The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ I could have wished you had gone before you brought all this sorrow to the Lombobo people.”

      K’maka shook his head.

      “This is the way,” he said drowsily, “for the living things prey upon the living things, birds upon insects, leopards upon birds, men upon leopards, and, since there is nought greater than man, then man preys upon himself. This is ordained—”

      They gave him water and he opened his eyes again.

      “Lord,” he said, and now he spoke with difficulty, “I have discovered in my thinking the greatest truth in the world.”

      A strange light came into his eyes; they danced eagerly with the greatness of his discovery.

      “All your wise men do not know this,” he whispered; “death is — —”

      Sanders waited, but K’maka the Thinker carried his secret with him to the land of sleep.

VIII. Nine Terrible Men

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      There were nine terrible men in the Forest of O’tomb’, so native report had it.

      Nine terrible men who lived on an island set in a swamp. And the swamp was hard to come by, being in the midst of a vast forest. Only a monkey or a leopard could find a way to the inhabitants of this island — they themselves being privy to the secret ways.

      No man of the Isisi, of the N’Gombi, of the Akasava, or of the river tribes, attempted to track down the nine, for, as it was generally known, most powerful ju-jus guarded all paths that led to the secret place.

      Nine outlawed men, with murder and worse upon their souls, they came together. God knows how, and preyed upon their world.

      They raided with impunity, being impartial as to whether Isisi or N’Gombi paid toll.

      By night they would steal forth in single file, silent as death, no twig cracking in their path, no word spoken. As relentless as the soldier ant in his march of destruction, they made their way without hindrance to the village they had chosen for the scene of their operations, took what they wanted and returned.

      Sometimes they wanted food, sometimes spears — for these lords of the woods were superior to craftsmanship — sometimes a woman or two went and never came back.

      Such lawless communities were not uncommon. Occasionally very ordinary circumstances put an end to them; some there were that flourished, like the People-Who-Were-Not-All-Alike.

      The Nine Terrible Men of the O’tomb’ existed because nothing short of an army corps could have surrounded them, and because, as Sanders thought, they were not a permanent body, but dispersed at times to their several homes.

      Sanders once sent two companies of Houssas to dislodge the nine, but they did nothing, for the simple reason that never once did they get within shooting distance. Then Sanders came himself, and caught little else than a vicious attack of malarial fever.

      He sent messages to all the chiefs of the people within a radius of a hundred miles to kill at sight any of the nine, offering certain rewards. After three palpably inoffensive men of the Ochori tribe had been killed, and the reward duly claimed, Sanders countermanded the order.

      For two years the nine ravaged at will, then a man of the Isisi, one Fembeni, found grace.

      Fembeni became a Christian, though there is no harm in that. This is not satire, but a statement with a reservation. There are certain native men who embrace the faith and lose quality thereby, but Fembeni was a Christian and a better man — except —

      Here is another reservation.

      Up at Mosunkusu a certain Ruth Glandynne laboured for the cause, she, as I have previously described, being a medical missionary, and pretty to boot.

      White folk would call her pretty because she had regular features, a faultless complexion, and a tall, well-modelled figure.

      Black folk thought she was plain, because her lips were not as they should be by convention; nor was she developed according to their standards.

      Also, from N’Gombi point of view, her fair, long hair was ridiculous, and her features “like a bird.”

      Mr. Commissioner Sanders thought she was very pretty indeed — when he allowed himself to think about her.

      He did not think about her more often than he could help, for two reasons — the only one that is any business of yours and mine being that she was an enormous responsibility. He had little patches of white hair on either side of his temple — when he allowed his hair to grow long enough for these to become visible — which he called grimly his “missionary hairs.” The safety of the solitary stations set in the wilds was a source of great worry.

      You must understand that missionaries are very good people. Those ignoramuses who sneer at them place themselves in the same absurd position as those who sneer at Nelson or speak slightingly of other heroes.

      Missionaries take terrible risks — they cut themselves adrift from the material life which is worth the living; they endure hardships incomprehensible to the uninitiated; they suffer from tempestuous illnesses which find them hale and hearty in the morning and leave their feeble bodies at the edge of death at sunset.

      “And all this they do,” said Bosambo of Monrovia, philosophically and thoughtfully, “because of certain mysteries which happened when the world was young and a famous Man called Hesu.* Now I think that is the greatest mystery of all.” [* The Third Person of the Trinity is so called in some dialects.]

      Sanders appreciated the disinterestedness of the work, was immensely impressed by the courage of the people who came to labour in the unhealthy field, but all the time he fretfully wished they wouldn’t.

      His feelings were those of a professional lion-tamer who sees a lighthearted amateur stepping into the cage of the most savage of his beasts; they were feelings of the skilled matador who watches the novice’s awkward handling of an Andalusian bull — a troubled matador with a purple cloak held ready and one neatly-shod foot on the barrier, ready to spring into the ring at the novello’s need.

      The “missionary patches” grew larger and whiter in the first few months of Ruth Glandynne’s presence at Musunkusu, for this village was too near to the wild N’Gombi, too near the erratic Isisi, for Sanders’ liking.

      Sanders might easily have made a mistake in his anxiety. He might have sent messengers to the two peoples, or gone in person — threatening them with death and worse than death if they harmed the girl.

      But that would have aroused a sense of importance in their childlike bosoms, and when the time came, as it assuredly would come, when their stomachs were angry against him, some chief would say:

      “Behold, here is a woman who is the core of Sandi’s eye. If we do her harm we shall be revenged on Sandi.”

      And, since children do not know any other tomorrow than the tomorrow of good promise, it would have gone badly with the lady missionary.

      Instead, СКАЧАТЬ