profitedvery considerably by that illegitimate trade. It was rumoured down at"the coast" that the leaders of these Touareg raiders were not Africans,and this story appears to substantiate a statement which was, at thetime, ridiculed at the Colonial Office in London.
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"Get up, you lazy devil. Stir yourself. We're in a complete hole!"
"Hole? hole? Ah, your English tongue is indeed extraordinaire! A holeis a place in the ground, _n'est ce pas_?"
"Yes, and you'll have a hole in the ground all to yourself, my dearPierre, if you don't bustle up a bit."
Pierre Dubois, the man addressed, a bronzed, grey-bearded, stout,small-eyed Belgian of fifty, was lying tranquilly on his back on a pileof soft rugs, like an Oriental potentate, smoking his _shisha_, ortravelling pipe, and being fanned by an extremely ugly negress. Duboiswas the name he had adopted after leaving the Congo hurriedly, carryingwith him a goodly sum belonging to the Belgian Government, in whoseemploy he had been for ten years. A native of Liege, he was one of thepioneers of that so-called Central African civilisation of trade, gin,and the whip; but after lining his pockets well, and making good hisescape through the boundless virgin forests of "darkest Africa," he hadstarted as a trader in that most marketable of all commodities--blackivory.
Pierre Dubois and Henry Snape, his partner, were slave-raiders. Theydressed as Arabs, and lived as Arabs.
Outside in the blazing noon, beneath the scanty shade of a few palms andmimosa scrub which surrounded that desert watering-place known as Akdul,a number of their heavily-armed followers were lying stretched upon thesand, sleeping soundly after their two-bow prayer to Allah, while hereand there alone sat one of their number on his haunches, wrapped in hiswhite burnouse, hugging his knees, his rifle at his side, keeping watch.They were a forbidding, evil-looking lot these Songhoi Touaregs,pirates of the forests and the desert, each with his black _litham_wrapped around his face concealing his features, a complete arsenal ofweapons in his girdle, a string of charms sewn in little bags of yellowleather around his neck, and, strapped beneath his left arm, a shortcross-kilted sword, keen-edged as a razor.
Beyond, lying in the full sun glare, were sixty or seventy wretched,woolly-haired negroes, men and women, chained together and guarded by adozen of the veiled men. Throughout Northern and Central Africa thevery name of the Songhoi was synonymous with all that was fierce, cruel,and relentless, for they lived by robbing the desert caravans orcapturing slaves in the boundless virgin forests between the Niger andthe Congo, being essentially a nomadic race, and having no other homethan their tents in the Sahara, that limitless wilderness of rock andsand. Of all the slavers of Central Africa these "veiled men" were theworst, for they attacked and burned villages, placed the unfortunateblacks to torture to compel them to reveal the hiding-places of theirstore of ivory, and afterwards took them prisoners, and sold them in thegreat central slave-market at El Obeid, away in Kordofan.
Among the natives of the Upper Congo and the Aruwimi, even the hordes ofthat notorious king of slavers, Tippu-Tib,--so called by the negroesbecause the guns of his men created a noise, from which they have namedhim phonetically,--were more tolerated than the fierce Songhoi bands,with their black veils, which none ever removed, sleeping or waking; forthe track of the latter through the forest or grass-land was alwaysmarked by murder, devastation, and wanton cruelty.
Dubois, when in the service of King Leopold, had been active inendeavouring to put down the trade, but seeing how lucrative it was, andfinding Snape, an English adventurer, ready to join him, he hadcollected a following of the fiercest Touaregs he could gather, and ashe paid all well for their services, while on their part they were proudto be led by a white man in whom they had once lived in fear, theirtrade had, for a long time, been a most lucrative one. They were theterror of the whole region from Stanley Falls to Tanganyika. A dozentimes they had been north to El Obeid with ivory of both varieties,white and black, and on each occasion the profits had been far beyondtheir expectations. The trade is still easy enough in the Congo State,and slaves are captured without very much difficulty. The great risk,however, is to transport them by the route they had been following forthe past two months, as, in order to reach the central market, they hadto pass through that portion of British territory where a very watchfuleye is kept, and where the notorious Arab raider Kilonga-Longa met hisfate only a few months before.
But Dubois and Snape had run the gauntlet many times, and wereabsolutely fearless. On the present raid through the country of Eminand Junker, they had made their captures in the Moubouttou, within theBelgian sphere of influence, with the complicity of the Belgian agent atSanga, whom they, of course, bribed with a goodly present of ivory;then, marching through the great Forest of Eternal Night, due northwardto Zayadin, they had passed through the Dinka country to Fatik, which,being only two days' march from the Bahr-el-Guebel upon which theBritish have posts, is a dangerous point. Nevertheless, they had pushedforward night and day, and were now in the centre of that great,sunburnt desert, the Wilderness of Nouer, which stretches northward forthree hundred miles to El Obeid.
Dubois grumbled loudly at the Englishman for interrupting hismeditations, saying--
"Go and sleep, _mon cher_. You'll be getting fever if you worry toomuch."
"Worry!" echoed Snape. "There's danger, I tell you. Surely you're nota confounded fool, man?"
"Ah," answered his partner, quite calmly, "is there not always dangerhere, in Africa? You have a wonderful imagination, my dear Henri, Iquite admit; but do allow me to finish my sleep. Then let us talk ofthis extraordinary hole, whatever it may be."
"Idiot!" ejaculated the Englishman, hitching up his flowing whiteburnouse. He was a tall, good-looking fellow of forty, whose career,however, had been a singularly eventful one. Since he left Balliol hehad met with a good many adventures in various lands, most of them beingto his discredit. He had been a born gambler, and had drifted from theLondon clubs to the tables at Monte Carlo, and thence, by a very crookedchannel, to that sink of the world, Africa, where chance had brought himin contact with the scoundrel and arch-slaver Dubois. They were awell-matched pair. At college Snape had taken honours for Arabic,therefore his knowledge of that language now served him in good stead.He was one of those men who could never run straight, even though he hadoften tried. He was a born outsider.
"Why idiot?" inquired his partner lazily. The old negress waved the fanbackwards and forwards, understanding not a word of the conversationbetween the headman and the great white Sheikh, who, on account of hisraiding, the Touaregs had named The Father of the Hundred Slaves.
"Well, I'm not the sort of fellow to let the grass grow under my feetwhen there's any danger," snapped Snape. "You remember what Zafar saidyesterday."
"He's like yourself, _mon cher_,--always apprehensive of some horriblecalamity," muttered the Belgian, blowing a cloud of smoke from his lips.
"This time, I tell you, it's no mere imagination," the Englishman wenton. "Last night, after the _dua_, I left secretly, so as not to arouseany misgivings, and rode due east until the dawn, when I discovered,encamped among the _aghrad_, a whole troop of Soudanese soldiers. I gotnear enough to ascertain that the officers were Englishmen."
"Well?"
"They've got word somehow that we are passing through," he said. "Andnow, if you don't stir yourself, you'll never see Brussels again--youunderstand?"
"I have no wish to see Bruxelles, _mon cher_," the elder man replied,quite undisturbed. "If I did, it would only be to see the inside of aprison. No; I prefer Africa to the pleasures of the miniature Paris.Here, if one has a little ivory, one is a king. Life is very pleasant."
"I admit that," his companion said. "But do, for Heaven's sake, get upand let us decide what to do. There's danger, and we can't afford to betrapped, especially with all those niggers tied in a string. Theevidence is a bit too strong against us, and the officers are English.There's
no bribing _them_, you know."
The Belgian stirred himself lazily at last, and asked--
"Are they at a well?"
"No. They are without water."
"Then as this is the only well for about a hundred miles, they'll arrivehere to-day--eh?"
"Of course. That's why I came straight to warn you. There's no time tobe lost. Let's strike camp and get away. It's skip or fight."
"If we skeep--I suppose you mean march--ah! your English language!--thenthey will skeep in pretty quick time after us. They've got wind of ourpresence in the vicinity, therefore why not remain and fight?"
"Fight my own people?" cried Snape. "No,