The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ the meantime, I’d little sympathy to spare; my own case, as we finally approached Antan’ after more than a week of tortured tramping, was deplorable. My shirt and trousers were in rags, my shoes were worn out, I was bearded and foul – but strangely enough, having plumbed the depths, I was beginning to perk up a trifle. I wasn’t dead, and they weren’t bringing me all this way to kill me – I was even feeling a touch of light-headed recklessness, probably with hunger. I was lifting my head again, and my recollections of the end of the march are clear enough.

      We passed a great lake along the road, and the guards made us shout and sing all the way past it; I later heard it was to placate the ghost of a dissolute princess buried nearby – dissolute female royalty being Madagascar’s strong suit, evidently. We crossed a great river – the Mangaro – and steaming geysers bubbling out of pools of boiling mud, before we came out on a level grass plain, and beyond it, on a great hill, we beheld Antananarivo.

      It took my breath away – of course, I didn’t even know what it was, then, but it was like nothing you’d expect in a primitive nigger country. There was this huge city of houses, perhaps two miles across, walled and embattled in wood, and dominated by a hill on the top of which stood an enormous wooden palace, four storeys high, with another building alongside it which seemed to be made of mirrors, for it shimmered bright as a burning-glass in the sunlight. I stared at it until I was almost blinded, but I couldn’t make out what it was – and in the meantime there were other wonders closer at hand, for as we approached the city across the plain which was dotted with huts and crowded with village people, I thought I must be dreaming – in the distance I could hear a military band playing, horribly flat, but there could be no doubt that the tune was “The Young May Moon"! And here, sure enough, came a regiment in full fig – red tunics, shakos, arms at the shoulder, bayonets fixed, and every man-jack of them black as Satan. I stood and fairly gaped; past they went in column, throwing chests, and shaping dooced well – and at their head, G-d help me, half a dozen officers on horseback, dressed as Arabs and Turks. I was beyond startling now – when a couple of sedans, draped in velvet, passed by bearing black women done up in Empire dresses and feathered hats, I didn’t even give ’em a second glance. They, and the rest of the crowds, were moving across the front of the city, and that was the way our guards drove us, so that we skirted the city wall until we came presently to a great natural amphitheatre in the ground, dominated by a huge cliff – Ambohipotsy, they call it, and there can be no more accursed place on earth.

      There must have been close on a quarter of a million people thronging the slopes of that great hollow below the cliff – certainly more than I’ve ever seen in one congregation. This great tide of black humanity was gazing down to the foot of the cliff; our guards brought us up short and pointed, grinning, and looking down that vast slope of people I saw that in a clear space long narrow pits had been dug, and in the pits were scores of human beings, tied to stakes. At the end of each pit huge cauldrons were fixed, above roaring fires, and even as we watched a gong boomed out, the enormous chattering crowd fell silent, and a gang of black fiends tilted the first of the cauldrons, slowly, slowly, while the poor devils in the pits shrieked and writhed; boiling water slopped over the cauldron’s lip, first in a small stream, then in a scalding cascade, surging down into the pit with a horrible sizzling cloud of steam that blotted out the view. When it cleared I saw to my horror that it only filled the pit waist deep – the victims were boiling alive by inches, while the onlookers bayed and cheered in a tumult of sound that echoed across that ghastly amphitheatre of death. There were six pits; they filled them one by one.

      That was the main performance, you understand. After that, figures appeared at the top of the cliff, which was three hundred feet up, and the luckier condemned were thrown off, the crowd giving a great rising whistle as each struggling body took flight, and a mighty howl when it struck the ground below – there was particular applause if one landed in the water-pits, which were still steaming mistily with the contorted figures hanging from their stakes. They didn’t just throw the condemned people down the cliff, by the way – they suspended ’em first by ropes, to let the mob have a good look, and then cut them free to drop.

      I make no comment myself – because as I watched this beastly spectacle I seemed to hear the voice of my little Newgate friend in my ear – “Interesting, isn’t it?” – and see again the yelling, gloating audience outside the Magpie and Stump; they were much the same, I suppose, as their heathen brethren. And if you tell me indignantly that hanging is a very different thing from boiling alive – or burning, flaying, flogging, sawing, impaling, and live burial, all of which I’ve seen at Ambohipotsy – I shall only remark that if these spectacles were offered in England it would be a case of “standing room only” – for the first few shows, anyway.

However, if the relation of such atrocities nauseates you,³⁵ I can only say that I swore to tell the truth of what I saw, and any qualms you may suffer were as nothing to poor old Flashy’s mental distress as we were herded away from the scene of execution – I’ll swear we were only there because our guards didn’t want to miss it – and through one of the massive gates into Antan’ town proper. Its name, by the way, means “City of a Thousand Towns”, and it was as impressive at first hand as it had been from a distance. Wide, clean streets were lined by fine wooden buildings, some of them two and three storeys high (all building must be of wood, by law) and starved and shaken with terror as I was, I could not but marvel at the air of richness there was about the place. Well-stocked booths, shady avenues, neatly-robed folk bustling about their business, expensively-carved and painted sedans swaying through the streets, carrying the better sort, some in half-European clobber, others in splendid sarongs, and lambas of coloured silk. There was no making sense of it – on the one hand, the horrors I had just watched, and on the other this pleasant, airy, civilized-looking city – with Captain Harry Flashman and friends being kicked and flogged through the middle of it, and no one giving us more than a casual glance. Oh, aye – every building had a European lightning conductor.

      They locked us in an airy, reasonably clean warehouse for the night, took off our fetters, and gave us our first decent meal for a week – a spicy mutton stew, bread and cheese, and more of their infernal rice-piddle. We scoffed it like wolves – a dozen woolly niggers snuffling over their bowls and one English gentleman dining with refinement, I don’t think. But if it did something for my aching, filthy body, it did nothing for my spirits – this nightmare of existence seemed to have endured forever, and it was mad, incredible, out of all reason. But I must hang on – I had played cricket once, and bowled Felix; I had been to Rugby, and Horse Guards, and Buckingham Palace; I had an address in Mayfair; I had dined at White’s – as a guest, granted – and strolled on Pall Mall. I wasn’t just a lost soul in a lunatic black world, I was Harry Flashman, ex-11th Hussars, four medals and Thanks of Parliament, however undeserved. I must hang on – and surely, in the city I’d seen, there must be some civilized person in authority who spoke French or English, to whom I could state my case and receive the treatment that was my due as a British officer and citizen. After all, they weren’t real savages, not with streets and buildings like these – a touch colourful in the way they disposed of malefactors, no doubt, and no poor relief worth a d--n, but no society’s perfect. I must talk to someone.

      The difficulty was – who? When they turned us out next morning, we were taken in charge by a couple of black overseers, who spoke nothing but jabber; they thrust us along a narrow alley, and out into a crowded square in which there was a long platform, railed off to one side, with guards stationed at its corners, to keep the mob back. It looked like a public meeting; there were a couple of black officials on the platform, and two more seated at a small table before it. We were pushed up a flight of steps to the platform, and made to stand in line; I was still blinking from the sunlight, wondering what this might portend, as I looked out over the crowd – blacks in lambas and robes for the most part, a few knots of officers in comic-opera uniforms, plenty of sedans with wealthy Malagassies sitting under striped umbrellas. I scanned the faces of the officers eagerly; those would be the French-speakers, and I was just about to raise a halloo to attract their attention when a face near the front of the crowd СКАЧАТЬ