A LINK FROM THE PAST
On their triumphal return to the cliff with the tusks of the slain
elephant as trophies of the hunt a strange spectacle met the boys'
eyes. Clustered about a sort of altar, which they had not noticed
before, was a group of the cliff-dwellers who seemed to be deeply
interested in something that was going forward. A loud sound of
chanting and intoning of what seemed to be a solemn ritual was the
first inkling the boys had of what was going on.
On joining the throng the lads found that it was some sort of a
religious ceremony that was being proceeded with. A group of men in
white flowing robes and high conical hats--decorated with mystic
symbols worked out in precious stones that looked like rubies and
emeralds, though of such size that this seemed scarcely
credible--were walking round and round the altar in a sort of what
the irreverent Billy termed "a cakewalk." Pausing at each corner
and revolving slowly, three times they intoned the weird chant.
Suddenly the music took on a louder tone arid several men with
clashing cymbals joined in. The auditors, too, fell flat on their
faces and Billy and Lathrop, on the former's suggestion, did the
same.
"Not to do as the others are doing might cost us our heads," sagely
remarked the diplomatic Billy, "and I need mine in my business."
Whatever the nature of the ceremony, it was now evidently
approaching a climax. The chanting grew louder and more furious and
the cymbal players clashed their huge metal instruments together
with a deafening clangor. Suddenly, from the passage from which the
galleries branched off, there appeared six men clad in robes of
flaming scarlet and conical caps of the same color.
They formed an escort to a pitiable figure.
That of a white bearded man who was bent with years and whose eyes
gazed vacantly about him as he stumbled along between the red-robed
dignitaries. But it was not his age and not his feebleness that
made the boys' hearts beat quicker and caused a galvanic shock to
shoot through them.
The man was white.
There was no doubt about it. In spite of his sun-browned skin and
the barbarous ornaments that covered him, the figure in the center
of the red-robed group was a Caucasian--perhaps an American--a
fellow countryman.
And now the boys noticed with a shudder that in the hands of each of
the red-robed men was a knife of some sort of stone--perhaps flint.
These cruel looking weapons they brandished as they slowly paced
forward in time to the chanting.
But their captive--if he were a captive seemed indifferent to all
this. His dull eyes gazed straight ahead of him as if he were
hypnotized--or, as was more probable, under the influence of some
drug. As the group approached the altar the chanting suddenly
stopped and the onlookers rose to their feet. From the altar now
arose a thin spiral of smoke, the offspring of a fire kindled by one
of the priests.
The sun was just setting and showed like a blood-red ball, through
the mist that arose from low-lying garden lands. As its disk
touched the horizon the chanting broke out afresh and the red-robed
men seizing the old white man as if he were a beast dragged him
forward and threw him on the altar.
And now for the first time came to the chums the horrifying
realization of what the scene they were witnessing really meant.
The man was about to be sacrificed!
But even as the red-robed men raised their knives in unison and were
about to give them the downward lunge that would extinguish the life
of their feeble victim--and as the other priests and the audience
turning toward the setting sun, chanted louder and more
vociferously--a startling interruption occurred.
"By the holy poker you're not going to kill that old man while I can
prevent it."
It was Billy Barnes; his face white and his lips set in a thin line
of determination.
As he spoke utterly oblivious to the fact that not one of the men
could understand him--Lathrop, pale-faced also, stepped forward by
his side.
And there stood the two American boys while the auditors--at first
dumb with amazement--began to buzz angrily like a nest of disturbed
hornets.
One of the white-robed priests gave a sharp order and once more the
red-garbed executors raised their knives.
Billy quietly, though his heart was beating almost to suffocation,
slipped a cartridge from the recovered bag into his Arab rifle. He
leveled it at the red-robed knife wielders.
"The first man that moves I'll shoot!"
Although the words were as unintelligible to the priests and the
cliff-dwellers as any that had gone before, the gesture with which
Billy raised the rifle to his shoulder and covered the group was
eloquent enough. And as it happened, the delay saved the old man's
life; for while they hesitated the sun rushed below the horizon and
the swift African night fell. A loud groan from the crowd announced
that the hour for the culmination of the sacrifice had passed and
that for the time being the intended victim's life was saved.
But for the boys the situation was serious enough. Powerless to
resist such numbers they were seized by scores of the winged men and
hustled into the passage, which was lit up by blazing torches of the
same resinous wood that their guide had used on the first night that
they came there. They were hurried along, their feet hardly
touching the ground, till they reached one of the diverging
galleries. Down this their captors shoved them till they reached a
small cubical cell--windowless and without ventilation. Into this
they were thrust and a huge stone door that hinged on some
contrivance the boys could not understand swung to upon them with a
dull bang. But a few minutes later it reopened and another prisoner
was thrust in.
It was the aged captive whose life Billy had saved!
This much they saw in the momentary glare of the torches and then as
the door closed the darkness--so black that you could feel it--shut
down again. But Billy's reportorial curiosity, even in this
situation, was still predominant.
"Who are you?" he asked eagerly of the new arrival, whose face he
could not see and whose presence he could only guess at by the
temporary revelation of the torch-light.
The only answer was a groan; but a few seconds later a voice that
sounded strange from long disuse or unaccustomedness to the use of
the English language replied:
"I have not heard a white man speak for forty years."
"What?" exclaimed the thunderstruck Billy.
"What I say is true and when you hear my name you will perhaps
realize that fact. I am George Desmond the American explorer."
"The George Desmond who was lost in 1870?" cried Billy, almost
choking with excitement.
"The same," was the reply in the same rusty voice, "like the sound
of a long disused door swinging on its hinges," was the way Billy
described it afterward in the article he wrote about the finding of
George Desmond.
"But George Desmond was a man of thirty-five!" protested Billy,
"when he was lost."
"And I am seventy-five," went on the sad voice in the blackness, "I
was captured by the winged men in 1870. I have kept the record of
the long years on a notched stick. I never expected to hear the
sound of a fellow countryman's voice again."
The poor tired voice broke down, and in the darkness through which
they could not see the boys heard the old man weeping.
"Great cats!" groaned Billy to Lathrop, whose hand he held so that
they could be near together in the awful blackness, "forty years
without seeing a white face--jumping horn-toads, what a fate!"
But the old man's soft weeping stopped presently and in a firmer
voice he said:
"My wife and my sons? Can you tell me anything of them?"
As a newspaper man Billy recollected very clearly the space that had
been given some five years before to the death, at a ripe old age,
of the wife of George Desmond the lost explorer.
"She is dead," he said gently.
They heard the castaway sigh, and then he asked in a voice he strove
to render firm, but which trembled in spite of itself:
"And my sons?"
"They are all alive and in business in New York," said Billy. "Your
wife died believing to the end that you would come back. They
placed her chair so that she could face the east. She died at
daybreak with her eyes turned toward the sea beyond which lay
Africa."
"Africa!" echoed the tired, disused voice. "Africa! it has cost me
everything I had."
There was silence for some time after this. Neither of the boys
wanted to intrude on the silent grief of the explorer so strangely
found, though each was dying to ask him a host of questions. It was
the aged man himself who broke the silence at length.
"But I am selfish," he exclaimed. "I should have thanked you before
this for saving my life. The priests were determined that, as I was
old and useless, my life should be offered to the Sun-god to appease
a sickness that has of late carried off hundreds of the Flying Men.
They are a dying race, young men. As a man of science, I predict
that in five years or less there will not be a single one of the
once numerous tribe alive. I have studied them closely and can
predict their extinction."
"Then you have not been a prisoner always?" asked Billy.
"No, my young friend, I have not. When first I came here I was
received warmly and was paid high honors. I was allowed to record
my observations in writing--fortunately I carried a supply of ink
and paper."
"You still have the manuscript?" gasped Billy, with the reporter's
instinct to the fore.
"I have," sighed old Mr. Desmond, "in the cell that I so long called
home then, the pages still lie. But I have neglected them for many
years. I had no more writing materials when I used up my slender
supply and I never thought to regain civilization.
"But now did you ever get here?" asked the amazed Billy.
"That is a long story," replied the captive, "but briefly told, it
is as follows: In the season of 1870, as you perhaps know, my
ill-fated expedition left Grand Bassam. My avowed object was to
collect specimens and data for the Smithsonian Institute, but my
real and secret desire was to find the tribe of Flying Men of whose
existence I had heard in a fragmentary way on previous expeditions
to the West Coast. I have found them--" he went on with a heavy
sigh--"but at what a cost--at what a cost!"
There was silence for a few minutes and then the old voice went on,
gaining in strength as he proceeded, and resumed acquaintance with
words to which his tongue had been long unused.
"My expedition, as you know, was never heard of again. The reason
was this. In some way the Arab slave-traders--who were thick in
this district then and plied their nefarious trade almost
openly--gained the belief that my expedition was a pretense for a
plan of espionage on them and they attacked my camp one night and
slaughtered every man in it but myself. Why they did not kill me
I do not know, unless it was because of the intercession of a young
Arab, a mere youth and the son of the chief. I have never forgotten
his name or his kindness."
"What was his name?" asked Billy, who was deeply interested and
wanted to get every detail of the extraordinary story.
"Muley-Hassan!" was the amazing reply.
"Muley-Hassan," echoed Billy, "why, he is the most cold-blooded
fiend in the slave-trade to-day."
"Perhaps," answered the old man, "but he was good to me when he was
a young man and I have never forgotten it."
"Well," he went on, picking up his narrative, "it was not long
before retribution overtook the Arabs. One night their camp was
attacked by a tribe whose village they had raided and sacked some
time before and only a few of them escaped, among them must have
been Muley-Hassan, though, till you told me of him, I believed him
dead. The savages, seeing that I was not one of the Arab race took
care of me and I fared well at their hands. But a great longing to
see civilization--to clasp my wife in my arms, to see my children
and America once more, was always with me, and one night I escaped
from their village. I wandered half-delirious from fever and
starvation for many days after that, for I lost my way in the
forest, and, as I had no compass, wandered aimlessly seeking a river
by which I might follow down to the coast. One night such a sharp
attack of fever overtook me that I was-stricken unconscious. I gave
myself up for dead before I lost my senses and only recollect
awaking in this village. From that day to this, although I have
repeatedly endeavored to escape I have never been able to do so.
The ladder is guarded day and night,"--(this information dashed a
half-formed hope in Billy's mind of escape by that way,) "and it
would be suicide to attempt to penetrate the great jungles on the
other side. I thought to end my days here, but I never dreamed till
the other day that my life was destined to end as it would have, had
it not been for your brave intervention.
"The malady of which I have spoken has devastated almost every
family in the cliff and at the instigation of Agagi, the head
priest--a man who has always hated my influence over his people--I
was blamed by the other priests for being the cause of the
affliction.
"They pretended to have a revelation from the Sun-god stating that
if my life were sacrificed the curse that rested on the
cliff-dwellers would be removed. Accordingly I was seized and
chained and would certainly have died had it not been for you. But
alas, young men, I fear you are doomed to forfeit your lives as the
cost of rescuing an old man who is not long for this life in any
event. I wish that you had been far away and had never had the
brave impulse to risk your young lives for my worthless old one."
Now it is a remarkable thing, but Billy, who should have replied to
the aged man in all sorts of high-sounding language, could find
nothing to reply to this but:
"Oh, that's all right."
"I think you are the bravest boys I have ever heard of," the old man
was beginning when a soft "hiss-s-st!" caused them all to turn their
eyes to the direction in which they knew the door lay, and from
which the sound had proceeded.
"H-s-s-s-t," came the sound again.
Did it mean a friend or an enemy?