Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 26).djvu/15

BY TAMMERS’ CAMP FIRES    5 warriors sent to capture us lent speed to our feet.

We plunged at first down a lovely glade hung with tropical ferns, through which tinkled a stream of water. Then we broke from the close heat of the forest into the more open and glaring heat of the plain. A fringe of scrubby trees and thickets hung about the flanks of the forest, and among these we came upon traces of Ruora and his people. Not readily shall I forget that march. The sun above us was pitiless; under its yellow dazzle and heat scenes and objects hideously suggestive fronted the morning.

“What’s that?” I jerked out, as rounding a bush we came on a dead fire, beside which some object hung from a stick placed upright in the ground.

“Looks as if somebody thought of toasted hand for his breakfast when he got called away in a hurry,” said Tammers.

But I cannot write down more of what we saw. As we cleared the trees the hive-like huts on the plain rose fully into view, and a strong smell of cattle came upon the dropping wind of the dawn.

We were at once perceived, and a detach- ment of armed men hastened out to meet us, or perhaps it would be more correct to say to drive us in. Many of you have read of Benin, and of what our soldiers saw when they entered the City of Blood. It was much the same in Ruora’s village-—the same squalor, the same abominable stenches, the same almost unbelievable evidences of cruelty.

We were thrust forward between the rows of huts until we reached an open space of ground, at the farther side of which two rather larger huts stood slightly apart from their neighbours. Heat, flies, sights, and smells! The horrible physical revulsion almost overcame the sense of the imminent danger in which we stood. It is, no doubt, a very fine thing to be a pioneer of civiliza- tion, but when the van of civilization goes forward into the untrodden places of the earth I, for one, prefer to shove behind.

Tammers doesn’t, though. I never ad- mired him more than I did on that morning —which is saying a good deal—while he walked along through a scene which re- called to me very poignantly the words of Swinburne: “Whereby the heights live haunted by present sense of past and mon- strous things.” Tammers, I say, marched on cool and unmoved, with the old indomitable carriage of his bullet-head, as if he had just bought the Continent of Africa and carried the stamped receipt for it in his pocket.

II.

THE cannibal of fact and the cannibal of fiction are two vastly distinct individuals. The latter 1s often pictured as Nature's erring gentleman, girt with leopard skins and dwelling in the warm darkness of some primeval forest. As a matter of fact he s usually a pot-bellied, red-eyed personage, who, in an environment of reeking sunshine and bad odours, suffers from acute indigestion.

This description applied in a superlative form to Ruora. We beheld a monstrously fat negro, seated on a small stool, with men and women grouped in a half-circle behind him. A rag of red cotton hung over one shoulder, and in his fist he held a much- handled stick, with which he beat upon the ground in his more emphatic moments. A man of low intelligence, vicious, malignant, yet his will lay as a yoke of iron on the necks of his people. He blinked at us in silence for a few minutes through his menacing red eyelids. Then, with a young tribesman for interpreter, the palaver began. Under the guidance of Tammers it proceeded on politic lines.

Far away, blotches against the aching blue of the sky, vultures hovered with expanded wings. I looked at them and felt very terrified indeed. How few of those who in arm-chairs read of the "mysterious heart of the marvellous Afric continent” can even dimly imagine the reality as I saw it then— pitiful, sun-rotted, squalid!

The talk went on, but the voices died strangely away to a whisper in my ears; the sunlight throbbed in flashes close before my eyes. I made a wild effort to regain my senses; unconsciousness fell upon me, and I woke to find myself in the stifling darkness of one of the beehive huts, with Tammers bathing my aching head. He asked me how I felt, and the concern in his voice drove me to refuge in feeble laughter.

“You've a touch of fever from the sun. I wish I'd never brought you here. The life’s too rough-cast for you, Anson.”

“Not a bit of it!” I declared. “Only over-exciting for weak nerves. Things going on well?” I asked, dreamily.

“As well as can be expected,” he replied, and I must have dropped asleep as he spoke.

These thoughts were floating half-pleasantly on the surface of my consciousness when Tammers touched me on the shoulder, and I sat up expecting to see the blink of dying stars in the morning sky above me as I had so often done when he roused me to resume our march. But a dense blackness closed