O'er Many Lands, on Many Seas Part 8

I drank the rum, and I learned a lesson; and whenever afterwards the king asked me to do anything that I had scruples at performing, I pretended to be exceedingly eager to do it--and thus got off.

Our adventures on our journey inland were many and varied. Under other circ.u.mstances I should have enjoyed them, but every mile west was taking me away from all I held dear in the world, so no wonder my heart sank within me and that I loathed the savages, loathed the fat old king, and even the boy interpreter, although he was the only one with whom I could converse.

Jooma was his name, and he turned out no friend to me. He entertained me from the first with terrible stories about the cruelties of the tribe I was going amongst, tales that made me long for death and my very blood run cold.

Then I thought of the poison berry, and was strangely tempted to eat a few. Thank Heaven, I did not give way to the fearful temptation! It is an awful thing for a human soul to hurry unbidden into the presence of its Maker.

One adventure thrilled me at first with delight, afterwards with grief.

We met and attacked a caravan of English travellers. I was bound to a horse and strictly guarded, at a distance from the scene of action. I do not know what occurred, but from the exultant looks of the savages on their return, and from the blood-stained booty they brought with them, I feared the worst.

Another adventure I remember was a night attack on our camp by a rhinoceros. The savages fled before the infuriated brute more speedily than they would have done before a human foe.

But my experience, gained since then, is that rhinoceroses are not as a rule dangerous animals, although a great many marvellous stories are told about them, usually travellers' tales.

Sometimes the hill and the jungle gave place to wide marsh lands, through which the cattle were driven first, the horses following, and last of all the foolish old king on his litter, with his rum bottle beside him.

Often he used to drink till he fell asleep. Sometimes he would make me sit by him. Once he had his great hand on my shoulder, and kept feeling at my neck.

I afterwards asked Jooma what he meant.

"Nothing he mean," replied Jooma, grinning, "only feel for proper place to cut your head away. Dat nothing!"

This was pleasant.

At last we arrived in the king's country, and a small tent was a.s.signed to me near the royal palace.

The country all round, although unfilled, was fertile and lovely in the extreme. Giant cocoa-palms waved on high, some parts of the landscape were wild orchards of the most delicious fruit, the hills were covered with purple heath, the valleys carpeted with gra.s.s and flowers of every shape and hue; while the birds that flitted among the boughs, and the monster b.u.t.terflies that floated from one bright blossom to another, were lovelier than anything you could imagine in your happiest dreams.

To King Otakooma's country bands of wandering Arabs occasionally came, and visited the king in his summer tent or his winter palace--for he had both. They came to solicit his a.s.sistance in the inhuman raids they made upon surrounding tribes of less warlike negroes.

Did I hope for escape through these Arabs? As well might the linnet beg the hawk to deliver her from the talons of the owl.

CHAPTER SIX.

"Much I mis...o...b.. this wayward boy, Will one day work me more annoy.

I'll watch him closer than before."

Byron.

When I look back now to the first two, or even three, years that I spent in Otakooma's country, among Otakooma's savages, I wonder that I was not bereft of reason, or that, knowing escape by death to be in my power, I did not have recourse to the deadly poison berry that grew in abundance in many a thicket. Our goats ate freely of this berry, by-the-bye, but it seemed to have no other effect upon them than to make them lively.

But even at this date, strange to say, there are certain sights and sounds that never fail to recall to me not merely my life among those savages, but the very feelings I then had. For instance, in the county in England where I now reside, the cow-boys, or sheep-herds (I will not call them shepherds), have a peculiar way of calling to each other; it is a kind of prolonged shrill quavering shout, and it bears some faint resemblance to the howl of Otakooma's savages, as heard by night in the forest. Again, anyone drumming on the table with his finger-nails will sometimes bring to my mind the feelings I used to have on hearing the beating of the horrid tom-toms. The beating of tom-toms and the howling, combined now and then with a shriek as of some poor wretch in mortal agony and dread, even when I was not present, but probably a prisoner in my hut, used to tell me as well as words could, that a human sacrifice was progressing somewhere in the vicinity of the royal palace.

The smell of weeds burning in a field only yesterday depressed me; the savages were constantly burning fires of different kinds of dried roots and weeds.

Just one more instance. I would not have a rockery in my grounds or garden; it would remind me of Otakooma's terrible piles of skulls on which weeds grew green, and flowers bloomed, and lizards--sea-green lizards with crimson marks on their shoulders, and lizards the colour of a starling's breast, that is, metallic-changing colour--used to creep.

If ever at that time I spent a happy hour it was in studying and wondering at the tricks and manners of the many strange denizens of the forest. Monkeys, mongooses, and even chameleons I managed to tame.

You see, then, I could not have been very happy. How could I? For at least two years I lived in constant dread of a violent death, and I never knew what shape it would take. I might die by the spear of some angry savage; I might be sacrificed to please some sudden fancy of the king; I might be burned at the stake or die by the torture.

My enemy--and he ought to have been my friend--was the boy Jooma. He was jealous, no doubt, of my influence with the king. I tried my best in every way to please this lad, because he could talk English, but in vain. He belied me one day after I had been a whole year in the country, belied me to the king in my presence--he pointed his hand at me. I struck the hand.

Then, as he threatened to kill me with his knife, I squared up in good English fashion and let my enemy have one straight from the shoulder.

He went down as if he had been shot.

The fat old king shouted for joy. That boy Jooma had never had a proper British bleeding nose before in his life, I expect. And he did not like it. He kept lying on the ground, because he saw me in the att.i.tude to give him another blow. But the king made him stand up, and for fear of offending the king I had to put him down again. Then he refused to rise. The king told him that a c.o.c.k and a goat and two curs were going to be carried in procession to the execution ground that afternoon, and that if he, Jooma, did not fight "the foreign boy" he should head the procession and finally lose his head. So Jooma had to fight as well as he could, and although I did not punish him willingly, he was paid out for many an ill turn that he had done me.

I was a favourite with the king for fully a month after this. He brought boy after boy for me to thrash. Indeed, three or four times a day I was fighting. I suppose every boy about the king's village had a set-to with me. I cannot say I blacked their eyes because they were already black, but they must have felt my knocks, and I know they did not love me any the better for it.

I did not know how all this would end, but my heart leaped to my mouth when one day the king himself, valiant through the rum he had drunk, stood up and announced his intention of trying conclusions with me himself.

What could I do?

What would you have done, gentle reader?

I knew I could have thrashed him, for though not old I was very hardy and wonderfully strong for my years, but I did not want to figure in a procession. So I submitted to be knocked down. Then I had to get up and be knocked down again and again. It didn't hurt very much, but there was indignity attached to it.

The king had found a new pleasure, and every afternoon or evening I was summoned to the palace yard or grounds, and first I had to fight the king, then a boy of my own standing. Well, I am afraid that if I suffered in body and mind from my encounter with the king, I took it out of the smaller savage to follow. There was some satisfaction in that.

But one day, to show his own wonderful powers of fisticuff, the king summoned a crowd of his warriors to his palace, and made them form a great ring. Then I was ordered in and pitted against an Indian boy bigger than myself. I never cared how big they were, they held their arms wide and hit downwards as if thumping a piano.

After one or two boys had been disposed of, to the wild delight of the warriors, the king took a drink of rum and handed the leather bottle to his chief executioner; then he took off his extra garments--his one boot and his crown, an old tin kettle without a bottom to it--and stood up in front of me. I went down several times according to my own programme, and the savages shook their spears and rattled them against their shields of buffalo hide, and shouted and shrieked to their hearts'

content.

Then the king hit me rather hard, and I suppose my English pride was touched, for the next thing I remember is--horror of horrors!--the sacred person of his Majesty King Otakooma sprawling on the dusty ground and his nose bleeding.

A silence deep as death fell on all the crowd.

Then there was a rush for me. Spears were at my breast and I expected only instant death, when the king sprang to my rescue and all fell back.

If I had knelt to him and begged his pardon, even then I might have been forgiven.

But an English youth to sue on his knees for mercy from a savage! Nay, it was not to be thought of.

The king sat down.

The king was silent for a s.p.a.ce of time. The king took more rum.

Then he ordered ropes of skin to be brought, and I was bound hand and foot and taken away to a loathsome dungeon.

I knew I was to die next day, and I longed for sunrise to have it past, for I suffered excruciating agony from the tightness of the cords that bound me.

The time came. I was to form part in a procession, and did; I was carried shoulder-high, lying on my back on a kind of bark tray, amid tom-tom beating, howling, shrieking, and a deal of capering and dancing that at any other time I should have laughed most heartily at.

At the execution ground goats and c.o.c.ks were killed, then it came to my turn.

The king came to have a last look at me. The cords were undone, and I stood up staggering because my feet were swollen. The king looked at my hands: they were swollen double the size.