I
FOR three days the rain fell so heavily that the mission lay isolated on
its hillside, as surely as if the country had been submerged by floods.
And yet no waterways appeared. That dry land drank the water as it fell
to reach the hidden channels by which it had drained for centuries into
the central ooze of the M’ssente Swamp. On Sunday, the fourth day, the
rain ceased about the time of a sullen and misty dawn, and by ten o’clock
in the morning the sun had triumphed. No one would have believed that
any rain had lately fallen; for the bush was full of dry and brittle
sound; the leaves of the undergrowth were of the same ashen hue; the
straggling candelabra cactus stood as withered as if they were dying of
drought; the hornbills were calling on every side. Only on the higher
mountain slopes, where the grassland had been burnt to a shade of pale
amber, a sudden and surprising flush of the most tender green appeared,
as transitory, alas! as it was beautiful.
There could have been no more lovely or affecting augury for James’
return to work. He was up early, walking to and fro upon the stoep,
watching a flight of starlings, whose glossy plumes shone in flight with
the blue of the kingfisher. The night before he had struggled through a
long conversation with the headman of the nearest Waluguru village, that
circle of squat _bandas_ from which their own servant, Hamisi, came. He
had made it the occasion of an experiment upon the new lines which his
reading of the life of Mackay had suggested. He had found the man more
curious about the use of the steel carpentering tools with which the
mission was well supplied than any questions of morality or faith, and
when he had gone James had also missed a chisel. But that didn’t matter.
It was the price of an interest which he hadn’t imagined to be possible
in the apathetic mind of the Waluguru. He was beginning to see his way.
Even if it meant the sacrifice of some sabbatarian scruples, he was
prepared to go through with it. “To-morrow, M’zinga,” he said at
parting, “I will show you other things. To-morrow, after the service at
the church. All these things and many more wonderful you can learn from
books. In a little while we will have a school, and I will teach your
totos to read Swahili.” And M’zinga had smiled with that soft, sly smile
of Africa . . .
On Sunday mornings, at half-past nine, it had been the privilege of the
boy Hamisi to go down to the chapel and ring the little bell. It pleased
him, for it was a work that needed little effort; the toy produced an
unusual noise and the performance exalted him above his fellows. At the
best it was a small and pathetic sound in the midst of so great a
wilderness, but very pleasing to the ears of James. This Sunday morning
he was a little restless. As he paced the stoep, with his Bible in his
hands behind his back, the time seemed to pass more slowly than usual.
He looked at his watch. It was already half-past nine. He called to Eva
in the kitchen to see if his watch was fast. “Five and twenty to ten,”
she called. He was annoyed. The Africans, no doubt, were sleeping.
They would sleep for ever unless they were disturbed. But Hamisi had
never failed him before. He hurried across the compound to the hut in
which they slept. They were neither of them there. For a moment he was
angry, but then remembered that forbearance was the better part; that
even the best of Africans were unreliable. Some day a time would come
when things would be different. Until then he must work for himself.
He set off, almost cheerfully, down the sandy path toward the chapel.
The rain had scoured its surface clean of the red sand and disclosed
beneath a mosaic of quartz, pure white and yellow and stained with
garnet-red. The fine crystals sparkled in the sun. “So many hidden
wonders,” he thought. It came into his mind that there might even be
precious stones among them. He picked up a little fragment of pure
silicon and held it up to the sun. “So many hidden wonders . . .” He
put it in his pocket.
In the middle of the path, in a pocket of sand round which the storm
water had swirled, one of the lily-like flowers of Africa had thrust its
spiky leaves. The rain and sun had nursed it into sudden bloom, and the
pale cups drooped at his feet. “In this way,” he thought, “the whole
world praises God. Behold the lilies of the field . . .”
His first instinct was to pick the flower; but on second thoughts he had
left it, hoping that Eva would see it also on her way down. He passed
for a little while between close walls of tall grasses on the edge of the
bush. Through this channel a clean wind moved with a silky sound, and
its movement gave to the air, newly washed by rain, a feeling of buoyancy
and freedom, a quality which was almost hopeful. It was a wonderful
thing, he thought, to be alive and well. His soul was full of
thankfulness.
He came at last to the church. Hamisi was not there, and so he settled
down comfortably to toll the bell himself. The incident would be an
amusing one to write home about. There were many little things like that
in Mackay’s letters. From that high slope the note of the bell would
penetrate the edge of the forest, and soon his congregation would appear,
the men in their decent gowns of white, the women in their shawls of
amerikani print, the bright-eyed, pot-bellied children. And this was a
new beginning . . .
He tolled the bell until his watch showed the time to be five minutes
short of the hour, but up to this time none of his congregation had
appeared. He began to feel a little nervous and puzzled. It couldn’t be
that he had mistaken the hour, for the Waluguru took their time from his
chapel bell. He wondered if, by some ridiculous miscalculation, he had
mistaken the day. The idea was grotesque. And yet when he was ill he
had missed two whole days as completely as if he had been lying dead. No
. . . it couldn’t be that. Only the day before he had verified it. It
was Sunday. He remembered the text on the German calendar, which he had
struggled to translate, and above the number of the day the little
concave shape of the new moon. He remembered telling Eva that the
weather would be likely to change.
At ten o’clock exactly he entered the church. Eva was sitting there in
her usual place; otherwise the building was empty. It smelt stale and
slightly musty with the odour of black flesh. He remembered suddenly
that once before he had entered an empty church that smelt like that.
Where or when, he couldn’t imagine . . . either in some other life or in
a dream. The coincidence made him shiver.
And Eva was sitting there, very pale. When he stalked past her her lips
moved in a piteous shape, as if she wanted to speak or to cry. But he
would not stay for her to speak. He went straight to his desk and began
to read the form of worship which their own Church prescribed, just as if
he might have been conducting a service in the small stone chapel at Far
Forest. For Eva this was a very terrible experience. It seemed to her
somehow unreasonable to prolong what she could only think of as an
elaborate and insane pantomime. She felt that, after all, it would have
been so much simpler for her to explain, to take him aside and tell him
that this was nothing but a freakish demonstration of the power of
Godovius, a hint to her of the kind of torture which it would be easy for
him to employ. But James spared her nothing. Instead of the familiar
Swahili words, they sang together a hymn of Moody and Sankey, which had
been a favourite of her father’s, a wearisome business of six long
verses. The performance nearly did for her. All the time she was
ridiculously conscious of the feebleness of their two voices in that
empty, echoing church. She was almost driven to distraction by the
impersonality of James. “Afterwards I will tell him,” she thought. She
wanted to tell him there and then, but the immense force of tradition
restrained her. It wouldn’t have been any use for her to tell him: for
the time he was no longer her brother—only a ministering priest rapt in
the service of his Deity. Never in her life had she felt more
irreligious. No vestige of the illusion of religion could overcome the
excitement of her own fear. Reading alternate verses they recited a
psalm of David, a passionate song against idolaters; and a little of the
passion came through into the voice of James, so that he spoke less
precisely than usual, like a peasant of Far Forest, forgetting the accent
which the training college had taught him. His voice rose and fell and
echoed in the little church:
“_Insomuch that they worshipped their idols_, _which turned to their
own decay_; _yea_, _they offered their sons and their daughters unto
devils_.”
And she heard herself reply:
“_And shed innocent blood_, _even the blood of their sons and their
daughters_; _whom they offered unto the idols of Canaan_; _and the
land was defiled with blood_.”
—heard her own voice, lowered and reverentially unreal. She supposed
that women always spoke like that in church; as if they were afraid of
hurting the words they spoke. She was thankful when the psalm was over.
And then James prayed. In their denomination the long extempore prayer
was an important part of the service, and ministers were apt to acquire a
rather dangerous fluency. But that morning James was inspired, if ever a
man was inspired, with religious ecstasy. He wrestled with God. In his
words, in the commonplaces of religious phrase, glowed a passion to which
she could not be wholly insensible. She pitied him . . . pitied him. It
seemed to her that God must surely pity a man whose soul was so abased
and in such agony. At times he rose to something that was very like
eloquence. One phrase she always remembered. He had been speaking of
Africa—that sombre and mighty continent and its vast recesses of
gloom—and then he burst into a sudden and fervent appeal for light, for a
cleansing light which might penetrate not only Africa but “these dark
continents of my heart . . .” _The dark continents of my heart_. Those
were the words which she remembered in after days.
For a little while he knelt in silence, praying, and then, hurriedly, he
left the church before she knew what he was doing. She put out her hand
to detain him, but he shook his head and said: “Not now, Eva, not now . . .”
She was left standing alone at the door of the church. No other soul was
near. In the mid-day quiet of the bush she heard a small bird singing.
It was a rain-bird, and its simple song of three descending notes subtly
wooed her dazed mind to a remembrance of the bells of the little church
at Mamble, whose homely music floats above the wooded valleys to the
green beyond Far Forest. And in a moment of vision she was assailed by
the tender, wistful atmosphere of a Sunday in the March of Wales, where
simple people and children were perhaps at that moment moving to church
between the apple orchards, and men were standing in their shirt-sleeves
at their garden gates. A gust of warm wind swept through the bush,
carrying with it the odour of aromatic brushwood. It was this scent that
broke and dispelled her dream.
II
Above all other things James wanted to be alone, not in his church nor in
the horror of the forest, but in his own room at the mission. He passed
swiftly over the path which he had followed that morning so happily; he
entered the empty mission-house and locked himself in his bedroom. The
sudden disillusionment which had come to him in the empty church had
overwhelmed him; but when the first shock of the incident had passed and
he lay upon his bed, with his hands pressed to his eyes, conscious only
of the extreme heat and of his throbbing pulse, he suddenly found himself
able to think more clearly. In spite of his passion he was almost calm.
He realised, in the hardest terms, that he was facing a power which might
be the ruin of his mission; that he wasn’t merely opposed by the vast
apathy of Africa, but by something definite and appallingly strong. He
saw that his real troubles were beginning; that, even if he failed, he
had got to fight. It was the first time in his life that he had been
forced to stand with his back to the wall.
Already he had a suspicion of the cause of the trouble. The problem
towards which M‘Crae had been attracted in his amateur studies of
ethnology by the stories of the Masai was presented to James for
solution, with no evidence beyond the few dark hints which he had
gathered in his work among the Waluguru and the collateral testimony, the
significance of which he had hardly realised before, present in the only
book with which he was intimately acquainted: his Bible. But already he
had picked up the scent. A lucky mischance, the purest accident in the
world, had arranged that the psalm which he had chosen for the day’s
service had been the hundred and sixth. In the idolatry of the children
of Israel, which the Psalmist so passionately lamented, he found a
significant parallel. In a little while his imagination was at work. He
sat at the table, turning over the worn pages of his Bible, finding
everywhere in the songs of the prophets words which strengthened his
incredible surmise.
The new moon. . . . That was the key to his suspicions. A number of
sinister remembrances came to reinforce the idea. He remembered the
young girl in the Waluguru village who had disappeared about the time of
the new moon. He remembered the story of the boy Onyango, who had said
that on the night of the new moon the Waluguru would kill him if he were
found in the forest. He remembered, astonished that he should not have
noticed it before, the name of that smooth mountain and of the house of
Godovius itself. The moon. . . . He wondered how he could have been so
blind. And the heathen inhabitants of Canaan worshipped the moon in
abominable rites. Ashtoreth, the Goddess of Groves, was a moon deity.
And Moloch. . . . Who was Moloch? The Bible would tell him; and most of
all his own passionate prophets. He opened Isaiah.
“_Bring no more vain oblations_: _incense is an abomination unto me_;
_the new moons and sabbaths_, _the calling of assemblies I cannot
away with_; _it is iniquity_, _even the solemn meeting_.
“_Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth_; _they are
a trouble to me_; _I am weary to bear them_ . . .”
Someone was knocking at the door. He supposed it was Eva. Well, Eva
must wait. He was sorry for her; he would explain later. He came to the
door and spoke. He was astonished at the steadiness of his own voice.
He said: “Don’t be frightened and please don’t disturb me. I must be
alone to-day.”
“But your door was locked. I wanted to see you if I could. I want to
speak to you,” she said.
“Later, later. . . . Not now.”
She told him that his dinner was nearly ready.
“I don’t want food,” he said. “Don’t think I’m doing anything desperate.
I’m not. I only want to think. Now be a good girl . . .”
Baal and Ashtoreth and Moloch. . . . He wished that he could go into the
library at college and look the business up. In those days he had never
taken that sort of thing seriously. It had seemed to him so utterly
divorced from the spiritual needs of the present day.
A strange people, the Waluguru. He remembered that once Godovius had
told him that they were of Semitic blood, a remnant of those Sabæans
whose queen had corrupted the court of Solomon, a fair-skinned people who
had sailed to Africa for gold. And Godovius was a Jew. . . . It was
plausible, plausible. And yet, in these days . . .
For all that, the Jews had never failed to be attracted by the worship of
lascivious Syrian deities. Ahaz, he remembered, who “_burnt incense in
the valley of Hinnom and burnt his children in the fire after the
abominations of the heathen_. . . . _He sacrificed also and burnt
incense in the high places and on the hills and under every green tree_.”
“The high places and on the hills . . .” Kilima ja Mweze: the hill of
the moon.
He remembered the denunciations of the prophet Ezekiel: “_For when I
brought them into the land for the which I lifted up my hand to give it
to them_, _then they saw every high hill and all the thick trees_, _and
they offered there their sacrifices_. . . . _Thou hast built thy high
place at the head of every way and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred_,
_and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by_, _and multiplied
thy whoredom_.”
And then, with a chilly heart, he passed from these prophecies to the
awful legends of Tophet and the sacrifice of children in the fires of
Moloch. These passages, in their mystery, had always seemed to him among
the most terrible in the Old Testament. He seemed to remember a lecture
in which he had been told that Moloch was the male counterpart of
Ashtoreth or Astarte, the great goddess of fertility; that the worship of
both, and the licentious rites with which their mysteries were celebrated
on Syrian hill-tops, were really ceremonies of homoeopathic magic by the
practice of which the fertility of fields and cattle might be increased.
So far, at any rate, the planter, Godovius, if he believed in any such
superstitions, had an object. But there must be more in it than this.
It was possible that in his rôle of hierophant he might be able to exert
a more terrible power over his slaves, the Waluguru. A man will do
almost anything for the lust of power; and one presupposed that Godovius
was in some way a psychopathic and a megalomaniac. Those were the two
types of mind in which the moral decadence of modern Germany had been
most productive. Was this the ecstasy which had won him the name of
Sakharani? Or was it a simpler, more crudely carnal passion, for which
this worship gave him an excuse, a celebration of those phallic rites
with which the Cilician high places had been defiled?
“Soon, at any rate, I shall know,” he thought. Perhaps the Waluguru,
whom the boy Onyango had feared, would kill him, before he had surprised
their secret. For a long time he lay on his bed contemplating the
dangers of his new duty. And then, for a long time, he prayed.
III
Now, at any cost, he was determined to see for himself. Nothing must
stand between him and his duty. This was a man’s work. He decided that
Eva must have no part in it; and so, a little later in the afternoon,
when the fiercer heat of the day was waning, he left his locked room by
way of the folding windows and took his way towards the forest. This
time he went there with none of the vague terrors which had troubled him
before: apart from a suspicion of shame in his deliberate secrecy, he had
no misgivings. He was happy to find himself so firm in his purpose,
thankful that the fever had left him free to meet this ordeal.
By the time of sunset he had reached the edge of the forest, in the very
hour at which its life awakened. As he passed into its shadow he was
conscious of this, as of a faint stirring in many millions of awakened
leaves suddenly aware of his presence. In this he found nothing
sinister. He was only filled with a wonder which had never come to him
in moments less intense at the existence of these countless multitudes of
green living creatures to whom the power of motion was denied. He was
impressed with the patience and helplessness of vegetable life, seeing an
aged and enormous tree strangled where it grew by the writhing coils of
some green parasite. And yet it seemed to him that life must be far
easier for a tree than for a man. A light breeze, herald of the evening,
threw the plumes of the forest edge into tossing confusion. The ways of
the wood were full of gentle sound.
And suddenly it was dark. He was on the edge of the nearest Waluguru
village, the home of the mission boy, Hamisi. He did not want all the
people of the forest to know of his errand; but blundering in the dark he
found himself under the shadow of their _bandas_, and seeing that
concealment was useless, he entered the circle of the village. The sound
of his step set up a small commotion among their goats, who were folded
within a _boma_ of thorns, but no human shape came to welcome him in the
village. He went to the door of the headman’s hut, expecting to find the
man M’zinga, who had stolen his chisel. But M’zinga was not there, nor
any of the wives of M’zinga. And this struck him as strange; for only a
little time before the youngest of these women had given birth to a baby,
whom it was his ambition to baptize. He tried another hut. All were
empty. The village was empty and stank more foully than if it had been
crammed with Waluguru. It was as if some plague had stricken its people,
leaving nothing behind but the stench of corruption.
He pushed on. In a little while he came to the M’ssente river, whose
crossings he now knew so well. By this time his eyes were becoming
accustomed to the gloom of the forest, so that when he came to the felled
tree which served him for a bridge he was astonished at the amount of
light which still lingered in the sky and its faint reflections cast
upwards from that swift, dark water. Lingering here a moment, entranced
by the sound of the stream and the glimpse of open sky, his eye was
surprised by a sudden gleam of silver. It was the broken image of the
new moon’s silver sickle. He raised his eyes to the sky in which that
pale and lovely shape was rising. He watched her sailing upwards through
the indigo air. And while he watched, it seemed to him that other eyes
must have seen her. In the distance, over towards Kilima ja Mweze, he
heard the throbbing of a drum.
At length he came to the village at which he had first surprised the
devil dance. This, too, was empty, empty and stinking. He wondered why
it was that Waluguru villages smelt so horrible at night. Where had the
people of all these villages assembled? The words of Isaiah returned to
him: “_The new moons and sabbaths_, _the calling of assemblies I cannot
away with_. _Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth_.”
And the baffling sound of drums drew nearer. On every side he heard the
throbbing of drums. It was as though all the drums of Africa had been
gathered together for this assembly. Every moment it seemed to him that
the night grew more suffocating. He felt afraid of the darkness, as
children are afraid. . . .
He had come to that thinner zone of the forest in which the terraced
walks which had puzzled Eva began. And now it seemed to him that the
wood was full of more than shadows. On every side of him, in the
darkness, he heard the rustle of bodies moving through the leaves. He
was conscious of the smell of the castor oil with which the Waluguru
smear their limbs. Sometimes he heard the sound of heavy breathing and
once or twice a laugh or a stifled cry. A terrible and bewildering
experience. He could see nothing; and yet he knew that the darkness was
crowded with men and women hurrying to and fro, who heeded him no more
than if he had been a shadow, and were as intangible as shadows
themselves.
Nor was this all; for it seemed to him that this atmosphere of hidden
evil—for assuredly it was a devilish thing—aroused in him a curious
excitement. It was as though there were in his composition nerve-endings
of which his senses had never been cognisant, and his mind never master,
which were responding against his will to these ancient and most subtle
stimuli. He didn’t feel sure of the self of which he thought he had
explored the utmost hidden recesses. Perhaps it was the hypnotic
influence of the drums’ monotonous rhythm; perhaps some special
enchantment hidden in this darkness full of whispers and breathings and
stifled cries. He understood now what the old writers had experienced
when they invented a devil, an incarnation of the spirit of evil. He
wanted to turn his back and run away from the whole adventure. He lay in
the grass and prayed.
Thus fortified, he struggled on, climbing the zigzag path which skirted
the Sabæan terraces. In the act of climbing he was happily less
conscious of that populous darkness. In front of him many lights
flickered through the trees. The noise of the drums grew very near.
Suddenly, rounding a corner in the twisting way, he found himself on the
edge of an open expanse, a wide shoulder of the hill, from which the
light had come. For fear of being discovered he dropped down on his
stomach in the grass. He slipped, and the blades at which he clutched
cut his hands. In the middle of that shoulder of the hill stood the
circular building of undressed stone which had astonished Eva on the
night of her visit to the House of the Moon; but here there was no longer
mystery or desertion; the open ground was crowded with black men and
women. From his place of concealment in the spear-grass he could look
straight through the gateway in the outer wall to the circular kiln which
rose in the centre of the building. Here a fierce fire of wood was
burning, the core, indeed, of all that buzzing activity. Towards it the
men and women of the Waluguru, whom he had heard moving and panting in
the darkness, were carrying bundles of dry fuel. They ran to and fro
like the black ants, which the Swahili call _maji ya moto_ (boiling
water), from the seething noise which they make when they are disturbed.
Even so this welter of the Waluguru boiled and sweated; and to add to the
fantastic horror of the scene, which resembled some ancient picture of a
corner in hell, the flames in the central kiln crackled and flared,
casting immense shadows from the black forms which leapt around them,
flinging tongues of light to search the dark sky and lighten the swaying
crowns of the forest trees. Sometimes, in this upper darkness, the
vagrant lights would pick out the wings of pale birds that fluttered
there. These were the doves which had nested within crevices of the
walls.
But what most deeply filled the heart of James with dread was the
expression of the faces of the naked men and women who danced about the
flame. They were not the faces, the pitiable human masks of the
Waluguru, but the faces of devils. He saw the transformed features of
men whom he knew well: the mouth of the mission boy Hamisi, opened wide
in horrible laughter, the red eyes of the headman, M’zinga. M’zinga was
carrying the stolen chisel, waving it as his muscles twitched to the
rhythm of the drums. He danced right up to the mouth of the kiln, then
suddenly collapsed before it, hacking at himself with the sharpened edge
till his legs streamed with blood. James could not see the end of this
horror, for a company of sweating fuel-bearers from the depths of the
forest swarmed before him, pushing the crowd to right and left. They
threw the branches which they had carried on the fire. There followed a
hissing of sap, for the boughs were green, and a cloud of smoke spouted
from the chimney of the kiln. At the crackling of the furnace the
fuel-bearers shouted for joy, scattering in the crowd of women, some of
whom they dragged away into the edge of the forest. The acrid wood-smoke
made the eyes of James smart.
And now the furnace was so heated that the stones which lined it shone
with a white heat. No more loads of fuel were brought to it from the
outer woods, and though the drumming never ceased, it seemed as though
the wilder ecstasy of the dancers had worn itself out. They lay
stretched out, many of them, on the sandy ground in attitudes of
abandonment and fatigue, their sweaty bodies shining like wet ebony.
James noticed a thing which he had not seen before: a group of women,
swathed in the black cloth, which the Waluguru affect, who had been
sitting patiently on the right hand of the opening in the temple wall.
The nearest of them he recognised as that slim girl the wife of the
headman M’zinga; in her arms, held tightly to her breast, she carried her
baby. From time to time she covered it with her black cotton cloth to
shield its face from the scorching fire.
Already James had guessed what was coming. Standing at the side of the
furnace door, he saw a tall man in white. He heard a whisper of the word
_Sakharani_ . . . _Sakharani_. In a moment another figure had leapt out
into the light. It was the headman, M’zinga, still dripping blood from
his most terrible mutilation. He pulled his baby from the arms of its
mother. She clung to it, but the other women tore at her arms, and the
rest of the Waluguru snarled. He held the child high above his head in
the face of the furnace. The Waluguru shouted. For the moment the
sacrifice of Ashtoreth was forgotten. And the white figure of Godovius
was Moloch, the king.