"I rejoiced also, you may be sure, over the moral torture they were undergoing. Please understand that I do not by this mean that they had any sense of humiliation—they were incapable of any such feeling; I allude to the injury done to their commercial interests. Just think for a moment—after having undertaken, and almost accomplished, so hazardous a journey, after having gone through such toilsome exertions to provide slaves for the markets of southern Africa—after all this, to see the fruits of their labour gone at one fell swoop! To have to surrender a certain profit, as they thought, and be at all the expense of their first purchase, besides the cost of provisions, cords, chains and yokes! The chains and the yokes, it is true, had been generously restored, and they could take them with them on their necks, but the bags of rice and durra, of which they had provided a supply sufficient to meet their wants across the deserts of Bahiouda and Nubia, became the property of the negroes. These inconsiderate people were even indiscreet enough to lay violent hands on the private supplies of the chief and his escort, dried meat, dates, coffee, tobacco, which up to now they had been compelled to carry on their heads without the power of touching them.
"This wholesale robbery of eatables, however, created a diversion; for the negroes, after having securely rivetted their prisoners and handed them over to us, gave themselves up to the enjoyment of such a meal as they had not made for a long time. We took advantage of the liberty thus accorded to us, and commenced our preparations for departure.
"At least five leagues separated us from Matamma, and some amongst us would be obliged to accomplish the journey on foot. Périères and Delange, who had been dismounted in the fray, might have made use of the horses allotted to our interpreters; but they preferred handing them over to our wounded enemies, on whom the Doctor had operated, to the great astonishment of the negroes. In fact, when the latter saw Delange open his instrument case and take out the forceps to extract the bullets, they thought we had returned to a better frame of mind, and were arranging the preliminaries of an execution. They speedily recognized that we have a peculiar way of our own as regards the infliction of torture, by which health is restored to the victim, and he is set on his feet, and it is just possible that this lesson of practical morality was not thrown away on these overgrown children, cruel, as all children are, by instinct and through ignorance.
"Madame de Guéran was anxious to take with her the female slave, the primary cause of all the trouble, whom she had already restored to consciousness, and hoped, by care and attention, to save altogether. It would, moreover, have been downright inhumanity to have left the unhappy woman with her companions, for she could not have followed them throughout the long journey necessary in order to regain their own country, and she would have died of hunger and sickness in the midst of the desert. Our two Arab interpreters improvised a sort of litter, on which they laid her, themselves undertaking the task of carrying her.
"We started off, and I am bound to admit that the majority of the negroes left off feasting to give us a few parting cheers. Several of them, indeed, escorted us for a considerable time, yelling frantically all the way; but I am constrained to record also that if they did come near us and kiss our hands and our garments, they at the same time indulged our prisoners with a pretty liberal allowance of the leathern strap they knew so well. The old chief, in spite of all our efforts, was the recipient of most of their attentions, and they did their best to pay him back in one hour all they had received from him in two months.
"What would become of all these people, so unexpectedly restored by us to liberty? Our interpreters told us that they had advised many of them to go to Khartoum, where we might meet them again and take them into our employ, if, as was very probable, we should form there a large caravan for our explorations southwards.
"After getting well away from them we lost no time in taking the chains and yokes off our prisoners, and we, in so doing, merely told them that, unless they felt a particular vocation in connection with pistol bullets, they had better keep quiet.
"Why all these precautions? you will say. Had we made up our minds to reduce these men to slavery? No, certainly not; they had disgusted us so much that their society was unbearable. But their restoration to liberty might, possibly, lead to their again taking a fancy to their former slaves, and, should they fall on the latter in the midst of their feasting and revelry, a number, if not all, would speedily be recaptured. Then it must be borne in mind that these men looked upon us as robbers and highwaymen, who had attacked a perfectly legitimate caravan, and had plundered respectable traders.
"They never gave a thought to what we had done for them. They said, and so far they were right, that we should never have had to protect them if, instead of attacking them, we had allowed them to pursue the even tenour of their way.
"And do not imagine, my dear Pommerelle, that all the world will approve of our conduct. There are, even in Europe, plenty of persons inclined to laud the sweets of slavery and to maintain that the slave-traders confer a great boon on the blacks in rescuing them from their own wretched country and landing them in Turkey, where they certainly enjoy a greater amount of ease and comfort than they can do at home.