Bones of the River (19 page)

“Not really, dear old miss? I was always considered a pretty old baby – ‘where have you come from dear old baby out of the nowhere particular into here’ – you know the jolly old hymn, honourable young miss? ‘Who gave you those twiddly-twiddly eyes of blue, a jolly old angel poked them as I came through.’”

“Good God!” gasped Hamilton under his breath. Bones quoting poetry always had this effect upon him.

“I think you’re lovely, Mr Tibbetts,” said Muriel with truth, and Bones giggled.

“You’re a naughty old flatterer!” he gurgled. “At the same time, Ham, old officer, I’ve often been mistaken for Henry Ainley. It’s a fact, dear old thing. I’m not sure whether it’s Henry Ainley or jolly old Owen Nares, but one of those comedians, old thing.”

“You’re sure you don’t mean the performing seals?” asked Hamilton, and Bones closed his eyes in patient resignation.

“I’ll take your word, dear old miss,” he said. “I don’t profess to be beautiful, but I’d pass in a crowd–”

“With a kick,” suggested Hamilton.

“And if you want to paint me,” Bones went on, contemptuous of the interruption, “well, here I am!”

“And if you’d paint him an invisible blue, so that we couldn’t see him,” said Hamilton, “you’d be rendering the community and the Government a great service.”

“You’re very unkind,” said Muriel, crumbling her toast, her grey, insolent eyes on Bones. “Mr Tibbetts has the perfect Greek face.”

“There you are!” said Bones with a smirk.

“His nose is a little too short for the
perfect
Greek, perhaps, but his chin is rather a dream, don’t you think, Captain Hamilton?”

“Have you noticed his cheek?” asked Hamilton sardonically. “That’s a nightmare!”

“There’s a lot about Bones that is very picturesque – let it go at that,” interrupted Sanders with a smile. “He’s rather thin, and his habit of stooping is a little unsightly–”

“And his feet are enormous,” murmured Hamilton.

“Jealousy, dear old thing, jealousy,” said Bones testily. “Don’t paint me, dear young honourable miss! I should never hear the last of it.”

“Paint him as a curiosity,” suggested Hamilton, “and leave a light burning over the picture at night. It would keep the most hardened burglar at bay.”

Bones carried off the visitor to give her a few lessons in the art of composition. She had chosen the residency garden and that patch of high gum-trees by the water’s edge – a perfect retreat on a hot day.

“If you’ll sit over here, dear old miss, you’ll see the river and that dinky little village. Isn’t that fine?”

“It’s perfectly splendid,” said the girl. “Put my easel there, Mr Tibbetts, and will you unfasten my stool? And oh, do please go back and get my paints: I’ve forgotten them.”

A dishevelled Bones ran errands for a quarter of an hour, after which the artistic Muriel began to paint.

Stealing forward until he filled the gap between the trees, and, incidentally, in the very centre of her picture, Bones folded his arms, struck a Napoleonic attitude and waited. He waited for half an hour, and when she said: “Do you mind standing on one side, Mr Tibbetts? I can’t see the view,” he was pardonably annoyed.

Miss Muriel Witherspan, in addition to being a painter, had a passion for information about native life and customs. In one afternoon she exhausted Sanders, in the course of the evening she reduced Hamilton to a nervous wreck.

“Well, it’s like this, you see, the Isisis are not exactly the same as the Akasavas.… No, I don’t think they have any special customs, y’know – no, they don’t eat babies, alive, at least…well, why don’t you ask Bones?”

Nothing would give Bones greater happiness, he informed his superior.

“Naturally, dear old duffer, I’ve studied the jolly old indigenous native more carefully, and–”

“You can lie better, that is all,” said Hamilton with asperity. “She wants horrific stories about these innocent people, and you can invent ’em.”

“Steady the bluffs, dear old Ham,” murmured Bones. “Steady the bluffs!”

“Buffs, you idiot.”

“There’s only an ‘l’ of a difference,” said Bones, exploding with merriment. “That’s rather good, old Ham? Made it up on the spur of the moment, dear old thing – just come out naturally. I must tell dear old honourable miss that!”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” warned Hamilton awfully. “Tell her about human sacrifices.”

“‘L’ of a difference – that’s good enough for
Punch
,” murmured Bones, “really awfully good. You said ‘Steady the bluffs,’ and I said…”

Hamilton left him soaking in the sunshine of his own approval.

The next morning Muriel Witherspan heard of the Wazoos. There was no such tribe on the river, but he had to fasten his stories to some people or other, and she listened open-mouthed.

“Mr Tibbetts was telling me how the Wazoos commit suicide by burying themselves head downward,” she said at lunch. And again: “The Wazoos, Mr Tibbetts says, live in trees in summer to keep away from the mosquitoes.”

Sanders blinked, but agreed.

To the unfortunate Wazoos, Bones affixed the creations of his fancy. On their behalf he invented a kingdom (he drew it on the firm sand of the beach), and a dynasty beginning with Wog-Wog the First and ending with Boo-Bah the Ninth.

“You’ve done it, Bones,” said Hamilton one morning, meeting his subordinate on the parade ground. “That lady wants to go to Wazooland, and Sanders had to prevent her forcibly from wiring to her lordly parent for permission. It only shows what mischief a ready liar can make.”

“I like that!” said Bones indignantly.

“Of course you do – Sanders is taking her up to the Ochori, and is breaking to her gently the fact that the Wazoos
ain’t
!”

“Why, you treacherous old officer hound!” protested Bones. “Didn’t you tell me–”

“Stand to attention when you speak to your superior officer,” said Hamilton sternly.

“Deuced unfair, sir,” murmured Bones. “Deuced unsporting, dear old Judas!”

It was Sanders who took her to the Upper River on the
Zaire
, but the chagrin of Bones at being deprived of the privilege of escorting the beautiful visitor was relieved when, the day after the departure of the chief, a pigeon post came to headquarters. Taking the little paper from the pigeon’s leg, Hamilton saw that it was from Sanders and marked “Urgent.”

“Send Bones instantly to Lujamalababa by Wiggle. Arrest and bring to headquarters Saka the witch doctor.”

“I suppose you’d better hop,” said Hamilton thoughtfully. “That blighter has been seeing things again.”

*  *  *

In the Akasava country, beyond Lujamalababa, on the farther side of the Great Lake, lived Saka, the sorcerer, who was the son of a sorcerer and the great-grandson of two others. This magic man had power of life and death. He could touch the dead upon their breasts, and they would straightaway open their eyes and speak. And he could look upon a man or woman, and they would disappear and never be seen again. So it was said.

Once, a petty chief and his tribe, who was a very rich man, went away to the Frenchi country to trade skins and ivory, and because he did not trust his relations – as who does? – he left with Saka all his movable wealth, and Saka buried it in his presence beneath the floor of his hut, uttering certain incantations which would produce fatal boils upon the neck of whosoever disturbed the ground; and the small chief went away, satisfied that his riches were safe.

In seven moons he came back and went to the hut of Saka, and they dug up the ground, but no treasure was there.

“O ko,” said Saka, in cheerful dismay, “this is because of my magic! For I must have looked too hard at the pretty wonders of yours, M’guru, and they have gone into nothing.”

M’guru, who was a trading man and therefore sceptical by nature and training, carried his woes to Sanders, and the Commissioner summoned Saka before him.

“Man,” he said, “they tell me you are a great magician, and that whatsoever you look upon disappears. I also am a magician, and lo! I stretch out my hand, and where is the free man who walks without shackles on his legs? He has vanished to my Village of Irons, where bad men labour everlastingly for the Government, and even great chiefs are no higher than fishermen. Now go, Saka, and look well with your wonderful eyes for the treasure of M’guru. And because you are a magician, I think you will find it.”

Saka went away, and came back in three days’ time with the story of his discovery.

“Lord, by the magic of my eyes I have seen all these wonderful treasures of M’guru. They are buried at three trees by the water, and I have dug them up and given them to M’guru.”

“That is good,” said Sanders. “Saka, I am a man of few words and many duties. Do not let me come again to this or that palaver, or there will be unhappiness in your hut.”

He whiffled his cane suggestively, and Saka, who was an imaginative man, winced. Thereafter, he did much to establish his fame with his people, though all his experiments were not uniformly welcomed. He looked upon the young wife of M’guru, his enemy, and she too disappeared, and M’guru shrewdly suspected that she was not buried near the three trees by the water. He sent for the sorcerer by virtue of his authority.

“Saka, by your magic you shall bring me back my young wife, or I shall bind you for Sanders.”

“M’guru,” said Saka, surprised, “I did not know that you had a wife; but by my wonderful powers I will find her and bring her to your hut, and you will give me two teeth
[5]
because of my talk with the pretty devils who sit around my bed every night and tell me stories.”

It happened that Sanders was in the neighbourhood, and the palaver which followed was brief and, to Saka, painful. Thereafter, the sorcerer’s eyes ceased to function.

Now, Saka was a sour man of middle age; and, like all witch doctors, intensely vain. The punishment, no less than the loss of his prestige, embittered him; and, being of an inventive turn of mind, he discovered a method of regaining the authority which, whilst it did not profit him greatly, caused intense annoyance to those whom he chose to regard as his enemies. Men and women who came secretly in his hut at night to seek his intervention in their affairs, heard of a new and more potent devil than any that had come to the Lake country. His name was M’lo; he was of microscopic size, and worked his mischief from some familiar article of clothing where he had lodged himself.

“You have fire in your teeth,” he said to one supplicant, whose swollen jaw and agonised expression were eloquent of his suffering. “My magic tells me that M’lo is working powerfully against you.” He closed his eyes in an ecstasy of divination. “He lives in the blue cloth of E’gera, the wife of M’guru. This you must burn. If you betray me to M’lo, and he knows I have told you, he will kill you?”

The following morning, the beautiful blue cloth which encircled the figure of E’gera, principal and favourite wife of M’guru, vanished, and became a heap of black and smouldering fibre in the recesses of the forest.

To a man whose wife had given him cause for uneasiness (to put the matter mildly) he revealed the presence of M’lo in the growing corn of an enemy’s garden, and in the morning no corn stood where the seeker after his hateful oppressor had searched.

He discovered M’lo malignly surveying the village from a fire beyond M’guru’s hut, and in the morning it was quenched. And nobody betrayed him because of their fear of the parasitical demon. Nobody save a spy of Sanders, whose business was to know and tell.

He had an interview with Saka, posing as a man who had lost a dog, and Saka told him of M’lo and how the devil might be exorcised by putting fire to M’guru’s hut. This he told because the spy was of another village.

Then on a day came Lieutenant Tibbetts with four soldiers, and they carried away Saka the sorcerer to a place where M’lo had no influence.

*  *  *

In the blue dusk which immediately precedes the darkness of night a white steamer picked her way through the pestiferous shoals that infest the river opposite the village of Lugala, and all the people of the village came down to the beach, hopeful that something would occur to afford a subject for gossip during the remaining hours of the night, they being great story-tellers and immensely credulous. Heavy rains had fallen; the shallow bed had silted up; new sandbanks had appeared where deep channels had run before; and the prospect of sensation was not unjustified.

Unconscious of the possibility which heavy rains and shifting sands may bring, the navigator of the steamer came at full speed, a fierce light of resolve in his eye, and the greater half of a banana occupying the cavity of his mouth. In the bow of the
Wiggle
a Kano boy plied a long stick, thrusting it into the water and relating his discoveries in a whining monotone.

“A fathom and half a fathom,” he droned, and then: “A fathom.”

The
Wiggle
thudded into something soft and, partly yielding, swung broadside to the stream, and stopped.

“Woof…umph…hgg!”

Bones’ natural expression of horror and amazement was somewhat distorted by the banana. He swallowed hastily and nearly choked, and then: “O ten and ten fools!” he snapped, glaring down at the perfectly innocent sounding boy. “Did you not say a fathom and a fathom and a half, and here is my fine ship upon the banks!”

“Lord, there is not a fathom and a fathom and a half here,” said the sounding boy calmly. “When I spoke we were in such water. Now we are on the sand. It is the will of God.”

Bones uttered an impatient tut and looked round. The night had come instantly. From the shore he saw the flicker of fires burning before the villagers’ huts, but knew there was no man of the Isisi who would come out to the rescue of the ship, since that implied standing waist-high in a river infested by crocodiles, in order to lift the
Wiggle
to deep water.

He was safe enough until the morning, for the pressure of the current would keep the
Wiggle
fast to the bank. But between safety and comfort was a wide margin. The floor of his sleeping cabin canted over to an angle of thirty degrees. It was impossible either to sit or lie in comfort. Bones ordered out the boat, and had himself rowed to the shore.