In the forests of the Mambava, in groves of banana trees, the peaked,
thatched roofs of Muene-Motapa's stronghold rose in concentric circles
round the royal houses.
Here, all day long, one heard the bleating of goats and fat-tailed
sheep, the coo and whirr of pigeons, the thump of wooden mortars in
which the women, their nude bodies covered with intricate designs of
scars, were grinding millet. At times these noises were pierced by the
clatter of little hammers, with which the smiths were beating into
spear blades the lumps of iron smelted in rude furnaces from
ferriferous quartz. It was an hereditary art. Who had taught it to
them? Perhaps the hook-nosed voyagers from the Phoenician coast, who
had bequeathed to them also a nebulous religious awe of fire, of the
sun, and also of the moon, personified in legend by a pale, ardent,
supernatural woman of surpassing beauty.
In their low verandas the warriors reclined at full length, their
bangles of copper jingling as they reached out their hands toward the
calabashes full of palm wine, or the smoking gourds charged with hemp.
At the gate of the king's stockade the guards sat with their stabbing
spears across their knees, surrounded by wolflike dogs and naked
children with distended abdomens.
It was in the royal enclosure that Lawrence Teck had endured his
captivity.
Beside him, waking and sleeping, there remained two guards, so that in
Muene-Motapa's capital there was a lucid riddle, "What is it that casts
three shadows?" Those two prehistoric warriors were aware of an
incomprehensible great value locked up in the captive's mind; yet at
his first false movement they would have slaughtered him, destroying
cheerfully, like many others before them, what they could never hope to
understand. However, they were kind to him, holding palm leaves over
his head when he crossed the courtyards in the blaze of the sun,
cooling his wrists when he fell ill with fever, and at night, if they
spoke to each other across his body, keeping their voices low so as not
to break his sleep. King Muene-Motapa had said to them long ago:
"If he escapes, you shall be beaten to death with sticks; but if he
tells me that you have not treated him respectfully, soldier ants shall
eat you alive."
For despite his chains, Lawrence Teck was the chosen friend of the king.
Muene-Motapa had been fond of him even before the drunken riot in which
he got his wounds. This friendship had then become a proprietary
emotion, a compound of affection, remorse, the fear of revenge, and
even a sort of proselytizing zeal mixed up with self-interest.
Muene-Motapa hoped that in time his prisoner would renounce all desire
for the white world, embrace the beliefs and habits of the Mambava,
become a subtle counselor in diplomacy as well as in wars of conquest.
In short, those tales of the lands beyond these forests--the wiles of
Islam, the methods by which the Europeans were eating up Africa--had
revived in the king the incoherent and grandiose dreams of his youth.
In this captive, whom he would some day make his brother, co-priest,
and fellow general, he had found the knowledge to supplement his force,
and make himself invincible.
So, night after night he repeated the same plea, sitting in the royal
pavilion, across the fire from the white man whose guards had been sent
out of doors.
Muene-Motapa was tall, muscular, bold of gesture and fierce of face.
His word was life and death. Day and night he was surrounded by
chiefs, councilors, wizards, and royal ladies who roared with laughter
when he smiled, gnashed their teeth when he frowned, accompanied his
every comment with moans of admiration and a soft snapping of their
fingers. They were round him now, aligned against the wattled walls,
behind the film of wood smoke; breathlessly awaiting the sound of his
deep voice.
He began, in a chanting tone, to rehearse the past glories of the
blacks. He spoke of that great ancestor of his, that other
Muene-Motapa, whose kingdom had extended from the country of the
Bushmen to the Indian Ocean, and from Nyasaland to Delagoa Bay. Then
the white men had come.
"The flies destroyed the horses. The fevers burned up the men. Those
who survived, my forefathers pierced with their spears. Have I shown
you the trophies, Bangana, the hats of steel, the corselets of steel,
the guns that one fires by lighting a string? My forefathers gave
those things to their children for toys, and grass grew through the
bones of those white men. But there came more, and more, and more,
swarming over all the land, till now my country alone is free from
them. Shall that be? Have I eaten rabbits? Am I some village
headman? When I stamp my foot seven thousand spearmen spring from the
ground. I am Muene-Motapa!"
In the crimson glow from the ashes the chieftains, the councilors, and
the wizards raised their faces which were convulsed with rage. The
wattled walls hurled back a deafening chorus of war cries.
The king drank from a gourdful of cashew-brandy, wiped his lips, and
shouted:
"Consent, Bangana! Consent, Mfondolo, who might be my brother lion,
pouncing upon army after army, as the lion pounces upon the antelope.
I have shown you the Zimbabwe, the stone cities of the ancients. With
slaves we will dig the gold out of the quartz reefs, buy guns from the
Arabs, and drive these little yellow-skinned white men back into the
sea. We two will rule over the land of my ancestors, the kingdom of
the first Muene-Motapa. Through your mouth we will treat with the
English, the Arabs, and all the world as equals. I will not kill you,
because you will be my mind. Besides, I love you."
At a wave of his hand, behind the veils of smoke the women of the royal
household rose and departed, their symmetrically scarred torsoes
shining with oil, so that they resembled statues of polished bronze.
They were slender, graceful, informed with the gentleness of those
reared in the shadow of royalty, showing profiles that suggested the
faces chiseled on Semitic monuments. Fringes of bark cloth hung down
from their yellow girdles to their knees; over their breasts dangled
strings of pearls and amber beads from Bazaruto; each wore on the
middle of her forehead a charm intended to make her fortunate in
marriage. They left behind them an odor of cheap German perfumes,
which Mohammedan traders had brought to the edge of these forests.
When they had passed beyond earshot--for the mention of sacred things
was not to be thought of while women sat within hearing--the king
continued:
"What more can I do to show you that I love you, Bangana? I have
initiated you into the mysteries of my people. You know the ceremonies
of the dead, of those who become of age. I have shown you where the
fire is kept from which, once a year, all the fires in my kingdom are
rekindled. I have told you which mountains and streams are holy. I
have admitted you even into the secret of my own divinity. Nay, I have
done still more. I have let you see my people dance for the Lady of
the Moon."
There was a silence.
Lawrence Teck remained as before, his bearded face bowed down; but a
slight tremor of horror passed through his shoulders under the
sun-blackened skin.
The Dances of the Moon! Yes, he had seen them, one time when he was
weak from fever and despair. All the frightfulness of Africa had then
been made manifest to him at last, as if the very soul of destruction
had condensed itself out of the vapors, venoms and invisible menaces of
these primeval forests, to assume, for one night, a horde of nearly
human shapes. But he shuddered not at his memory of that spectacle,
but at its effect on him--an effect that he had denied with a
passionate, clanking gesture of his chained arms, yet that had remained
in the depths of his brain like a serpent, which had always slept till
then, and had ever since been gnawing at his thoughts.
He recalled the deafening thunder of the drums, the glare and the
blood, the moon peering down through the branches like the face of a
perverse divinity pale from pride, and the thought that had come to him
there, in his sickness and lonely hopelessness--that while some in a
fit of decrepitude and despair might turn to God, others might turn to
the oblivion promised by evil.
Raising his head, he called out in a voice as strong as the king's:
"Still dreaming, Muene-Motapa? Awake, and let me go!"
The king leaped to his feet, to pace the earthen floor. His kilt of
leopards' paws swayed from side to side; his amulets jingled; his
shaven head glistened amid the shadows, like an ebony ball. His court
bowed their naked bodies, muttering:
"Father of elephants! He shall stamp on this man, and his foot shall
shake the whole earth!"
Muene-Motapa bitterly asked his captive:
"Is there not always rich meat, and beer and brandy in season? I have
also hundreds of women who are young, as slender as palm trees, with
teeth like milk. I will buy women from the Arabs, with red or tawny
skin and straight hair like waterfalls. I will send men to steal the
women of Mozambique--white women with hair brighter than firelight.
Why do you not marry my little sisters, my brother? They pine away for
you. Or is it wealth? I know the little bible that you carry in that
pouch! When you look into it, you remember all the quartz reefs in the
gorges of the mountains beyond my forests, with their veins of gold and
of gray and yellow copper; and the river sands full of gold; and the
places where you have seen the iron that draws iron, and the tin, and
the black grease. But I have already told you that you shall be rich.
What is the matter with you, Bangana? Are you deaf?"
He squatted down before Lawrence Teck, and thrust forward his angry
face; and his pendent, pear-shaped earrings of jasper, which some
Phoenician adventurer had worn perhaps four thousand years ago,
quivered as he shouted with all his might:
"Are you deaf, I say? Shall I open your ears with a spear point?"
He stared in stupefaction at Lawrence Teck's stony countenance, then
suddenly burst into sobs.
"See how I love him!" he moaned, "and yet he hates me; and I shall
never be great."
The prisoner thought to himself, "Now, if ever, is the time." He laid
his hands on the shoulders of the king with a movement at once
commanding and compassionate. All the courtiers stopped weeping to
gasp in consternation at this sacrilege; one or two stood up; and in
the shadows a blade of steel returned the crimson gleam of the embers.
Lawrence Teck said gently, as if talking to a child:
"Alas! my brother, I should lead you only to some death unbefitting a
king. You were happy before you made me your captive; these chains
have tormented you as much as me. Strike them off, and let me go.
Forget me, and free yourself from vain thoughts."
"I should not forget you, Bangana," the king responded in a small, thin
tone, as though the virile resonance of his voice had passed away with
all his naïve and grandiose hopes. "All those tales! To whom shall I
listen now at night? Besides, it has been good to see you here every
day; for you alone in these forests have really understood my
heart--and have stabbed it to death with your wisdom."
He pondered dismally, while the councilors and chieftains wept out his
unexpressed grief, so that the whole pavilion was filled with their
full-throated sobbing.
"Will you ever return, Bangana?"
"Why not? To persuade you to peace instead of war. To make treaties
for the passage of my workmen through your forests to the new mines,
and to give your people work if they will accept it."
The king closed his eyes.
"All that again! What are these white man's promises? Have they made
the other tribes happy in their slavery? No, my face will be glad when
you return to see me; but never ask me to let the white foot wedge
itself in the door of my country. There would only be a great battle
without you to help me in it. I and my race, if we cannot be mighty,
at least will die free men."
He rose from his heels, and in a strangling voice called out to the
guards, who came headlong, stooping, through the low entrance of the
pavilion, with bared teeth and darting spears.
"Strike off the chains from my brother!" shouted Muene-Motapa, as one
should say, "Slay my dreams!"
Then he stalked away, to sit alone in darkness. Next day, with an
escort of Mambava warriors, Lawrence Teck set out for the coast.
At the bidding of the king, to do honor to the white man who was
leaving them, they had put on their gala paint, and their plumed
headgear bound under their chins with fur lappets. Their bangles made
a cheerful clatter as they marched along the dim trails between the
enormous trees. They carried food for two weeks.
Emerging from the forests, they saw the lowlands steaming in the heat;
for while it was winter in America, here it was summer.
They traversed plateaux that were dotted with islets of jungle, plains
covered with flowers and drenched with torrential rains, misty marshes
that suggested landscapes of the Paleozoic Age. They saw sodden herds
of zebras, the tracks of leopards, acacia trees uprooted by elephants.
In a glade filled with blossoms of every color they came upon a family
of lions, one of which they headed off and deftly killed with their
spears.
The plumes of the warriors bobbed along in single file; at sunset the
spear blades seemed still wet with blood. They raised their long
shields, adorned with crude geometrical designs, and sang for the white
man a rambling song of parting.
"But he will return some day to bask in the countenance of
Muene-Motapa."
They all took up the refrain:
"To bask in the countenance of Muene-Motapa!"
Their voices rose strongly, full of exultation. On a branch above
them, a python, awakened by those vibrations, revealed itself in an
iridescent gliding of its coils.
Suddenly, on the edge of a jungle of bamboo, they stood still. Far off
appeared the bastions of a fort, of whitewashed stone, mottled and
streaked with green. A flag was hanging limply from the flagstaff.
His two shadows, in bidding him farewell, began to weep, their tears
running over the white grease paint with which their cheeks were
bedaubed. They turned away with a choking cry:
"Farewell!"
"Farewell!" all the other warriors uttered in unison, fiercely, at the
top of their voices. Their howl passed over his head, like a defiance,
toward the distant fort.
So Lawrence Teck returned to civilization.