[Illustration]
THE ALO MAN
[Illustration]
CHILDREN OF THE WORLD
THE ALO MAN
STORIES FROM THE CONGO
BY
MARA L. PRATT-CHADWICK
AND
L. LAMPREY
[Illustration]
_Illustrated by Rollin Crampton_
1921
WORLD BOOK COMPANY
YONKERS-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK
WORLD BOOK COMPANY
THE HOUSE OF APPLIED KNOWLEDGE
Established, 1905, by Caspar W. Hodgson
YONKERS-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK
2126 PRAIRIE AVENUE, CHICAGO
This little book is the third in the Children of the World, a series of
books for young readers which are designed to open up to them the study
of geography and history as living subjects. “Paz and Pablo: A Story of
Two Little Filipinos” and “Sunshine Lands of Europe” have already been
published, and other volumes will be added to the series from time to
time, until stories of the life of children in every land are told.
CW: CLAM-1
Copyright, 1921, by World Book Company
Copyright in Great Britain
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE DRUM IN THE FOREST 7
II. THE STRING OF BEADS 17
III. THE LEOPARD AND THE DOG 29
IV. THE CAT AND THE RAT 42
V. THE JACKAL AND HIS TRACKS 55
VI. WHY THE CANOE UPSET 68
VII. THE TRAIL OF THE ELEPHANT 83
VIII. THE CUSTOMS OF THE ANTS 96
IX. THE FEAST IN THE VILLAGE 109
X. HOW THE CARAVAN SET FORTH 124
XI. THE HYRAX AND THE ELEPHANT 141
XII. A VOICE IN THE FOREST 156
[Illustration: MAP OF AFRICA
_Shaded portions represent regions inhabited by the BANTU tribes_
_COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY WORLD BOOK COMPANY_]
THE ALO MAN
CHAPTER I
THE DRUM IN THE FOREST
Mpoko the boy and Nkunda the girl were squatting in the firelight just
outside their mother’s hut, where they could smell the smells from the
cooking pots the women were tending so carefully. Their father, the
chief of the tiny village, had gone with his men two days before on a
trading journey to one of the great markets. They should have been at
home before this.
[Illustration]
Mpoko was busy winding a precious piece of brass wire round the handle
of his pet hunting spear, and Nkunda was watching him. Each man or
boy of the village had his favorite spear with its leaf-shaped iron
blade, and the wire on the handle was useful as well as ornamental, for
it gave a good grip. Iron is found almost everywhere in Africa, and
the native blacksmiths made not only spear heads but knife blades and
little axes. They could not make brass, which is a mixture of copper
and zinc, but all traders had brass rods in their stores, and these
could be hammered into all sorts of shapes. When these rods were first
brought into the country, they were made about thirty inches long; but
there was so much demand for smaller pieces to use in trading like
small change, that they were now made only six or seven inches in
length. Nkunda had a piece of brass wire almost as long as Mpoko’s, but
hers was coiled round her slender brown wrist as a bracelet.
In Central Africa, supper time is about six o’clock all the year round.
From one season to another, night and day are nearly equal and the
time of sunrise and of sunset changes hardly more than fifteen minutes
throughout the year. The year begins with the first heavy rain of
the wet season, and when the new green shoots come out on the spurge
thickets the people know that the new year is at hand.
The evening meal is the most important one of the day, sometimes the
only regular meal. Soon after sunrise on this particular day the women,
as usual, had picked up their hoes, their baskets, and their babies and
had gone out to work on the farms outside the village. They had come
back in the middle of the afternoon to begin preparing supper, which
was a matter of some hours’ work, because there were so many different
things to be done. Grain for bread or mush had to be ground on heavy
stone slabs, vegetables must be made ready for cooking, water, fetched
from the spring, wood brought, and fires made. Mpoko and Nkunda had
helped a little, and they knew where, in a heap of hot ashes, the sweet
potatoes from their own corner of the field were baking. There would be
boiled fowl and cassava bread, and maybe some stewed fruit.
[Illustration]
Besides helping their mothers, the children of the village had their
own special work,--to drive in the goats from the fields,--and they
had done this before sunset. All the shaggy, bleating little animals
were now safe in the pen built of logs and roofed with planks, and
Mpoko had seen to it that stakes were set firmly across the entrance to
keep them in and keep out wild beasts. Even as the children sat here
in the firelight they heard from time to time the hunting call of a
leopard or hyena, but no fierce prowling creature of the jungle would
come near the fires.
The cooking fires were in the middle of the open space around which the
village was built. The village itself was nothing more than a rather
irregular circle of huts inside a fence. Mpoko and Nkunda were sitting
at the very edge of the great black shadow that closed in the lighted
space and, beyond the huts, melted into the deep velvet darkness of the
forest. The forest was all around them, and it was full of the noises
of the night. The wind was whispering in the great leaves and walking
in the tall grasses; the chitter and scamper of some small animal or
the call of sleepy birds now and then broke the silence of the night.
Under the many rustlings and whisperings there was always to be heard
the voice of a mighty river flowing through the wilderness.
The people of the village knew a great deal about this river, but
they could not have found it on a map, for they had never seen
such a thing. White men call it the Congo. This was the name of a
chief who ruled the country near the mouth of the river more than
five hundred years ago, before even the first Portuguese explorers
came. It was the Portuguese who gave his name to the river. But
the Congo has many names in the twenty-five hundred miles of its
length. Here in the jungle it has a very long name which means
The-great-river-out-of-the-lake-that-drowns-the-locust-who-tries-to-fly-across.
If a person knows, as the Bantu people do, how far a locust can fly
without alighting, this name for the great lake is really useful. The
whole of the name is Mwerukatamuvudanshi, but nobody used it unless the
chiefs were having a formal council, and on the white men’s maps the
lake is called Mweru. In other parts of its course the river was called
after whatever lakes, mountains, or cataracts there might be in the
neighborhood.
Mpoko and Nkunda talked a little about the river as they squatted there
in the warm darkness. Mpoko had been promised that he should go fishing
when the canoes went downstream to mend a bridge that was shaky, and
Nkunda promised to help him make new nets for the fishing. He finished
winding the wire round the spear handle and began to polish it with
great care.
Then very far away in the forest they heard the tapping of a drum.
The sound of a drum in the African jungle always means something. It
may mean a village dance; it may mean news; it may mean sudden danger.
It is not like any other noise in the forest.
On the other side of the mountain, the great towering mass of stone
beyond the forest, was the country of Tswki, the Snake, who was not
friendly to the river villages. When he was getting ready to make war,
whichever village heard of it first, warned the others. Messengers
were not needed to take the warning, for the sound of the drum could
be heard over lake and marsh, through tangles of wild jungle where a
man would have to cut his way at every step. The drum was made of wood,
covered with oxhide stretched tight, or with the skin of a large snake
or lizard.
The children had been the first to hear the tapping, because they were
nearest to the ground, but in a minute all the others, old and young,
heard it too, and listened. They stopped whatever they were doing and
stood as still as trees, and listened, and listened.
[Illustration]
Then through the blackness of the forest, far away, there sounded
singing, and Mpoko and Nkunda were not afraid any more. This was not
one of Tswki’s war parties that was coming; it was their own men,
singing all together to forget their weariness on the last miles of
the trail. A Central African carrier will travel with a load of sixty
pounds from fifteen to thirty miles a day. And this is not walking on a
level road; the carriers go through a wilderness without anything like
a road, the trail often only a few inches wide. They may have to climb
steep hills, scramble over boulders, or force their way through matted
grasses ten and twelve feet high. There are no pack animals. Everything
is carried on men’s backs, and during most of the year the mercury
is at about eighty in the shade. When the men sing toward the end of
a journey, it is likely to be a sign that they are very tired indeed.
Often they beat time with their sticks on their loads. But now they
surely had a drum, and somebody was playing it.
At last Mpoko, listening very closely, caught a line or two of the
song, and he jumped up, whirling his spear round his head and shouting,
“The Alo Man! The Alo Man!” Then Nkunda, too, sprang up and began to
dance and whirl round and round, clapping her hands and singing, “The
Alo Man! The Alo Man is coming!”
Every one was glad. The Alo Man, the wandering story teller who went
from place to place telling stories and making songs, came only once in
a very long time. When he did come, he told the most interesting and
exciting stories that any one in the village had ever heard. He knew
old stories and new ones, and it was hard to say which were the finest.
No one could make the people see pictures in their minds as he could.
No one knew so many wise sayings and amusing riddles. No one had seen
so many wonderful and interesting things among the people of so many
different tribes. Even when some one could remember and tell over again
the stories that the Alo Man had told, they did not sound as they did
when he told them himself.
Even the dogs knew that something was going to happen and began to
bark excitedly, and the slaty-blue, speckled guinea hens half woke and
ruffled their feathers and gave hoarse croaks of surprise. The beat
of the drum and the singing voices grew louder and louder, until the
people waiting in the firelight caught the tune and joined in the song,
keeping time with the clapping of their hands curved like cymbals.
Then there was a blaze of torches in the forest, the dogs burst into a
wild chorus of yelping and baying, and out of the dark they came, the
whole company of them. Every man was keeping step to the splendid new
song that the Alo Man led. Each one marched into the open circle of
firelight, flung down his pack, and began to tell the news to his own
family and ask for something to eat as soon as it could possibly be had.
They were all glad--the whole village--to see the Alo Man, and he was
just as glad to see them. His white teeth flashed and his eyes shone
as he greeted one old friend after another, and asked and answered
questions as fast as his tongue would go. Cooking pots were hustled off
the fire and good things ladled out, and soon the feasting and laughter
and story-telling and singing of the Alo Man’s visit had fairly begun.