CHAPTER XVIII
A LINK FROM THE PAST
On their triumphal return to the cliff with the tusks of the slainelephant as trophies of the hunt a strange spectacle met the boys'eyes. Clustered about a sort of altar, which they had not noticedbefore, was a group of the cliff-dwellers who seemed to be deeplyinterested in something that was going forward. A loud sound ofchanting and intoning of what seemed to be a solemn ritual was thefirst inkling the boys had of what was going on.
On joining the throng the lads found that it was some sort of areligious ceremony that was being proceeded with. A group of men inwhite flowing robes and high conical hats--decorated with mysticsymbols worked out in precious stones that looked like rubies andemeralds, though of such size that this seemed scarcelycredible--were walking round and round the altar in a sort of whatthe irreverent Billy termed "a cakewalk." Pausing at each cornerand revolving slowly, three times they intoned the weird chant.
Suddenly the music took on a louder tone arid several men withclashing cymbals joined in. The auditors, too, fell flat on theirfaces and Billy and Lathrop, on the former's suggestion, did thesame.
"Not to do as the others are doing might cost us our heads," sagelyremarked the diplomatic Billy, "and I need mine in my business."
Whatever the nature of the ceremony, it was now evidentlyapproaching a climax. The chanting grew louder and more furious andthe cymbal players clashed their huge metal instruments togetherwith a deafening clangor. Suddenly, from the passage from which thegalleries branched off, there appeared six men clad in robes offlaming scarlet and conical caps of the same color.
They formed an escort to a pitiable figure.
That of a white bearded man who was bent with years and whose eyesgazed vacantly about him as he stumbled along between the red-robeddignitaries. But it was not his age and not his feebleness thatmade the boys' hearts beat quicker and caused a galvanic shock toshoot through them.
The man was white.
There was no doubt about it. In spite of his sun-browned skin andthe barbarous ornaments that covered him, the figure in the centerof the red-robed group was a Caucasian--perhaps an American--afellow countryman.
And now the boys noticed with a shudder that in the hands of each ofthe red-robed men was a knife of some sort of stone--perhaps flint.These cruel looking weapons they brandished as they slowly pacedforward in time to the chanting.
But their captive--if he were a captive seemed indifferent to allthis. His dull eyes gazed straight ahead of him as if he werehypnotized--or, as was more probable, under the influence of somedrug. As the group approached the altar the chanting suddenlystopped and the onlookers rose to their feet. From the altar nowarose a thin spiral of smoke, the offspring of a fire kindled by oneof the priests.
The sun was just setting and showed like a blood-red ball, throughthe mist that arose from low-lying garden lands. As its disktouched the horizon the chanting broke out afresh and the red-robedmen seizing the old white man as if he were a beast dragged himforward and threw him on the altar.
And now for the first time came to the chums the horrifyingrealization of what the scene they were witnessing really meant.
The man was about to be sacrificed!
But even as the red-robed men raised their knives in unison and wereabout to give them the downward lunge that would extinguish the lifeof their feeble victim--and as the other priests and the audienceturning toward the setting sun, chanted louder and morevociferously--a startling interruption occurred.
"By the holy poker you're not going to kill that old man while I canprevent it."
It was Billy Barnes; his face white and his lips set in a thin lineof determination.
As he spoke utterly oblivious to the fact that not one of the mencould understand him--Lathrop, pale-faced also, stepped forward byhis side.
And there stood the two American boys while the auditors--at firstdumb with amazement--began to buzz angrily like a nest of disturbedhornets.
One of the white-robed priests gave a sharp order and once more thered-garbed executors raised their knives.
Billy quietly, though his heart was beating almost to suffocation,slipped a cartridge from the recovered bag into his Arab rifle. Heleveled it at the red-robed knife wielders.
"The first man that moves I'll shoot!"
Although the words were as unintelligible to the priests and thecliff-dwellers as any that had gone before, the gesture with whichBilly raised the rifle to his shoulder and covered the group waseloquent enough. And as it happened, the delay saved the old man'slife; for while they hesitated the sun rushed below the horizon andthe swift African night fell. A loud groan from the crowd announcedthat the hour for the culmination of the sacrifice had passed andthat for the time being the intended victim's life was saved.
But for the boys the situation was serious enough. Powerless toresist such numbers they were seized by scores of the winged men andhustled into the passage, which was lit up by blazing torches of thesame resinous wood that their guide had used on the first night thatthey came there. They were hurried along, their feet hardlytouching the ground, till they reached one of the diverginggalleries. Down this their captors shoved them till they reached asmall cubical cell--windowless and without ventilation. Into thisthey were thrust and a huge stone door that hinged on somecontrivance the boys could not understand swung to upon them with adull bang. But a few minutes later it reopened and another prisonerwas thrust in.
It was the aged captive whose life Billy had saved!
This much they saw in the momentary glare of the torches and then asthe door closed the darkness--so black that you could feel it--shutdown again. But Billy's reportorial curiosity, even in thissituation, was still predominant.
"Who are you?" he asked eagerly of the new arrival, whose face hecould not see and whose presence he could only guess at by thetemporary revelation of the torch-light.
The only answer was a groan; but a few seconds later a voice thatsounded strange from long disuse or unaccustomedness to the use ofthe English language replied:
"I have not heard a white man speak for forty years."
"What?" exclaimed the thunderstruck Billy.
"What I say is true and when you hear my name you will perhapsrealize that fact. I am George Desmond the American explorer."
"The George Desmond who was lost in 1870?" cried Billy, almostchoking with excitement.
"The same," was the reply in the same rusty voice, "like the soundof a long disused door swinging on its hinges," was the way Billydescribed it afterward in the article he wrote about the finding ofGeorge Desmond.
"But George Desmond was a man of thirty-five!" protested Billy,"when he was lost."
"And I am seventy-five," went on the sad voice in the blackness, "Iwas captured by the winged men in 1870. I have kept the record ofthe long years on a notched stick. I never expected to hear thesound of a fellow countryman's voice again."
The poor tired voice broke down, and in the darkness through whichthey could not see the boys heard the old man weeping.
"Great cats!" groaned Billy to Lathrop, whose hand he held so thatthey could be near together in the awful blackness, "forty yearswithout seeing a white face--jumping horn-toads, what a fate!"
But the old man's soft weeping stopped presently and in a firmervoice he said:
"My wife and my sons? Can you tell me anything of them?"
As a newspaper man Billy recollected very clearly the space that hadbeen given some five years before to the death, at a ripe old age,of the wife of George Desmond the lost explorer.
"She is dead," he said gently.
They heard the castaway sigh, and then he asked in a voice he stroveto render firm, but which trembled in spite of itself:
"And my sons?"
"They are all alive and in business in New York," said Billy. "Yourwife died believing to the end that you would come back. Theyplaced her chair so that she could face the east. She died atdaybre
ak with her eyes turned toward the sea beyond which layAfrica."
"Africa!" echoed the tired, disused voice. "Africa! it has cost meeverything I had."
There was silence for some time after this. Neither of the boyswanted to intrude on the silent grief of the explorer so strangelyfound, though each was dying to ask him a host of questions. It wasthe aged man himself who broke the silence at length.
"But I am selfish," he exclaimed. "I should have thanked you beforethis for saving my life. The priests were determined that, as I wasold and useless, my life should be offered to the Sun-god to appeasea sickness that has of late carried off hundreds of the Flying Men.They are a dying race, young men. As a man of science, I predictthat in five years or less there will not be a single one of theonce numerous tribe alive. I have studied them closely and canpredict their extinction."
"Then you have not been a prisoner always?" asked Billy.
"No, my young friend, I have not. When first I came here I wasreceived warmly and was paid high honors. I was allowed to recordmy observations in writing--fortunately I carried a supply of inkand paper."
"You still have the manuscript?" gasped Billy, with the reporter'sinstinct to the fore.
"I have," sighed old Mr. Desmond, "in the cell that I so long calledhome then, the pages still lie. But I have neglected them for manyyears. I had no more writing materials when I used up my slendersupply and I never thought to regain civilization.
"But now did you ever get here?" asked the amazed Billy.
"That is a long story," replied the captive, "but briefly told, itis as follows: In the season of 1870, as you perhaps know, myill-fated expedition left Grand Bassam. My avowed object was tocollect specimens and data for the Smithsonian Institute, but myreal and secret desire was to find the tribe of Flying Men of whoseexistence I had heard in a fragmentary way on previous expeditionsto the West Coast. I have found them--" he went on with a heavysigh--"but at what a cost--at what a cost!"
There was silence for a few minutes and then the old voice went on,gaining in strength as he proceeded, and resumed acquaintance withwords to which his tongue had been long unused.
"My expedition, as you know, was never heard of again. The reasonwas this. In some way the Arab slave-traders--who were thick inthis district then and plied their nefarious trade almostopenly--gained the belief that my expedition was a pretense for aplan of espionage on them and they attacked my camp one night andslaughtered every man in it but myself. Why they did not kill meI do not know, unless it was because of the intercession of a youngArab, a mere youth and the son of the chief. I have never forgottenhis name or his kindness."
"What was his name?" asked Billy, who was deeply interested andwanted to get every detail of the extraordinary story.
"Muley-Hassan!" was the amazing reply.
"Muley-Hassan," echoed Billy, "why, he is the most cold-bloodedfiend in the slave-trade to-day."
"Perhaps," answered the old man, "but he was good to me when he wasa young man and I have never forgotten it."
"Well," he went on, picking up his narrative, "it was not longbefore retribution overtook the Arabs. One night their camp wasattacked by a tribe whose village they had raided and sacked sometime before and only a few of them escaped, among them must havebeen Muley-Hassan, though, till you told me of him, I believed himdead. The savages, seeing that I was not one of the Arab race tookcare of me and I fared well at their hands. But a great longing tosee civilization--to clasp my wife in my arms, to see my childrenand America once more, was always with me, and one night I escapedfrom their village. I wandered half-delirious from fever andstarvation for many days after that, for I lost my way in theforest, and, as I had no compass, wandered aimlessly seeking a riverby which I might follow down to the coast. One night such a sharpattack of fever overtook me that I was-stricken unconscious. I gavemyself up for dead before I lost my senses and only recollectawaking in this village. From that day to this, although I haverepeatedly endeavored to escape I have never been able to do so.The ladder is guarded day and night,"--(this information dashed ahalf-formed hope in Billy's mind of escape by that way,) "and itwould be suicide to attempt to penetrate the great jungles on theother side. I thought to end my days here, but I never dreamed tillthe other day that my life was destined to end as it would have, hadit not been for your brave intervention.
"The malady of which I have spoken has devastated almost everyfamily in the cliff and at the instigation of Agagi, the headpriest--a man who has always hated my influence over his people--Iwas blamed by the other priests for being the cause of theaffliction.
"They pretended to have a revelation from the Sun-god stating thatif my life were sacrificed the curse that rested on thecliff-dwellers would be removed. Accordingly I was seized andchained and would certainly have died had it not been for you. Butalas, young men, I fear you are doomed to forfeit your lives as thecost of rescuing an old man who is not long for this life in anyevent. I wish that you had been far away and had never had thebrave impulse to risk your young lives for my worthless old one."
Now it is a remarkable thing, but Billy, who should have replied tothe aged man in all sorts of high-sounding language, could findnothing to reply to this but:
"Oh, that's all right."
"I think you are the bravest boys I have ever heard of," the old manwas beginning when a soft "hiss-s-st!" caused them all to turn theireyes to the direction in which they knew the door lay, and fromwhich the sound had proceeded.
"H-s-s-s-t," came the sound again.
Did it mean a friend or an enemy?