Then Teita asked if we were connected with the Gbaru. These, Mori explained, were a powerful tribe further inland. Teita suspected a connection because we, like the Gbaru, had the strange habit of covering our bodies with cloth. The Baga feared the Gbaru, who raided them.
Now the greatest menace of this part of Africa—sickness —began to visit us. Four of my sailors and my young cousin Pronax came down with fevers and fluxes. I made them as comfortable on the Jezebel as I could. Doctor Mentor puttered around the patients and looked wise, but I do not think he knew any more about African ills than I did.
When we examined the Astra, we found that the rock had done more damage than we thought. One of the strakes was cracked and leaking. We patched the ship's bottom with tarred wool, sheet lead, and some boards which we shaved down to fit snugly over the site of the damage. With reasonable luck, that patch should have held throughout the journey.
All this took over a ten-day. About two days after my conversation with Teita, we were ready to launch the ships at the next high tide. Around noon, while we were still awaiting the tide, a Baga rushed screaming into the village. Instantly, all the other Baga dropped what they were doing to scamper off, as they had done when my ships sailed into the bay. I looked for Mori to ask the cause of this commotion, but he had fled with the rest.
A thunder of drums echoed across the bay, and a swarm of armed blacks burst out of the forest and rushed upon us, yelling like furies. One Baga, who had been slow in starting, ran towards the river. When they saw he was gaining on them, one of them shot an arrow at him. African bows are puny little things, and the arrows are not even feathered. Nonetheless, the shaft struck the fleeing Baga in the back of the shoulder. Although it did not look like a serious wound, after a few more steps the fugitive began to stagger. Soon he sank to the ground, twitching in his death throes. The arrow had been poisoned. Meanwhile, the newcomers swarmed down from the village to where my ships lay.
Only a few of my crew were armed. Life among the peaceful, friendly Baga had made us careless. I drew my sword and shouted to the others to arm themselves, but it was no use. A half dozen spears and swords could do nothing against a hundred native warriors, many of whom bore spears with heads of iron or bronze.
The newcomers wore kilts and loincloths, either of fur or of coarse, striped cloth. They bore headdresses of feathers and monkey fur and jingled with necklaces, bracelets, and other ornaments of shell, ivory, and metal. Besides their bows and spears, they bore large, oval shields of the hide of Africa's thick-skinned beasts. Their faces were painted in patterns of red and white. They were, I soon learnt, the Gbaru of whom Teita had spoken.
An older man, clad in a kind of toga, seemed to direct them. At a barked command, they drew up in a semicircle around us, spears poised and bows nocked. We stood in a clump with our backs against the Astra.
The man in the toga shouted something at us. When we looked blank, he stepped forward, tapped the blade of my sword with his spear, and pointed to the ground. I dropped the weapon, and the other armed men in my party did likewise.
As soon as we were disarmed, a group of Gbaru sprang upon us, pulling us out of our own crowd one by one. They stripped us of everything but our shoes. My bronze statuette of Ganesha was taken from me with my clothes. I suppose that to this day it hangs from the neck of some Gbaru warrior as a grigri or talisman, half a world away from its Indian home.
The Gbaru then bound our wrists with rawhide thongs, of which they had brought an ample supply. Other thongs linked each man with the next, until we formed a human chain, like that in which I had marched to the gold mines of Upper Egypt-Other Gbaru climbed aboard the ships and fell upon the loot they found there. There was a perfect shower of glassware, purple garments, and other trade goods falling from the deck of the Jezebel as the whooping, laughing Gbaru threw them over the side. Much of the stuff they broke or ruined in their haste and ignorance. My five sick men, including young Pronax, they hauled out and killed by smashing their skulls with clubs. Had Lady Luck spared him, that boy would have grown into a fine man.
One of my three blacks, Sumbo, had been caught with the rest of us. He was, in fact, only four men from me in the human chain. I called:
"Sumbo! Do you understand these people?"
"Who, me?" he said. "What?"
"I said, do you understand these people?"
Sumbo thought awhile and said: "I understand a little only. I am Bulende; my tribe live far off that way." He pointed to the southeast. "But every man speak a little Gbaru."
In fact, since the Gbaru were the strongest tribe in this part > of Africa, their language had become an intertribal tongue, like Greek in the Inner Sea. I said:
"What do you think they'll do with us?"
"Do with us?"
"Yes, you idiot! Eat us?"
Again the long pause. "Not know. Make slaves, maybe. Gbaru not maneaters, but they kill many men for sacrifice to gods."
"Then you shall teach me Gbaru," I said. "Me? Teach you?"
It went on like this for the rest of our journey. While docile and willing, Sumbo was as stupid as a Cyprian ox—certainly the last man anybody would choose to teach a strange and difficult language. These African tongues, I was surprised to .find, had very complex grammars. Moreover, the tone of a word affected its meaning, so that one had to sing one's sentences. It gave the language a musical sound but made it even harder to learn.
Still, by the time we reached Klimoko, I had mastered the words for such elementary things as food, drink, parts of the body, and material objects like houses, rivers, and trees. I could even put together a few simple sentences. The Gbaru made no attempt to silence us; they were usually chattering away loudly themselves. Africans are a noisy folk, always talking, laughing, arguing, shouting, and singing, save when actually hunting or laying an ambush.
BOOK X — Nkoa the African
Our captors loaded us with the loot from the Jezebel and marched us off on a jungle trail. Near the coast, the forest is scrubby, with many openings. In these open spaces grew huge flowers of every hue—scarlet, azure, gold, and purple.
As we marched inland, however, the trees grew taller and taller until they reached a size I had never seen before. We found ourselves inclosed between towering walls of monotonous dark green. Vines hung down from gigantic trees in loops and strands, as tangled as the web of a hedge spider. The ground beside the trail was covered with ferns and palms in riotous profusion.
Birds and monkeys chattered in the trees. We seldom saw large beasts, although we heard them often enough—the trumpeting of the elephant, the snarl of the leopard, the grunt of the wild pig, the scream of the giant man-ape.
The trail was fairly passable, since this was the dry season. Now and then we had to wade through a patch of swamp, where huge white lilies stood up like ghosts. The biting flies and mosquitoes tormented us to distraction, the more so since we were now naked. Some men were frightfully bitten by venomous ants when they carelessly trod upon a procession of the creatures.
We came to a place where the jungle had been cleared for farms. Amid the wide, deforested plain stood Klimoko, the capital of the Gbaru. Klimoko proved much larger than Gombli; practically a real city. I guessed that it sheltered five to ten thousand people. A stockade, the points of which were decorated with human skulls, surrounded it. As we neared the town, our column halted. A violent altercation had broken out among the leaders of our plumed and befurred captors. Sumbo told me: