O'er Many Lands, on Many Seas, Gordon Stables [microsoft ebook reader TXT] 📗

wild cat. I clutched his belt and raised my arm

to strike. He bore me to the ground by a blow from his sword-hilt. He

seemed to scorn to fight with such as I.

 

Next moment he himself was down. Sweeba had felled him, but was, in his

turn, cut down almost immediately. On the ground I grappled again with

the pirate chief. It seems all like a dream now, but I have little

doubt my agility saved me, and enabled me to make such good use of my

dirk that Zareppa never rose again.

 

Years after this I knew we had gained this fight, but now, as for me, I

was taken prisoner, bound hand and foot, and carried into the interior.

After the death of their chief, the Arabs had fought only long enough to

secure possession of the boy who had killed their leader. This done,

they mounted and fled.

 

I was, it would seem, reserved for the torture. But the king of a

warlike tribe fancied the boy for a white slave, and the cupidity of the

Arabs overcame their love even for vengeance--I was sold into slavery.

 

Then began a long, dreary march into the interior. It is only fair to

say, however, that from the commencement King Otakooma was not unkind to

He ordered my wrists to be untied, and I was set free--such freedom

as it was, for with a mob of savages around me I dared not attempt to

escape. Indeed, I cared little now what became of me, and for the first

few days I refused all food. Then nature asserted herself, and I ate

greedily of the fruit that grew plentifully everywhere in the country

through which we were passing.

 

I had pulled what appeared to me a most delicious-looking large berry,

when suddenly I heard our chief shriek.

 

"_Oa eeah wa ka_!" and at the same moment the fruit was dashed from my

hand ere I could convey it to my lips. I knew from this it was poison.

Then the chief called me towards him, and placed me on the grass, and

put before me a plate of boiled paddy [a kind of rice] and a bright

glittering dagger. I knew what he meant, and chose the paddy. Then the

king laughed till his fat sides shook again. He was a sort of

half-caste Arab, I suppose, and yellow, not black. Perhaps his colour

made him king, for his followers were very black, tall, wiry, and

savage-looking.

 

The king on the other hand simply looked good-humouredly idiotic, but I

found out afterwards that he could be both cruel and fierce, and though

not a cannibal, he was addicted to human sacrifices. Piles of skulls

adorned his palace grounds. He built them up like rockeries, and

flowers actually grew on them, although they had never been planted.

 

As soon as I had eaten the rice, he patted my cheek and asked me,

through a boy interpreter, if I would have some rum. I refused; upon

which a cocoa-nut half full and the dagger were again placed before me.

 

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

circumstances 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 assigned

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 grass and flowers of every

shape and hue; while the birds that flitted among the boughs, and the

monster butterflies 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 assistance 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 misdoubt 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

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

He kept lying on the ground, because he saw me in the attitude 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 cock 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