deck all laughed, and to the birds we must have seemed a picnic party bent on self-immolation for their benefit.

  They followed and screamed at us, as if in haste to get the disaster over, and our bones picked before dark. But the captain, and his half-breed crew, and the tax-collector with his coal-black señora, talked on, and passed a bottle ‘round, as if the treacherous river were an open road, and they on metal rails.

  Chai Chai came into view beyond a bend at noon; and its excuse for being greeted the nostrils instantly. There is neither mistaking nor forgetting the vile, acrid stench of the barreled stuff the Portuguese callvino tinto that they sell to the natives of that miserable land. Its only resemblance to wine is its murky-red color, which may or may not be aniline.

  But international law lays down that spirits shall not be sold to natives between certain parallels, and there is more in a name than Shakespeare hinted at. A barrel of the beastly stuff will keep a dozen natives drunk for half a month, and they will work for the sake of it. So three thousand barrels of it went to Chai Chai every thirty days; our tug did a roaring business; and Chai Chai, except for the “fort,” was three or four barns of concrete and corrugated iron, all devoted to one purpose.

  There were mealie plantations in sight; and two of the planters’ houses graced the hillside looking down on the muddy river — cool, they looked, and prosperous; but the locusts had eaten every green thing on either river bank, and the few lean goats and cows licked up and ate the living insects.

  The one exception was the pineapples. Fields and roads were all marked out with the prickly plants, and for some reason the locusts scorned those, so that the land was a wilderness of reddish brown, marked with irregular lines of green, and punctuated by the skeletons of leafless trees.

  The fort was a mud-walled rectangle down near the river bank, enclosing fifty round, thatched huts and an iron storehouse at one end. In one or two places the ditch had been allowed to fill from neglect. Three or four Portuguese soldiers in ragged uniforms lounged in the shade of a tree, and there was a general air of hungry shabbiness. But the Portuguese flag fluttered bravely from a crooked pole, and the one officer in sight strutted in a uniform whose whiteness was simply dazzling.

  For the rest, there were half a dozen Indian stores facing a sandy road — corrugated-iron affairs with open fronts, where matches, thin cotton blankets, and enameled pots were displayed to catch the native eye. And there was a jail — an undoubtable, unspeakable jail, with iron bars, an armed sentry and a smell.

  The sun beat down on all this in a splendid effort to melt the iron roofs, and there was only one redeeming spot in sight. The planters’ houses, that might otherwise have graced the unlovely scene, only added to the desolation by the insolence of their contrast to all that misery. They were built on the profits of native labor paid for with vino tinto, and unexplainably they smirked, and looked, the part.

  But — and my eye fell on these with the instinct that impels a drowning man to grasp at flotsam — beyond the fort, on a little rise by the river bank were two white tents. They were clean, dazzling, well-constructed tents, with an air about them of self-respect. I reasoned that if they were Portuguese they would almost certainly belong to the Government, and in that case a Portuguese flag would have been in evidence.

  But there was no Portuguese flag. Whichever way I looked there was no other pleasant thing in sight, and those tents drew me like a magnet. I walked down the crazy gang-plank and wandered toward them — they were half a mile away — with the sensation of having been reprieved. They were big tents, with awnings out in front, and presently I could see chairs under the awnings, and in one chair a man who, from his dress and attitude, could only have been English.

  As I approached within clear view I heard him call to some one in the other tent.

  “Monty! Hey, Monty! Didums, d’you hear? Come out, you la
zy rascal! I say, Monty — here’s an Englishman!”

  I walked up to the tent, and he rose to meet me — not so gray then as now, but iron-gray, nevertheless, with the same upturned mustaches, and the same way of standing as if there were a rapier in his right hand. I told him my name, and he told me his was Oakes — Frederick Joliett Oakes.

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of me from the Portuguese?”

  But I had not.

  “This is Lord Montdidier,” he said, as another tall man came from the other tent, as clean-limbed and as cleanly clothed as he, but darker — a gray-eyed man, with a rather heavy, dark mustache, and a neck and shoulders that suggested polo instantly.

  He wore a white silk shirt, partly open, showing skin burned to a nut-brown. The rolled-up sleeves showed forearms as lithe and clean as those of the sculptured Hermes. He was a younger man than Oakes, with a rather gentler smile and the air about him of the English upper class, that knows it is immortal and is far too tactful to be self-assertive.

  They ordered a native to bring another chair, and made me sit down facing them.

  “You’re rather an astonishing apparition!” said Oakes. “You arrive like the god out of a box in the old Greek plays. We weren’t exactly praying, and we had given up hope, but we would rather see an Englishman just at this minute than any other unexpected thing we can think of.”

  “You’ll stay to lunch, of course?” said Lord Montdidier.

  “I wonder what you’re doing here?” said Oakes.

  “None of our business, of course,” said Lord Montdidier.

  “We’re prospectors,” said Oakes.

  “May I order you a drink?” said Lord Montdidier.

  “Doing?” I said. “I’m looking for work!”

  “Rare!” said Montdidier, shaking his head with a peculiarly gentle smile. “Very rare in these parts!”