Once again, there was the general obeisance, the respect, and the joy. Once again that savage welcome went up from hundreds of throats:
“Edo, Edo, Edo…"
Yet again evil faces leered. Other figures had huge carved headdresses in the form of faces covering them to their shoulders. The truck slowed, stopped in a central compound ringed with mud-walled, grass-roofed huts, a compound now lined deep with liquor-inflamed men and women.
There was a hush then, and Shaw heard the men in front of the truck getting down. The door was banged to and then the tailboard was let down and hands reached in, roughly dragged Shaw and the girl across the boards and untied the ropes around their ankles as Wiley, who had evidently been in the front of the vehicle, looked in at them. Opposite there was a long, low hut with a canopy extended over a raised platform in front of it, and in the centre of this platform, flanked by tall guards, sat a small, wizened, white-haired African with a plumed cap on his head, and dressed in a richly embroidered robe which seemed almost to smother his skinny frame.
This would be the headman.
As Wiley approached, the old man got up. Together with his guards, he prostrated himself at Wiley’s feet, remaining there until the big man bent and lightly touched him on the shoulder. Rising, the old headman and his guards took up their places on the platform again, together with Wiley now, and then Wiley spoke to him in the local dialect. After some minutes of talk, the headman gave a signal to his guards, and four of them left the platform and advanced on Shaw and Gillian Ross.
They were turned roughly around and sharp weapons pricked into their backs.
There was a small, choked cry from the girl.
Shaw bit back the words that came to his lips, knew he could achieve nothing by making any protests now. He murmured, “Hold on, Gillian. I’m going to get you clear… just remember that, whatever they do.”
She gave a shiver, drew in her breath sharply as the men pushed her forward. She looked back briefly over her shoulder and Shaw caught the gleam of pure terror, of shock, in her eyes. And then she was gone away from him, across the compound, shoulders drooping, the men’s hands dark and hot on her white flesh. Shaw watched the men push her into one of the huts and then take up positions outside the heavy door which they pulled across the entrance, a door held in place by a thick wooden cross-beam resting in brackets on either side.
After that he was taken himself to a similar hut not far from the girl’s. The men tied his bound hands to a big stake set in the centre, but loosely and on a long stretch so that he could lie down, however uncomfortably — lie down, he thought cynically, so that he would get some rest and not collapse from exhaustion before the climax — and then he was left alone.
All that day he heard the guards patrolling outside the hut and all the time there was the incessant, inescapable beat of the drums, throbbing into his brain, and the rising and falling chant of the villagers. He was visited only twice, when women brought him food and water. They didn’t speak to him; they merely set down the earthenware vessels and went out again, breasts swinging. Shaw was left alone with his aching thoughts, the bitterly self-reproachful thoughts which revolved around the way in which Hartog had persuaded him to believe in that story… and yet the odd thing was, he still couldn’t help feeling that the man wasn’t lying, at any rate not wholly. Could it be that Hartog really had fooled Edo and the Cult after all; that they were waiting for something, when they gave that as yet undefined signal, that wouldn’t happen at all?
Shaw felt a stirring of hope; but it faded when he remembered that Hartog must have known about Edo’s plan all the time he was talking to him yesterday morning, had known all about it and hadn’t told Shaw so that he could act on it. When he’d been down where the train had been attacked, that must have been when he was getting his final orders. There could have been so much more behind the work he’d done for Russia than he’d been prepared to admit. And there were those insane flickers in the man’s eyes; whatever he was up to, it was something pretty terrible…
Everything depended on Stephen Geisler’s alertness now.
As night came down over Zambi village the flicker of fires came redly through the cracks around the hut’s door, sending ghostly shadows chasing across the walls; and all the time still there was the deadly monotonous drumbeat and a sound as of something unnamable going on outside to the accompaniment of that dismal, chilling chant. There were hoarse men’s cries, excited voices, and the shivering, exultant cries of young girls… there was a kind of foreboding about it, as though the villagers were building up to a climax, the grand finale of some ancient, evil ceremony — the last act which Wiley had spoken of back in Jinda the day before.
In spite of his mental turmoil and his terrible anxiety, Shaw had fallen into a light sleep by the time they came for him, which was in the very early hours of the following morning. That sleep, and the food and drink which he had had during the day, had refreshed him and the aches and pains of the truck-ride from Jinda had receded.
The door was dragged back and two Africans armed with those short clubs shaped like legs of lambs stood there, while others untied his hands from the stake, and then they beckoned him out, and spoke abruptly to him in their own tongue. Flexing his muscles, easing away the cramp, Shaw obeyed the obvious meaning of the order. He went forward, walked out into the light of the fires and the torches, beneath a mist-shrouded moon which betokened the restarting of the rains, the lull ending. Immediately in front of the hut was drawn up a double file of blacks in their full ceremonial dress; over all there was that chanting which Shaw had heard, mounting and falling away again, all through the day and night. As he appeared it changed to a kind of growl, a deep-throated roar of anticipation in which was mingled revenge and cruelty and hate and joy, as though all the Dark Gods were urging these men on to some terrible deed through which they would attain their heaven.
“Ai…ya, ai…ya…“Kill… kill… kill…
A few moments later there was a loud, commanding cry from the headman’s verandah, and at once the chanting stopped, stopped on a breath, every man together. It was just as if a radio had been switched off, a radio that had been going at full blast and had now left a dreadful silence behind it, a void… a void which would have to be filled with something very soon. Ahead of his guards now, Shaw was marched through the ranks of men, past the muscular bodies, the sweat-bright bodies on which the flickering firelight glinted redly and was reflected by the metal of the barbed spears and the ornamentation. Their hips jiggled still to the now dead rhythm of the silent drums; Shaw felt their breath hot on his face and the strong smell of native sweat was heavy on the air, the air which was very still and close. Then the drums started sounding out again ominously, low and vibrant at first, then swelling to a crescendo roar of noise as more and more came in. The Africans began moving, nightmare figures in those weird headdresses and with bones rattling at their ankles, closing in behind Shaw, opening out in front as he went along. He had the curious sensation that he was being as it were digested, pushed along willy-nilly by some extraordinary process of expansion and contraction, an undulation like some gross alimentary canal. He was automaton-like in the grip of some power and strength which was too great for him; it was as if he, too, had fallen under the spell of the Dark Continent, that he too had been caught up at last in something only partly understood, some relic of the dim, barbarous, primeval past which had strayed into the later twentieth century to distort his mind and weaken his will. And yet, as he walked through those ranks, his perception didn’t altogether leave him, and after a while he became conscious of something else in the air, some vague undercurrent, a curious tension which, it seemed to him, went a little way beyond the forced hysteria of chant and drumbeat and ceremonial.