HOW THE CARAVAN SET FORTH
When the great feast was over and the guests had gone home, it was
time to begin in earnest preparations for the caravan. This had
been discussed by the headmen in the intervals of feasting and
entertainment, and it had been agreed that one of the best-known
wizards of that country should come and make luck charms and see that
everything was properly done when the company took its departure. As
this village was farther down the river than the others, it was to be
the place of meeting.
Among other matters, the men from different villages had discussed
what goods were most likely to be profitable in trading. They all
agreed that the traders were not like the Bantu people, who prefer to
do the same things and follow the same customs year in and year out;
the traders were forever changing their minds. Things which used to be
much in demand were now not wanted. The older men, for example, could
remember how, when they were boys, camwood and barwood and African
mahogany were asked for. It was said that in some parts of the forest
it paid even now to take ebony and teak and other kinds of lumber to
the coast. But this was only where the logs could go down by water.
There were too many rapids and the distance was too great to make any
such trade profitable for this village.
Camwood is very good for cabinet work; it is light brown when cut, and
with exposure to the air turns a beautiful deep red-brown. Barwood is
sometimes used for violin bows. Both these trees are cousins of the
California redwoods, though they do not grow to be giants. But in the
days when the traders bought the wood, it was not for cabinet work; it
was for dyestuffs. Before aniline dye was invented, the rich dull red
of Madras handkerchiefs was made by boiling the chips of these woods in
water. Such a dye would not fade like the colors in the cloth now sold
by the traders.
The most profitable thing found in the great forest storehouse was
rubber. Mpoko himself had helped get some of the supply of it that was
waiting to go down to the coast. This work of getting rubber is done
usually in August, or from October to March during the dry season, when
there is not so much to do on the farms and it is pleasanter to work
in the woods. The women prepare about three weeks’ food for the rubber
gatherers, who camp in the woods while the work goes on.
[Illustration]
The latex, or sap, is collected in various ways. A cut may be made in
the tree and a broken bottle, a large snail shell, or a gourd fastened
below to receive the sap. Rubber is also obtained from lianas or vines
which are sometimes cut up to let the sap drain into basins from both
ends of the stem at once. Toward evening or in the early morning the
sap is collected and put into iron pots. It is a rather thick, milky
juice, and the rubber is separated from the watery fluid either by
boiling or by adding lime juice or tannin squeezed from wild fruits.
Then it is dried, in the form of strips, or strips rolled into a ball,
or flat cakes, over the smoke of a wood fire. Sometimes it is soaked
in streams to clear out the impurities, a practice which adds to its
weight but is not honest. One man can collect three or four pounds a
day, for which the trader will pay a shilling a pound.
Another thing that was going into the packs of the porters now was
raffia. In the old days this was never valuable. Now there seemed to
be a market for it. It was first exported in 1890, the price then
being from $300 to $350 a ton. Later it was about $100. Long before it
was known to our schools for basket making and mat making, the Bantu
people used the long, tough strips for netting, weaving, and many other
purposes.
When the men went into the forest to add raffia and some other things
to their stock for the trading journey, Mpoko and Nkula went with them.
The forest was a wonderful place even to them, who had never known
any other country, and to a civilized boy it would have looked like
fairyland. Monkeys leaped and chattered in the branches, and birds
of many sorts, many of them splendid in coloring, hopped and flew
among the trees. There were wild canaries, waxbills, crows, now and
then a red-tailed gray parrot, and the bright-colored plantain-eater,
or touraco, as the boys called it. This bird, a distant cousin of
the cuckoo, has a crest like a jay’s, which it can raise or lower,
and its call sounds almost exactly like “touraco, tu-ra-co!” The
queerest-looking bird of all, perhaps, was the ground hornbill, which
is as common about African villages as a crow. This bird looks as if
it had been trying to imitate the rhinoceros, for it has a great horny
bill with a thick lump on what might be called the bridge of the nose.
It is useful to the villager, for it is a sort of street cleaner in
feathers, and eats garbage, rats, snakes, lizards, and other small
creatures, with great relish.
[Illustration]
Mpoko and Nkula caught a bunting to take home and tame, and they came
upon a little group of the dome-shaped huts of the weaver bird. On the
way home the party went out of its way to the Red Rocks. This was the
name the boys had for them, but the place was really an outcrop of iron
ore, red with rust from the air and the dampness. While the men were
getting out some lumps of ore to be made into weapons, the boys went
exploring and found something surprising on their own account.
In a little clearing farther up the mountain, great yellow globes were
shining on the ground among coarse vines. They were pumpkins. But how
came pumpkins away up there, miles away from any farm or house? It
really looked like witchery. But when the hunters saw them they laughed
and said that the boys had happened on the Elephant’s Garden. These had
sprung up from seeds of the pumpkins carried off by elephants from some
settlement.
If the loads had not already been heavy enough, more of the pumpkins
would have been carried away, and as it was, the two which Mpoko and
Nkula carried were quite heavy enough before they had a chance to drop
them. Iron was more important just then.
Nkula’s father was the smith and ever since they could remember, Nkula
and Mpoko had watched the business of making iron tools and weapons.
Very few boys outside the jungle know as much as these two did about
the way in which iron is made into useful articles.
The iron as it is found in that country is not so mixed with other
minerals as to be hard to separate. Sometimes a lump would be found
almost pure. But in order to make it suitable for the blacksmith’s
hammer, it had to be smelted. A furnace was made of clay, and a hole
was dug in the ground, big enough to sink it in. Around this hole a
clay wall was built up into a sort of chimney, and a tunnel was dug
from a little distance away, down to the charcoal fire at the bottom
of the furnace. The fire, which must be kept up to the very greatest
possible heat, was fed with fresh air through this tunnel by means
of a goatskin bellows with a stone nozzle. After two or three hours
of uninterrupted heat, there would be a lump of pig iron, and the
impurities could be hammered out and the metal worked into shape on a
forge.
Nkula’s father knew how to make spear heads, ax heads, knives with
leaf-shaped or curved blades, and iron wire, which, when passed red-hot
over buffalo horn, blackened and became nearly rust-proof. Iron wire
could also be polished and used for ornaments, although the people
preferred brass wire, which would not rust. Among the things which
Nkunda’s mother treasured was a necklace of grayish-brown mottled nuts
like pairs of little pyramids set base to base, fastened together, not
by a string, but by little links of iron wire. A cross formed of the
nuts made a kind of pendant, and although nobody in the village knew
it, the necklace had probably been made in some coast village, for a
rosary, from the nuts of a eucalyptus or “fever tree” near a mission
settlement.
While the preparations for the expedition were going on, even the
monkeys appeared to know that it was a busy time, and they leaped and
chattered and swung from tree to tree as if they too had important
affairs on hand. As the Alo Man watched them, he was reminded of the
story of the Scrawny Old Man and the Scrawny Old Woman.
[Illustration]
I often tell [said he] of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old
woman who lived in a hut in the forest. They always complained of being
very poor and having hardly enough to eat, but by and by the neighbors
noticed that after the two had visited at any house, something or other
was always missed. Then one day a neighbor who was sick in bed awoke
to see them going out of his hut with his bag of cowrie shells between
them. He shouted and shouted at them, but they did not stop, and after
a while some of the other neighbors heard and came running in to see
who was being murdered.
“Oh, oh, oh!” wailed the poor sick man. “The scrawny old man and the
scrawny old woman have been here, and they have taken all my cowries
and gone away!”
The neighbors looked at one another and nodded. They told the sick man
not to wail and weep any more, for they would attend to getting back
his bag of cowries.
Then they went all together to the house of the scrawny old man and
the scrawny old woman and said, “Give us back the bag of cowries that
you stole from the poor sick man, or we will beat you with whips of
hippopotamus hide!”
[Illustration]
But the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman cried and howled and
said that they had not taken the bag of cowries. And when the neighbors
searched the hut they did not find it.
But the neighbors still believed that the scrawny old man and the
scrawny old woman had taken the bag of cowries, and they said, “We will
come with our whips of hippopotamus hide and you shall eat whip until
you give back the cowries that you stole.”
Then while the neighbors went to fetch their whips, the scrawny old man
and the scrawny old woman climbed up and got the bag of cowries, which
they had hidden in the thatch of the roof, and ran with it into the
forest. But they were not quite quick enough. The neighbors saw them
and came after them so fast with their whips of hippopotamus hide, that
at last the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had to climb into
a tree.
“You shall not come down from the tree,” cried the neighbors, looking
up at the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman where they squatted
among the branches, “until you give back the cowries that you stole
from the poor sick man.”
“We will stay in this tree until they go away, and then we will climb
down and escape,” said the scrawny old man to the scrawny old woman.
The neighbors heard what he said, and they shouted, “We will stay under
the tree until you come down.”
“When they go home to get their supper we will climb down and run away
very fast in the dark,” said the scrawny old woman to the scrawny old
man.
The neighbors heard her, and they shouted, “We will build huts under
the tree and take turns watching for you to come down.”
And so they did.
Days passed, then weeks, then months. The scrawny old man and the
scrawny old woman sat in the tree waiting for the neighbors to go away,
and the neighbors sat under the tree waiting for them to come down.
The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman became very hungry.
First they ate the fruit of the tree; then they ate the kernels; then
they ate the young leaves; then they ate the old leaves; at last they
stripped the bark off the branches and ate that. They grew scrawnier
and scrawnier every day. Their eyes had sunk in their heads with
sleeplessness. Their teeth grew long and sharp with cracking the
kernels of the fruit and gnawing the bark from the tree. They almost
forgot how to talk.
One day the scrawny old man held out his scrawny old hand and said,
“See how tough the skin is!” And the scrawny old woman held out her
scrawny old hand and said, “My hand is just as tough as yours!”
Then they looked at their feet and saw that the skin of their feet had
grown tough also; and their toe nails and finger nails had grown long,
like claws, with holding on so firmly to the branches of the tree.
“It is very strange,” said the scrawny old man.
“Indeed, it is very strange,” said the scrawny old woman.
Then the new year came with its heavy rains, and the scrawny old man
and scrawny old woman shivered with cold. One morning the scrawny old
man said to the scrawny old woman, “This is very strange. You are all
covered with hair.”
And the scrawny old woman said to the scrawny old man, “It is surely
very strange, but so are you.”
It really seemed as if they were not the same persons that they were
when they climbed into the tree.
Then one morning the scrawny old man said to the scrawny old woman, “I
have a very strange feeling at the end of my spine.”
“So have I!” said the scrawny old woman. “What can be going to happen
now?”
And behold, each had a tail just beginning to grow!
[Illustration]
The Jackal says it was then that the scrawny old man and the scrawny
old woman began to chatter and shriek at each other as if they had lost
their wits, but no one can tell whether or not they were blaming each
other for the strange things that had happened to them, because from
that day to this no one has been able to understand what they say.
Certain it is that when they found their appearance was so completely
changed, they began to leap from one branch to another and from one
tree to another, and so escaped from the neighbors, who were still at
the foot of the tree, waiting for them to come down. But they let go
the bag of cowries in their flight, and it fell to the ground and was
picked up by the neighbors, who carried it back to the poor sick man.
And from that day to this the People of the Trees have all been little
scrawny old men and old women who chase one another from tree to tree,
and chatter and shriek and quarrel, and sometimes come down and steal
things from the huts, but very seldom are able to keep what they have
stolen. And from that day to this they have not forgotten that they
once were people and lived in a village, for they build little huts in
the branches for their young ones, and are always watching what the
people of the village do and trying to be like them.
* * * * *
It is not known whether the monkey story had anything to do with it or
not, but during the final preparations for the trading expedition there
was no quarreling and things went on in a very orderly and businesslike
fashion.
When the carriers had all come in from the other villages, there were
more than a hundred all together, and last of all the medicine man made
his appearance. He was a little, wizened, shrewd-looking old fellow
who carried a charm bag and a wooden fetich image which nobody would
have touched for anything. It must have been at least three or four
hundred years old, for it was a stumpy carved statue of a Portuguese
sea captain in the dress of the sixteenth century, and the wood had
turned almost black with age. Nobody in Africa could possibly have seen
anything like it for many generations, and naturally it was thought to
be magic.
[Illustration]
The medicine man called all the headmen together and sat them down in a
circle, he and his fetich occupying the middle. On his head was a crown
of gay feathers, and his costume was made up chiefly of rattles, beads,
and ornaments of magical power. He made a little speech to the fetich,
asking it to give good luck to the caravan, to keep it safe from danger
of water, flame, or iron, and to make it successful in its dealings.
Then he sacrificed a chicken to the fetich, and the chicken was
solemnly cooked and eaten by the company. No one in the caravan could
after that enter his house or turn back upon the road. The medicine man
selected charms from those in his charm bag--herbs, spices, feathers,
and little bones--and put them in a shell which he set in the middle of
the trail. Then the caravan was ready to start. The long procession of
traders, porters, headmen, and soldiers moved in a swinging stride down
the path, each one stepping over the shell and not looking back. No one
touched the shell, which was very lucky, and whether the medicine man’s
ceremonies had anything to do with it or not, the expedition returned
safely in due time, with a tale of good luck on the trail and success
in the trading.