I
The time approaches when all the wildness of this little world will be
overrun and tamed into the trimness of a civilized parterre; when the
last trail will have been trodden, the mystery of the last forest
bared, and the last of the savage peoples penned into a League of
Nations to die of unnatural peace. What will our children do then, I
wonder, for their books of high romance? How satisfy their thirst of
daring with nothing further to dare? Who will appease them, when
"The Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards ride no more,"
when Robinson Crusoe and the classics are once read, and in a hencoop
world no saga-man arises in their stead? They say that by then we
shall have enlarged our borders and gone in our chariots of petrol to
visit the wheeling stars. But I misdoubt these Icarian flights. It
seems to me more likely that the harassed parents and publishers of
those days will be driven earthward to rummage into the lumber of the
past and bring out as new the obscure things that a former more heroic
age had buried. In those stricken times, I hope someone may have the
fortune to light upon my manuscript _Journal_ of Isaaco, a slim,
alluring folio that now glitters in red-and-gold upon my study
shelves. It would be a pity if Time, the All-Merciless, were allowed
to throw the dust of oblivion over these pretty pages, for they
possess in good measure that trait of "pleasant atrocity" which wins
the attention of youth.
But who was Isaaco, and what was his _Journal_ that it calls for the
popularity of print? Those who have followed the harrowing tale of
Mungo Park's _Travels_ along the River Niger, in the years 1795 to
1797, and again in the fatal expedition of 1805, will be well
acquainted with Isaaco. They will have smiled at his childish tempers,
applauded his snakelike cunning, and laughed outright at his heathen
superstitions. But the others must be gravely informed that Isaaco was
a West African of the Mandingo tribe who was wont for dignity's sake
to describe himself as a Mohammedan priest. Certainly he had the
Pentecostal gift of tongues, for there was hardly a dialect of
Bambouk, Fool-adoo, Jallonkadoo, Timbuctoo, and all the other tribes
of Senegal and beyond, but he could deceive the wiliest natives in it.
Moreover, as a professional guide he found it paid to keep a wife in
every petty state. At the worst she served to exercise the tongue; at
the best she was provisioner, geographer, and spy. Never tired, never
sick, never at a loss, Isaaco was simply indispensable to the European
merchants trading in Senegal. So, indeed, was he to Mungo Park, that
doughtiest of Scotsmen, who dared on through Bambarra and Haoussa
where no white-face had ever been. Without Isaaco's genius and
gigantic strength, it is unlikely that the second expedition (in 1805)
would ever have reached the Niger. It was Isaaco who nursed the forty
brave men who one by one sickened of dysentery; supported them on
their mules, even in delirium, when they cried like children for their
homes; and buried them at the last with saphies or charms from the
_Koran_ over their unmarked graves. It was he who watched, while the
others slept the dead sleep of exhaustion; piled up the camp-fires to
scare off the lions and wolves, and, worse than the wolves, those
thieves and murderers (the scum of Senegal) who ever dogged their
steps. None like Isaaco could placate each chieftain with the gift
that his soul desired (be it cowries, beads, looking-glasses, muskets,
or multi-colored waistcoats); nor when these failed, could any but
Isaaco win passports with the mere honey of his tongue. Nothing could
swerve him from honesty or the performance of his task. He was tied to
a tree and flogged in the presence of his local wife, set upon by the
very white men he was serving, stung all over by a swarm of bees, and
mauled in both thighs by a crocodile; but each time he turned up
smiling and ready to go on. Nothing could stop him, for did he not
keep the solemn ritual of the guides, sacrificing a black ram at the
threshold of every country they entered, drawing the magic triangles
and hieroglyphs on the sand of every desert they had to cross, and
keeping fast in his scrip that lock of a white man's hair, which added
all the knowledge of a European to the African natives who possessed
it?[2]