THE WOOD OF THE DEVIL.
Making signs that I was a friend, or wished to be considered one, by
casting away my asseguy, and placing my hands upon my head and
breast, I advanced with a resolute aspect, but with a quaking heart,
towards them.
By what I heard then, and learned afterwards, I had violated the
sanctity of a holy place--the abode of a fetish--as this wood had for
ages been dedicated to the Devil, whom these savages, like those of
Benin, worship as a dreadful spirit, not to love, but to conciliate.
No one entered this wood, which was composed of giant chestnuts,
palm, orange, and lime trees, all growing wild for many leagues, as
the spirit of evil was alleged to harbour in its inmost recesses.
Here then, on its skirts, a mother and her infant were sometimes
sacrificed with tortures too terrible for description, to propitiate
this dark spirit; though in some rare instances a husband might
ransom his doomed wife with a poor female slave, captured from a
hostile tribe.
So sacred is this wood deemed, that if a person accidentally enters
it by one path, he must force his way through it to the very end
without turning or looking back--a feat none ever performed, as it
teems with wild beasts, whose fangs and claws speedily dispose of the
intruder. Even a foreign _negro_, or his wives, dare not enter it;
then, what punishment was due to me, a white man, for having ventured
to do so?
Dapper, a very old traveller, and a bold fellow, too, mentions that,
to ridicule the faith of the people in this forest, he went shooting
into it, and deliberately turned _back_ when about half way through.
"What will the Devil think of this?" he asked the negro priests, who
were scared by his audacity, and confounded by his return in safety.
"He does not trouble himself about white men," was their response;
and, singular to say, our traveller was permitted to go unscathed,
for savages generally admire courage and temerity.
However, the negroes into whose hands I had unfortunately fallen
seemed of a different opinion from Mr. Dapper's friends; and after a
noisy palaver, to which I listened with an agonizing interest, my
life being in the balance, they laid violent hands upon me.
I was dragged to a tall palm-tree, which grew on the verge of the
forest, with some of its fibrous roots extending among the grassy
border on one side, and into the dry sand of the desert on the other.
I was placed with my back against the stem; and there they bound me
hard and fast by drawing my arms round it and tying my wrists
securely by the tendrils of a convolvolus--one of the climbing kind,
which, when tough and green, is strong as a new inch-rope.
They then retired, mocking and grinning, and ever and anon
threatening to launch their asseguys at me; thus I fully expected to
be martyred like St. Sebastian, as we see him in Guido's picture at
Dulwich; but they left me, and disappeared round an angle of the
forest, abandoning me to my fate and my own terrible reflections.
It was midday now, and above me shone the blaze of an almost vertical
sun; thus I found the shade of the drooping palm branches grateful
and pleasant--a boon, a blessing.
Lest the savages might be watching me from a distance, I did not
attempt to release my hands; but after nearly an hour elapsed,
fearing that strength might fail me from the cramped manner in which
my arms were bound backward round the tree, I strove to rend the
green withes which fettered me to it.
Vain task!
Strain them as I might, the tough and unyielding tendrils of the
convolvoli only seemed to tighten, and to cut me as I tore, wrenched,
and struggled, without success.
The horror of being left thus defenceless at the mercy of the wild
animals with which the forest teemed was so great, that I forgot
alike the pangs of hunger and those of thirst, which are greater
still; and again and again strove frantically for freedom, until,
with the futility of each successive effort, the conviction forced
itself upon me, that without human assistance I could never be
released, but might perish of starvation, or be devoured alive.
Human assistance! who, then, would be disposed to aid me? And, if
so, who would come in time?
And so the hot day passed breathlessly, slowly, and terribly on!
As the burning sun revolved towards the West, the lengthening shadows
of the wood went round in the reverse direction, until the level
sunbeams cast them far across the arid desert I had traversed so
swiftly yesterday; and as the light of evening sank, the hues of that
white glistening waste changed to yellow, then to brown, and then to
amber.
My arms ached till they seemed in process of being rent from my
shoulders: so, panting, hot, breathless, and half dead with thirst, I
reclined against that abhorred tree, from which I could in no way
free myself.
As evening deepened, the hum of insect life lessened, and the
bright-plumed birds of the wilderness were seeking their nests in the
foliage above me; but on me their beauty was lost. Even the cock of
the Libyan forest, with his purple breast, his crimson and green
pinions, was unheeded, as he picked up a few grains of millet at my
feet, and passed to his mate in the orange tree.
A raven or two, soaring through the blue immensity of the sky,
suggested dreadful thoughts of what I _might be_ on the morrow.
Then little snakes came from amid the long grass to writhe and
wriggle on the sand, which was yet warm with the sunshine of the past
day; and they made me think of the dreadful cobra-capello, with his
flamelike tongue, charged with poison and death--the hooded serpent,
which, when in fury, has been known to rear its horrid front, and
spring at a man on horseback; and then of the berg-adder, which I
feared still more, because it is so difficult to discover, and which
I had no means of avoiding if it approached me.
My past reading had given me, moreover, a somewhat exaggerated idea
of the number of wild animals in Africa. At Ascension, I had seen a
narrative of a _Voyage à l'Isle de France_, by a person who styled
himself an _Officier du Roi_, and who stated that, in the forests of
Africa, "there were to be found whole _armies_ of lions."
Later travellers have ridiculed this idea, but be that as it may, the
distant roaring of a lion now added to the accumulating dangers which
surrounded me, and filled my soul with emotions of horror so great
that I could not summon even a thought of prayer, and memory refused
to supply me with the most hackneyed ejaculation of piety.
Bound and helpless, without means of defence or flight, I now heard
this terrible animal approaching me, crushing the shrubs and branches
in his native forest as he came.
On hearing this sound, so fraught with danger, a zebra and several
antelopes bounded out of the wood and paused to listen. Again that
prolonged cry rang upon the still air. The zebra cowered and
shuddered, and after crouching for a moment, sprang away into the
desert of sand, followed by the fleet little antelopes (which were of
the kind called Guinea Deer, having legs no thicker than a
tobacco-pipe), and they were all soon out of sight.
The roar was singular in sound. Hoarse and inarticulate, it swelled
upon the air like a prolonged O, that seemed to come from and pass to
a vast distance. It never became loud or shrill, but the _idea_ it
suggested of the animal itself, made it seem to pierce the very soul;
and all the tales I had read or heard of the lion, and all the
terrors I had conjured up as being embodied in his tremendous person,
came upon me like a flood.
There are some who aver that if he has once tasted human flesh he
will for ever disdain any other.
With great bewilderment of mind--like one in a dream that is full of
nightmare--I beheld a great and dark-skinned lion, with an enormous
dusky mane, run out of the wood about a hundred yards off, and, after
looking about, he came straight towards me, for by some strange
instinct he became sensible of my vicinity in a moment. In his mouth
he bore a zebra (about the size of a Shetland pony), which he grasped
by its crushed back, and the legs of which were trailing on the
ground as he bore it along, with all the air and all the ease of a
cat carrying off a large rat.
On beholding me he dropped his prey, which was quite dead, and after
uttering another hoarse roar, continued to approach, with his nose
close to the ground, while switching his tufted tail and shaking his
shaggy mane, preparatory, as I imagined, to making a spring upon me;
then I closed my eyes, and with a heart that died within me, resigned
myself to my fate.
Onward he came, step by step, for I could hear his footfalls on the
ground!
Onward yet, and now every pulse seemed to stand still!
Then a warm and fetid breath played upon my face, I felt his whiskers
touch my breast, and there was a strange snuffing sound in my
tingling ears.
Opening my eyes, I beheld close to mine the tremendous visage of the
lion, the enormous upper lip, in form so suggestive of cruelty and
rapacity, and all studded with wiry hairs, bristling out fiercely on
either side; the low flat forehead and impending brows; the wild orbs
that seemed to glare from amid the masses of his tangled mane; the
open jaws and sharp teeth, reeking and steaming with the warm blood
of the zebra he had just slain!
After deliberately snuffing at me in this manner for a second or
so--a time which seemed an eternity, so much agony of thought and
tension of the heart were compressed within it, he quietly _turned
about_, took his dead zebra, as if he deemed it the most preferable
supper of the two, trotted into the wood and disappeared.
The agonies of a lifetime seemed concentrated into that minute!
All I had endured now proved too much for me. A sudden insensibility
sank like a cloud over all my senses, and a sleep--the sleep of utter
prostration of mind and body, fell upon me. Thus, the noon of the
next day was far advanced before I became again conscious, or aware
of my miserable existence.