Ahamadou, squatting upon his haunches before our camp fire, calmly
smoking his long pipe, related to me the following story, declaring it
to be a true incident. All wanderers in the Great Desert, be they Arabs
or Touaregs, are born story-tellers, therefore I reproduce the narrative
as he told it. It must be remembered that the Azjars were, at one
period--not so very long ago--slavers who made many raids in the
primeval forests south of Lake Tsad, and that Ahamadou himself profited
very considerably by that illegitimate trade. It was rumoured down at
"the coast" that the leaders of these Touareg raiders were not Africans,
and this story appears to substantiate a statement which was, at the
time, ridiculed at the Colonial Office in London.
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"Get up, you lazy devil. Stir yourself. We're in a complete hole!"
"Hole? hole? Ah, your English tongue is indeed extraordinaire! A hole
is a place in the ground, _n'est ce pas_?"
"Yes, and you'll have a hole in the ground all to yourself, my dear
Pierre, if you don't bustle up a bit."
Pierre Dubois, the man addressed, a bronzed, grey-bearded, stout,
small-eyed Belgian of fifty, was lying tranquilly on his back on a pile
of soft rugs, like an Oriental potentate, smoking his _shisha_, or
travelling pipe, and being fanned by an extremely ugly negress. Dubois
was the name he had adopted after leaving the Congo hurriedly, carrying
with him a goodly sum belonging to the Belgian Government, in whose
employ he had been for ten years. A native of Liege, he was one of the
pioneers of that so-called Central African civilisation of trade, gin,
and the whip; but after lining his pockets well, and making good his
escape through the boundless virgin forests of "darkest Africa," he had
started as a trader in that most marketable of all commodities--black
ivory.
Pierre Dubois and Henry Snape, his partner, were slave-raiders. They
dressed as Arabs, and lived as Arabs.
Outside in the blazing noon, beneath the scanty shade of a few palms and
mimosa scrub which surrounded that desert watering-place known as Akdul,
a number of their heavily-armed followers were lying stretched upon the
sand, sleeping soundly after their two-bow prayer to Allah, while here
and there alone sat one of their number on his haunches, wrapped in his
white burnouse, hugging his knees, his rifle at his side, keeping watch.
They were a forbidding, evil-looking lot these Songhoi Touaregs,
pirates of the forests and the desert, each with his black _litham_
wrapped around his face concealing his features, a complete arsenal of
weapons in his girdle, a string of charms sewn in little bags of yellow
leather around his neck, and, strapped beneath his left arm, a short
cross-kilted sword, keen-edged as a razor.
Beyond, lying in the full sun glare, were sixty or seventy wretched,
woolly-haired negroes, men and women, chained together and guarded by a
dozen of the veiled men. Throughout Northern and Central Africa the
very name of the Songhoi was synonymous with all that was fierce, cruel,
and relentless, for they lived by robbing the desert caravans or
capturing slaves in the boundless virgin forests between the Niger and
the Congo, being essentially a nomadic race, and having no other home
than their tents in the Sahara, that limitless wilderness of rock and
sand. Of all the slavers of Central Africa these "veiled men" were the
worst, for they attacked and burned villages, placed the unfortunate
blacks to torture to compel them to reveal the hiding-places of their
store of ivory, and afterwards took them prisoners, and sold them in the
great central slave-market at El Obeid, away in Kordofan.
Among the natives of the Upper Congo and the Aruwimi, even the hordes of
that notorious king of slavers, Tippu-Tib,--so called by the negroes
because the guns of his men created a noise, from which they have named
him phonetically,--were more tolerated than the fierce Songhoi bands,
with their black veils, which none ever removed, sleeping or waking; for
the track of the latter through the forest or grass-land was always
marked by murder, devastation, and wanton cruelty.
Dubois, when in the service of King Leopold, had been active in
endeavouring to put down the trade, but seeing how lucrative it was, and
finding Snape, an English adventurer, ready to join him, he had
collected a following of the fiercest Touaregs he could gather, and as
he paid all well for their services, while on their part they were proud
to be led by a white man in whom they had once lived in fear, their
trade had, for a long time, been a most lucrative one. They were the
terror of the whole region from Stanley Falls to Tanganyika. A dozen
times they had been north to El Obeid with ivory of both varieties,
white and black, and on each occasion the profits had been far beyond
their expectations. The trade is still easy enough in the Congo State,
and slaves are captured without very much difficulty. The great risk,
however, is to transport them by the route they had been following for
the past two months, as, in order to reach the central market, they had
to pass through that portion of British territory where a very watchful
eye is kept, and where the notorious Arab raider Kilonga-Longa met his
fate only a few months before.
But Dubois and Snape had run the gauntlet many times, and were
absolutely fearless. On the present raid through the country of Emin
and Junker, they had made their captures in the Moubouttou, within the
Belgian sphere of influence, with the complicity of the Belgian agent at
Sanga, whom they, of course, bribed with a goodly present of ivory;
then, marching through the great Forest of Eternal Night, due northward
to Zayadin, they had passed through the Dinka country to Fatik, which,
being only two days' march from the Bahr-el-Guebel upon which the
British have posts, is a dangerous point. Nevertheless, they had pushed
forward night and day, and were now in the centre of that great,
sunburnt desert, the Wilderness of Nouer, which stretches northward for
three hundred miles to El Obeid.
Dubois grumbled loudly at the Englishman for interrupting his
meditations, saying--
"Go and sleep, _mon cher_. You'll be getting fever if you worry too
much."
"Worry!" echoed Snape. "There's danger, I tell you. Surely you're not
a confounded fool, man?"
"Ah," answered his partner, quite calmly, "is there not always danger
here, in Africa? You have a wonderful imagination, my dear Henri, I
quite admit; but do allow me to finish my sleep. Then let us talk of
this extraordinary hole, whatever it may be."
"Idiot!" ejaculated the Englishman, hitching up his flowing white
burnouse. He was a tall, good-looking fellow of forty, whose career,
however, had been a singularly eventful one. Since he left Balliol he
had met with a good many adventures in various lands, most of them being
to his discredit. He had been a born gambler, and had drifted from the
London clubs to the tables at Monte Carlo, and thence, by a very crooked
channel, to that sink of the world, Africa, where chance had brought him
in contact with the scoundrel and arch-slaver Dubois. They were a
well-matched pair. At college Snape had taken honours for Arabic,
therefore his knowledge of that language now served him in good stead.
He was one of those men who could never run straight, even though he had
often tried. He was a born outsider.
"Why idiot?" inquired his partner lazily. The old negress waved the fan
backwards and forwards, understanding not a word of the conversation
between the headman and the great white Sheikh, who, on account of his
raiding, the Touaregs had named The Father of the Hundred Slaves.
"Well, I'm not the sort of fellow to let the grass grow under my feet
when there's any danger," snapped Snape. "You remember what Zafar said
yesterday."
"He's like yourself, _mon cher_,--always apprehensive of some horrible
calamity," muttered the Belgian, blowing a cloud of smoke from his lips.
"This time, I tell you, it's no mere imagination," the Englishman went
on. "Last night, after the _dua_, I left secretly, so as not to arouse
any misgivings, and rode due east until the dawn, when I discovered,
encamped among the _aghrad_, a whole troop of Soudanese soldiers. I got
near enough to ascertain that the officers were Englishmen."
"Well?"
"They've got word somehow that we are passing through," he said. "And
now, if you don't stir yourself, you'll never see Brussels again--you
understand?"
"I have no wish to see Bruxelles, _mon cher_," the elder man replied,
quite undisturbed. "If I did, it would only be to see the inside of a
prison. No; I prefer Africa to the pleasures of the miniature Paris.
Here, if one has a little ivory, one is a king. Life is very pleasant."
"I admit that," his companion said. "But do, for Heaven's sake, get up
and let us decide what to do. There's danger, and we can't afford to be
trapped, especially with all those niggers tied in a string. The
evidence is a bit too strong against us, and the officers are English.
There's no bribing _them_, you know."