Jules Verne (33 page)

"Is the cone, then, entirely under water?" murmured Dick Sand.

He must know; and, in order to know, he must pierce a third hole, at
the very top.

But it was asphyxia, it was immediate death, if the result of this
last attempt should prove fruitless. The air remaining inside would
escape through the upper sheet of water, and the water would fill the
whole cone.

"Mrs. Weldon," then said Dick Sand, "you know the situation. If we
delay, respirable air will fail us. If the third attempt fails, water
will fill all this space. Our only chance is that the summit of the
cone is above the level of the inundation. We must try this last
experiment. Are you willing?"

"Do it, Dick!" replied Mrs. Weldon.

At that moment the lantern went out in that medium already unfit for
combustion. Mrs. Weldon and her companions were plunged in the most
complete darkness.

Dick Sand was perched on Hercules's shoulders. The latter was hanging
on to one of the lateral cavities. Only his head was above the bed of
water.

Mrs. Weldon, Jack, and Cousin Benedict were in the last story of
cells.

Dick Sand scratched the wall, and his ramrod pierced the clay rapidly.
In this place the wall, being thicker and harder also, was more
difficult to penetrate. Dick Sand hastened, not without terrible
anxiety, for by this narrow opening either life was going to penetrate
with the air, or with the water it was death.

Suddenly a sharp hissing was heard. The compressed air escaped—but a
ray of daylight filtered through the wall. The water only rose eight
inches, and stopped, without Dick Sand being obliged to close the
hole. The equilibrium was established between the level within and
that outside. The summit of the cone emerged. Mrs. Weldon and her
companions were saved.

At once, after a frantic hurra, in which Hercules's thundering voice
prevailed, the cutlasses were put to work. The summit, quickly
attacked, gradually crumbled. The hole was enlarged, the pure air
entered in waves, and with it the first rays of the rising sun. The
top once taken off the cone, it would be easy to hoist themselves on
to its wall, and they would devise means of reaching some neighboring
height, above all inundations.

Dick Sand first mounted to the summit of the cone.

A cry escaped him.

That particular noise, too well known by African travelers, the
whizzing of arrows, passed through the air.

Dick Sand had had time to perceive a camp a hundred feet from the
ant-hill, and ten feet from the cone, on the inundated plain, long
boats, filled with natives.

It was from one of those boats that the flight of arrows had come the
moment the young novice's head appeared out of the hole.

Dick Sand, in a word, had told all to his companions. Seizing his gun,
followed by Hercules, Acteon, and Bat, he reappeared at the summit of
the cone, and all fired on one of the boats.

Several natives fell, and yells, accompanied by shots, replied to the
detonation of the fire-arms.

But what could Dick Sand and his companions do against a hundred
Africans, who surrounded them on all sides?

The ant-hill was assailed. Mrs. Weldon, her child, and Cousin
Benedict, all were brutally snatched from it, and without having had
time to speak to each other or to shake hands for the last time, they
saw themselves separated from each other, doubtless in virtue of
orders previously given.

A last boat took away Mrs. Weldon, little Jack and Cousin Benedict.
Dick Sand saw them disappear in the middle of the camp.

As to him, accompanied by Nan, Old Tom, Hercules, Bat, Acteon and
Austin, he was thrown into a second boat, which went toward another
point of the hill.

Twenty natives entered this boat.

It was followed by five others.

Resistance was not possible, and nevertheless, Dick Sand and his
companions attempted it. Some soldiers of the caravan were wounded
by them, and certainly they would have paid for this resistance with
their lives, if there had not been a formal order to spare them.

In a few minutes, the passage was made. But just as the boat landed,
Hercules, with an irresistible bound, sprang on the ground. Two
natives having sprung on him, the giant turned his gun like a club,
and the natives fell, with their skulls broken.

A moment after, Hercules disappeared under the cover of the trees,
in the midst of a shower of balls, as Dick Sand and his companions,
having been put on land, were chained like slaves.

The aspect of the country was entirely changed since the inundation.
It had made a lake of the plain where the termite village stood. The
cones of twenty ant-hills emerged, and formed the only projecting
points on this large basin.

The Coanza had overflowed during the night, with the waters of its
tributaries swelled by the storm.

This Coanza, one of the rivers of Angola, flows into the Atlantic, a
hundred miles from the cape where the "Pilgrim" was wrecked. It was
this river that Lieutenant Cameron had to cross some years later,
before reaching Benguela. The Coanza is intended to become the vehicle
for the interior transit of this portion of the Portuguese colony.
Already steamers ascend its lower course, and before ten years elapse,
they will ply over its upper bed. Dick Sand had then acted wisely in
seeking some navigable river toward the north. The rivulet he had
followed had just been emptied into the Coanza. Only for this sudden
attack, of which he had had no intimation to put him on his guard, he
would have found the Coanza a mile farther on. His companions and he
would have embarked on a raft, easily constructed, and they would have
had a good chance to descend the stream to the Portuguese villages,
where the steamers come into port. There, their safety would be
secured.

It would not be so.

The camp, perceived by Dick Sand, was established on an elevation near
the ant-hill, into which fate had thrown him, as in a trap. At the
summit of that elevation rose an enormous sycamore fig-tree, which
would easily shelter five hundred men under its immense branches.
Those who have not seen those giant trees of Central Africa, can form
no idea of them. Their branches form a forest, and one could be lost
in it. Farther on, great banyans, of the kind whose seeds do not
change into fruits, completed the outline of this vast landscape.

It was under the sycamore's shelter, hidden, as in a mysterious
asylum, that a whole caravan—the one whose arrival Harris had
announced to Negoro—had just halted. This numerous procession of
natives, snatched from their villages by the trader Alvez's agents,
were going to the Kazounde market. Thence the slaves, as needed, would
be sent either to the barracks of the west coast, or to N'yangwe,
toward the great lake region, to be distributed either in upper Egypt,
or in the factories of Zanzibar.

As soon as they arrived at the camp, Dick Sand and his companions had
been treated as slaves. Old Tom, his son Austin, Acteon, poor Nan,
negroes by birth, though they did not belong to the African race, were
treated like captive natives. After they were disarmed, in spite of
the strongest resistance, they were held by the throat, two by two, by
means of a pole six or seven feet long, forked at each end, and closed
by an iron rod. By this means they were forced to march in line, one
behind the other, unable to get away either to the right or to the
left. As an over precaution, a heavy chain was attached to their
waists. They had their arms free, to carry burdens, their feet free to
march, but they could not use them to flee. Thus they were going to
travel hundreds of miles under an overseer's lash. Placed apart,
overcome by the reaction which followed the first moments of their
struggle against the negroes, they no longer made a movement. Why had
they not been able to follow Hercules in his flight? And, meanwhile,
what could they hope for the fugitive? Strong as he was, what would
become of him in that inhospitable country, where hunger, solitude,
savage beasts, natives, all were against him? Would he not soon regret
his companion's fate? They, however, had no pity to expect from the
chiefs of the caravan, Arabs or Portuguese, speaking a language they
could not understand. These chiefs only entered into communication
with their prisoners by menacing looks and gestures.

Dick Sand himself was not coupled with any other slave. He was a white
man, and probably they had not dared to inflict the common treatment
on him. Unarmed, he had his feet and hands free, but a driver watched
him especially. He observed the camp, expecting each moment to see
Negoro or Harris appear. His expectation was in vain. He had no doubt,
however, that those two miserable men had directed the attack against
the ant-hill.

Thus the thought came to him that Mrs. Weldon, little Jack, and Cousin
Benedict had been led away separately by orders from the American or
from the Portuguese. Seeing neither one nor the other, he said to
himself that perhaps the two accomplices even accompanied their
victims. Where were they leading them? What would they do with them?
It was his most cruel care. Dick Sand forgot his own situation to
think only of Mrs. Weldon and hers.

The caravan, camped under the gigantic sycamore, did not count less
than eight hundred persons, say five hundred slaves of both sexes,
two hundred soldiers, porters, marauders, guards, drivers, agents, or
chiefs.

These chiefs were of Arab and Portugese origin. It would be difficult
to imagine the cruelties that these inhuman beings inflicted on their
captives. They struck them without relaxation, and those who fell
exhausted, not fit to be sold, were finished with gunshots or the
knife. Thus they hold them by terror. But the result of this system
is, that on the arrival of the caravan, fifty out of a hundred slaves
are missing from the trader's list. A few may have escaped, but the
bones of those who died from torture mark out the long routes from the
interior to the coast.

It is supposed that the agents of European origin, Portuguese for the
most part, are only rascals whom their country has rejected, convicts,
escaped prisoners, old slave-drivers whom the authorities have been
unable to hang—in a word, the refuse of humanity. Such was Negoro,
such was Harris, now in the service of one of the greatest contractors
of Central Africa, Jose-Antonio Alvez, well known by the traders of
the province, about whom Lieutenant Cameron has given some curious
information.

The soldiers who escort the captives are generally natives in the pay
of the traders. But the latter have not the monopoly of those raids
which procure the slaves for them. The negro kings also make atrocious
wars with each other, and with the same object. Then the vanquished
adults, the women and children, reduced to slavery, are sold by the
vanquishers for a few yards of calico, some powder, a few firearms,
pink or red pearls, and often even, as Livingstone says, in periods of
famine, for a few grains of maize.

The soldiers who escorted old Alvez's caravan might give a true idea
of what African armies are.

It was an assemblage of negro bandits, hardly clothed, who brandished
long flint-lock guns, the gun-barrels garnished with a great number of
copper rings. With such an escort, to which are joined marauders who
are no better, the agents often have all they can do. They dispute
orders, they insist on their own halting places and hours, they
threaten to desert, and it is not rare for the agents to be forced to
yield to the exactions of this soldiery.

Though the slaves, men or women, are generally subjected to carry
burdens while the caravan is on the march, yet a certain number of
porters accompany it. They are called more particularly "Pagazis," and
they carry bundles of precious objects, principally ivory. Such is the
size of these elephants' teeth sometimes, of which some weigh as much
as one hundred and sixty pounds, that it takes two of these "Pagazis"
to carry them to the factories. Thence this precious merchandise is
exported to the markets of Khartoum, of Zanzibar and Natal.

On arriving, these "Pagazis" are paid the price agreed upon. It
consists in twenty yards of cotton cloth, or of that stuff which bears
the name of "Merikani," a little powder, a handful of cowry (shells
very common in that country, which serve as money), a few pearls, or
even those of the slaves who would be difficult to sell. The slaves
are paid, when the trader has no other money.

Among the five hundred slaves that the caravan counted, there were
few grown men. That is because, the "Razzia" being finished and
the village set on fire, every native above forty is unmercifully
massacred and hung to a neighboring tree. Only the young adults of
both sexes and the children are intended to furnish the markets.
After these men-hunts, hardly a tenth of the vanquished survive. This
explains the frightful depopulation which changes vast territories of
equatorial Africa into deserts.

Here, the children and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of
that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in
the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women
covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly
and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in
addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more
torturing than the convict's chain, is the most lamentable that can be
imagined.

Yes, the sight of the miserable people, hardly living, whose voices
have no sound, ebony skeletons according to Livingstone's expression,
would touch the hearts of wild beasts. But so much misery did not
touch those hardened Arabs nor those Portuguese, who, according to
Lieutenant Cameron, are still more cruel. This is what Cameron says:
"To obtain these fifty women, of whom Alvez called himself proprietor,
ten villages had been destroyed, ten villages having each from one
hundred to two hundred souls: a total of fifteen hundred inhabitants.
Some had been able to escape, but the greater part—almost all—had
perished in the flames, had been killed in defending their families,
or had died of hunger in the jungle, unless the beasts of prey had
terminated their sufferings more promptly.