AN OLD FRIEND IN A NEW PLACE.
The pallor of his countenance, his wasted form, and sunken features
shocked me, for I was quite unaware or heedless that he would find an
equal ravage in my own appearance. His beard and hair grew in matted
masses about his sunburnt face, and his once stout and manly hands
were thin and wan as those of a consumptive girl.
I shook his shoulder; he awoke, and turned listlessly to me at first;
then with a strange cry of mingled joy and grief, he exclaimed--
"Jack!"
"Bob--Bob Hartly!"
Such was all we could utter for some seconds as each clasped and
shook the hands of the other.
"Oh, Jack Manly," he exclaimed, in a broken voice, "I would rather
see you in your grave than in this place with me!"
"How--why--what do you mean?"
"My poor lad, you know not for what we are reserved."
"Not--not to be killed and eaten?" said I, in a low voice of dismay.
"Oh, worse than that. Do you not know?"
"No."
"My poor friend--my poor friend!"
"What on earth can be worse than that? Amoo told me----"
"Who is Amoo?"
"A chief, the brother of the King of the Rio Serpientes."
"The savage brother of a savage! And he told you----"
"That I was reserved for the greatest honour?"
"Honours indeed!" reiterated Hartly, with a bitter laugh.
"Yes."
"Did he add, you should have _liberty_ to enjoy your honours?"
"No."
"Air--breath--sunshine--light--life?"
"No!"
"I thought not, for these accursed savages are as subtle and severe
as they are cruel and sanguinary."
"What _do_ you mean, Hartly?"
"That we are reserved for _burial alive_."
"Alive!"
"Yes--with their king who is just dead. It is the custom here to
celebrate the obsequies of royal personages--of kings especially--in
a frantic and barbarous manner. Oh, Jack! after all we have seen and
suffered together, is it not cruel of fate to persecute and finish us
thus? And is it not strange that in this age of a civilized world
such things _can_ be?"
"I will fight to the last!" I exclaimed, furiously.
"We have not a single weapon."
"But these female guards have plenty."
"The weakest among them is stronger than both of us put together
_now_," said he, despondingly.
"We must not perish thus, Hartly--we _shall_ escape!" said I,
emphatically.
"But how?"
"Time will show--we were nearly as desperately circumstanced when
foul of the iceberg, or beset in the field ice."
"We have still a few days for deliberation; but meantime, tell me how
you came here."
"I was brought to Benin by Amoo, who saved me from dying of hunger,
or by the teeth and claws of wild animals in the Devil's wood, where
some savages found me concealed, and bound me hand and foot by withes
to a tree."
"Tell me all about this, Jack."
I related briefly all that had occurred to me since we had been
separated at the cliff above the Gabon, where three of our hapless
party perished; the destruction of poor Captain Baylis and his wife;
and how I feared that he, Hartly, was the seaman who had been
tortured in the basket of thorns; of my slavery with Amoo, and his
squaw's felonious intentions with regard to my head; of my flight and
recapture--to all of which he listened with varying expressions of
anger and honest grief, for the loss of so many brave English seamen.
"And now, Bob," added I, "for your own story."
"I have little to relate that is not similar to what you have told
me. On that fatal day when our boat's crew were captured, and we
were separated, I was given by the King to a fetisher, or priest, a
hideous old fellow who was covered with tattooing, and wore a copper
ring in each of his ears, and had the dorsal fin of a shark through
his nose, in sprit-sail-yard fashion.
"He employed me as his 'slavey,' in making and pointing arrows for
the warriors, as the manufacture of that commodity is a perquisite,
or portion of the priestly trade in Gabon, for the tips of the arrows
are poisoned by a combination of herbs, of which these fetishers
alone possess, or pretend to possess, the knowledge, and with true
priestcraft take especial good care to keep the secret among
themselves. If the monstrous negro race hereabout have any religion,
it consists of an adoration of the Devil, to whom they never tire of
sacrificing wild animals, and occasionally each other--which is a
sacrifice of much less consequence."
"Have they no belief in a Supreme Being?"
"They know that some power superior to themselves created the skies
and the earth; but because He is not an evil, but a good spirit, they
deem it better policy to appease the Devil, and so they work in _his_
service with all their might; and from all we have seen, they seem to
have the gift of doing so to the utmost. My old master, the
fetisher, professed to be on very intimate terms with Whirlwind Tom,
and by his aid could always foretell what was to happen."
"How?"
"He had an old pipkin perforated by three holes, through which he
alleged the Devil spoke to him in whispers. He was a vicious old
wretch, and on one occasion _bit me_, which was no joke, as his teeth
were all filed, till they were sharp as those of a tiger cat.
"When not employed in selecting and cutting reeds for arrows, or
feathering, or pointing and poisoning them, this fetisher made me
fish for him in a tributary of the Snake Elver, on the bank of which
he lived in a wigwam, which stood amid a grove of mimosa trees; and
it resembled a huge punch-bowl or beehive, as it was built entirely
of reeds and turf, plastered over with mud, which the sunshine had
burned as white as Kentish chalk.
"There he led me a dog's life, for he was an ill-tempered old savage,
who hourly reviled, kicked, beat, and spat upon me, and as my beard
grew, he was wont to snatch and tear it, a proceeding, you must
allow, very trying to one's temper.
"I perceived that we dwelt in a secluded place; that, save a warrior
who came from time to time for a bundle of arrows, no one ever
approached us, so I resolved to escape. In my fur socks, and a
species of cummerbund which my master permitted me to wear, I
secreted a good stock of fishing apparatus, and selected a strong
javelin with an iron point, well steeped in those precious poisonous
stuffs which he was wont to brew in a pipkin.
"On the day I had finally made up my mind to slip my cable and be
off, we were cutting reeds for arrow-shafts on the summit of a rock
above the Gabon River. It was a lovely place, covered with feathery
fern, bright scarlet geraniums, and flowering reeds, but I thought it
looked very like the place where I had last seen you, and where our
three shipmates perished in so barbarous a manner. My heart became
filled with wild and dark thoughts, and I was neglecting my work,
when suddenly my beard was grasped by the old tattooed fetisher, who
squirted a whole quid of some stuff full in my face, while raining a
shower of blows upon my bare back with a _sjambok_, or supple-jack,
of rhinoceros hide, which he always carried for my especial benefit.
"Flesh and blood could stand this no longer.
"We were close to the brink of the rock which overhung the stream
that rolled about a hundred feet below, so I gave his sooty reverence
a vigorous kick which shot him over like a crow, and souse he went
through the air, with arms outspread.
"Whether he swam, sank, or fed some hungry crocodile, I know not, as
I fled into the adjacent forest, and after lurking there
long--sleeping at night in the trees, as many a time I had done on
the swinging topsail-yard--I began, like you, to make for the coast
to the westward, in the hope of seeing a ship venture into the Bight,
or bearing toward the Pongos for fresh water.
"For many days and nights I wandered through forests of oak, cypress,
myrtle, and mimosa trees, enduring constantly the terror of being
devoured by wild animals, or falling again among savages who might
force me to render a severe account of the blessed fetisher I had
kicked into the Gabon, till at last I found myself in a stately wood
of sea-pines and _then_ I saw the ocean--the brave old ocean,
Jack!--the broad turnpike that could lead us home--the same ocean
whose waves swept up by the Nore and Greenwich Reach, to mingle their
waters with the Thames--and I laughed with joy, though its bosom was
glistening under the vertical sun that scorches the coast of Guinea.
"All the memories of home and Old England swelled up within me as I
gazed upon the girdle of her shores. The sea! that
"----glorious mirror where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed--in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;--boundless, endless, and sublime!"