The Ivory Trail/Chapter 17

in camp slept that night. When the tusks had been chopped out, and our camp carried across and pitched beside Monty’s—ivory weighed—lion-proof boma built—and elephant-heart portioned out to the men, who gorged themselves on it in order that their own hearts might grow great and strong; when all the myriad matters had been seen to that make camping in the tropics such a business, then there were tales to be told. We demanded Monty’s first; he ours; and because his was likely to be much the shortest we won that argument.

“Wait one minute, though,” he insisted. “Before I begin, have you any notion who a man with a beard could be—bruised face-broken front teeth—Mauser rifle—big dark beard cut shovel-shape—enormously powerful by the look of his shoulders and arms? I came on him three, no, four days’ march back.”

“Schillingschen!” we exclaimed with one voice.

“Show me Schillingschen!” echoed Brown, who was very drunk by that time, nearly ready to be put to bed. “Show me Schillingschen, an’ I’ll show you a corpse!”

“He’s right,” nodded Monty. “The man’s dead. Blew his brains out with his last cartridge. Looked to me to have lost himself. Slept in trees, I should say. Clothing all torn. Hadn’t been dead long when some of my boys came on him and drove away the jackals. Had he been in a fight, do you know?”

But we would not tell him that tale until we had his own.

“Mine’s short and simple,” he began. “Some ruffians boarded my ship at Suez, who made such eyes at me, and so obviously intended to do me damage at the first opportunity, that I talked it over with the captain (giving him a hint or two of the possible reason) and he agreed to slip me off secretly at Ismailia. It was easy—middle of the night, you know—had the doctor isolate the ruffians on the starboard side while the ship anchored—some cooked-up excuse about quarantine—and kept ’em out of sight of what was happening until the ship went on again. Very simple.”

“Go on, Didums—we’ll be all night talking—what did you do with the King of Belgium?” Fred demanded.

“Nothing. Didn’t go near the King of Belgium. I was quarantined at Ismailia on wholly imaginary grounds for fourteen days; and who should come smiling into the same lazaretto on the last day but Frederick Courtney—a very old friend of mine!”

“He was to go to Somaliland,” I said.

“So he told me. He’s on his way there now. Decided for reasons of his own to enter the country by way of Abyssinia. Told me of the advice he’d given you fellows, and assured me he’d seen King Leopold himself on the very matter scarcely a year before. Of course, he said, I might succeed where he failed, using influence and all that sort of thing, but he assured me Leopold was hard to deal with, and difficult to tie down. His advice was, go back to Elgon, and hunt for the stuff there.”

“That’s what he kept advising us,” said Will. “But why should he give away his information free? And if it’s good, where did he get it?”

“Courtney’s no dog in the manger,” Monty answered. “He told me of this man Schillingschen. Said he had sent in a report about him to the Home Government, but couldn’t for the life of him get documentary evidence with which to back up his charges.”

Will whistled, and drew out the diary he had rescued from the tin box. Fred nodded. Will threw it to Monty, who caught it.

“He told me this Schillingschen had searched the whole country over for the stuff—had it straight from Schillingschen’s boys—I dare say you know how Courtney can make a native tell him all he knows. Schillingschen, he said, had eliminated pretty nearly all the likely places until Mount Elgon was about all there is left. Courtney said, too, that there were always so many thousands of elephants near Elgon that Tippoo Tib probably gathered a harvest there. We discussed probabilities, and agreed it wasn’t likely he would carry the stuff far in order to hide it. It seemed likely to both of us, too, that if the quantity the old man hid was anything like what rumor says, then there were probably half a dozen hiding-places, not one. Most of the stuff may be in the Congo Free State, and we’ll do well to leave that to Leopold of Belgium and his pet concessionaires. Some of it may be near here. I stayed in the lazaretto an extra day with Courtney, talking it over. One other thing he remembered to tell me was that Schillingschen had hunted high and low for Tippoo Tib’s old servants, and had finally managed to have the relatives of that man Hassan—I remember, Fred, you called him Johnson in Zanzibar—thrown in jail in German East for some alleged offense or other.”

Monty stopped to scrape out a faithful pipe, fill it, press down tobacco with a practiced thumb, and reach toward the campfire for a burning brand. Then he smoked for two minutes reflectively.

“I offered Courtney a share should we find the stuff. Knew you fellows would agree.” Pause. “Courtney wouldn’t hear of it.” Pause. “Said good-bye to him, and took a coastwise trading steamer back to Mombasa. Delightful trip—put in everywhere—saw everything. Saw a lot of the Galla—fine tribe, the Galla.”

“Suppose you cut the travelogue stuff until later on!” suggested Will.

“Landed at Mombasa, and learned the first day that you fellows had managed to make more enemies than friends. Put in a number of days on heavy social labor—lingered at the club—drank too much of their infernal gin-and-black-pepper appetizer—but made you fellows right, I think.”

“We’re not interested in the slumming. Go on and tell us what you did!” urged Fred.

“That is what I did—and undid. I made friends. Soon I had all the other junior officials in a state of mind to help me if they could. Then I began to inquire for Hassan. They drew the dragnet tight, and discovered him at Nairobi! A young assistant district superintendent of police, who will rise in the service, I hope, before long, discovered a woman—who was jealous of a man—who was just then making love to the dusky damsel particularly favored by Hassan; and in that roundabout way we discovered that Hassan intended to take a trip very soon toward Mount Elgon, where, if you please, he was to take part in Professor Schillingschen’s ethnological studies. On condition that he held his tongue until I gave him leave to talk, I promised that young policeman—to put him en rapport with Schillingschen’s doings as swiftly as may be. Then I returned to Mombasa, and got your code letter saying you would head this way. It all fitted in like a game of chess.”

“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.

“Oh 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!” “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 seized 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 to 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!”