Scene: The interior of King 'Ntango's palace. The king seated on a mat
in the middle of the floor of the principal apartment--a large square
room with walls of mud and grass. The only furniture, a tall tom-tom, a
mat-covered dais, and a heap of empty stone bottles in a corner. Those
bottles once contained gin.
It is near sunset, the king is alone. There is no sound to break the
silence, except the tap, tap, tap the gecko lizards that crawl on the
walls make, as they beat to death the moths they catch.
Yes, the king is alone in his glory, though his spear-armed attendants
wait outside. He is quite a study, this savage potentate, to any one
fond of an anthropology. Look at him now! he is leaning his fat face on
his podgy fingers, his elbows are resting on his knees--he is thinking.
There are but two things in this world that this king dearly loves; one
is to see human blood spilled, the other is to drink gin or rum. These
last two words are the only English ones he can pronounce or understand.
He learnt them from itinerant Arabs, unscrupulous scoundrels, who
bought the youth and flower of his people for a bottle each.
The king is thinking; the question that exercises his mind at present is
this, "Shall I kill these white men, and laugh to see the red blood
flow; or keep two, and send the others back for rum?"
"Room," this is how he pronounces the word "rum," and "gin" he calls
"geen."
"Room, room, room," he mutters to himself, "geen, geen, geen."
He rises; a thought strikes him. May it not be possible that one, just
one full bottle remains still among that heap of empty ones? He goes
straight to the heap, and turns them over. No, not one. Still, he has
a glimmering notion that in a dazed moment he hid one. Ha! he remembers
all of a sudden. He seizes the stick with which he is wont to beat the
tom-tom, and hies him to a corner, and speedily unearths, not one
bottle, but two.
He is a joyful king now. He whacks the tom-tom, and summons two of his
wives to squat beside him; not to help him to drink, but to _see_ him
drink.
Then he summons Essequibo, and launches questions at him. "How long
will he take to fatten? How long before he be ready to kill? Do the
white men tremble to die?"
"No," Keebo tells him; "they rejoice to die because their spirits will
go to a glorious land of flowers and sunshine."
The king gets blue with rage. He whacks Keebo with the tom-tom stick,
and he whacks his wives; then he declares that the white men shall _not_
die, that their spirits shall _not_ go to the glorious land of flowers
and sunshine.
Then he drinks "geen," and cools down.
But Keebo sees his advantage. He expatiates on the mechanical ability
and cleverness of white men in general, and of Massa Kennie, Archie, and
Harvey in particular, and so inflames the king's cupidity, that he sends
for the white men, and has their chains knocked off in his presence, and
tells his sentries they are free, and any one who touches the hem of
their garments shall be made food for the blue-bottle flies, and the
long-legged "krachaw." [A kind of carrion-eating heron.]
"Ha! ha! ha!" he yells, "the king will live for ever."
Then he drinks again, yells again, whacks his wives with the tom-tom
stick, and laughs to see them wince; and drinks, and drinks, and drinks,
till he falls back asleep, and is borne away by the wives he whacked,
and laid tenderly on the dais.
"Well," cried Harvey, "this is a queer ending to a day's march."
Zona shrugs his square thin shoulders, and Kenneth and Archie laugh.
"Ask those scoundrels," says Kenneth to Essequibo, "what they have done
with our arms and our boat."
Very submissive are those spear-armed warriors now. They lead them to a
wood, and there in the thicket they find everything intact.
"Now, lads, do as I tell you," said Kenneth.
And here is what our heroes did at Kenneth's advice. They rolled all
their spare arms and ammunition in blankets, dug a hole, buried them,
and turned the boat upside down on them. Next they tore up a lot of
white and red rags, tied them to strings, and arranged these along,
over, and around the boat, in precisely the way you would over a row of
peas in the country to keep the sparrows away.
Funny though it may seem, this was quite enough to keep these savage
negroes at bay. There was magic in it, they thought, and they gave that
wood a wide berth.
Well, our heroes had, after a manner of speaking, to buy their lives.
The king had them before him at daybreak, not to order them to
execution, but to give them his royal commands. They were to teach his
people to do all the clever things that white men could do; if they
failed, the king told them death would be the fate of their teachers.
"We do not fear to die, King 'Ntango," said Kenneth.
The king looked at him with a merry twinkle in his eye; then he took a
sip of "geen" and said, through the interpreter Keebo,--
"You do not fear death? No, you think you go straight to your glorious
land of sunshine; but listen, you will _not_. I will arrange it
differently. I will cut from you a leg, an arm, and an ear,--ha! ha!
what think you? will the leg, and arm, and ear go first to the land of
sunshine, and wait you? Take care, I am a great king, and I have twenty
thousand ways to torture without killing."
Poor Kenneth confessed to himself that the king had the best of the
argument, but he replied,--
"If you cut from me an arm or leg, how then shall I teach your people?"