The hot night air brooded steamy and close upon the slumbering camp of the slavers, but to these it mattered nothing. Ferocious Arab and bloodthirsty negro alike were plunged in calm and peaceful slumber.
Not so the unhappy captives. To the tortures of their cramping bonds and the bites of innumerable insects from which they were entirely powerless to protect themselves, were added those of anticipation. With a refinement of cruelty which was thoroughly Oriental, the slaver chief had decreed a respite. He had caused his victims to undergo in imagination the horrible torments he intended should be their lot on the morrow, and, to this end, he had ordered them to be taken down from the tree and put back as they were before, so that they might have the whole night through to meditate upon what awaited them on the following day.
Haviland had fallen asleep through sheer exhaustion, but his slumbers were fitful, and ever haunted by frightful visions, which would start him wide awake and quaking: for his nerves were unstrung with the awful ordeal he had undergone; and further, the recollection of the sickening massacre, the heat and excitement of battle over, was one to haunt. In his broken, unrestful sleep he was back at Saint Kirwin’s, and, instead of the Headmaster, it was Mushâd, duly arrayed in academicals—which did not seem a bit strange or out of the way in the bizarre reality of his dream—who was about to pass sentence upon him. And then appeared Cetchy, not as he used to be, but as a big, powerful, full-grown man, and started to punch the spurious Doctor’s head, and they fought long and hard, and he watched them in powerless and agonising apprehension, for upon the issue of the contest depended whether he should undergo the hideous fate in store for him or not. And then he awoke.
To the first sense of relief succeeded a quick realisation that the actuality of their position was worse than the make-believe of any dream. Involuntarily a groan escaped him. The savage face of one of his guards shot up noiselessly, with a sleepily malignant grin. But Haviland realised that it was growing almost imperceptibly lighter. The day would soon be here.
It was the hour before dawn, and sleep lay heavy upon the slave-hunters’ camp. Even their sentinels scarcely took the trouble to keep awake. Why should they? Did they not belong to the great Mushâd, whose name was a terror to half a continent, whose deeds a sweeping scourge? Who would dare to assail or molest such a power as this? So, in the faint lightening of the darkness which preceded the first dawn of day, they slumbered on, heavily, peacefully, unsuspectingly. And then came the awakening. The awakening of death.
The vibrant barking slogan seems to shatter the world, as the destroyers, apparently starting up from nowhere, pour over the silent camp, and each affrighted sleeper leaps up, only to meet the slash of the broad shearing blade which rends his vitals, and hurls him back to the earth, a deluging corpse. Huge figures, fell and dark, hundreds and hundreds of them, and yet more and more, with streaming adornments and mighty shields and short-handled, broad-bladed spears—this is what the captives behold in that terrible hour of lightening dawn. Their former enemies, overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers, entirely taken by surprise, have not even time to rise and defend themselves. They are struck down, ripped, before they can gain their feet and lay hand upon a weapon. And they themselves? They, too, will be butchered in the helplessness of their bonds, but it will be a swift and sudden death.
But somehow the tide of slaughter seems to surge round them, not over them, to pass them by. What does it mean? That in the confusion and uncertain light they are counted already dead as they lie there, but even in that case these savages would inevitably rip them with their spears? Something like a glimmer of hope seems to light up the despair at their hearts, as it occurs to them that the surprise and massacre of their enemies may mean ultimate rescue for themselves.
Yet who and what are these savages? They are for the most part men of splendid physique, tall and straight, and of a red-brown colour, and their features are of the negroid type. They carry great shields akin to the Zulu, only more oval in shape, and more massive, and the latter is also the case with regard to their short-handled stabbing spears, and their battle-shout is a loud, harsh, inarticulate bark, indescribably terrible when uttered simultaneously by many throats. Here, as uttered by over a thousand, words can hardly express the blood-curdling menace it conveys. But, while thus pondering, the attention of these new arrivals is turned to themselves. Ha! now their time has come. With ready spear two of the savages bend over them. The dark faces are grim and pitiless, and the spears descend, but not to be sheathed in their bodies. The tense thongs, severed in more places than one, fly from them. Their limbs are free.
They could hardly realise it. They stared stupidly upward at the ring of faces gazing down upon them. What did it mean? Then their glance fell upon one among that vast increasing group of towering men. If that was not the ghost of Kumbelwa, why it was Kumbelwa himself. And then a string of the most extravagant sibonga, bursting from the warrior in question, convinced them that this was indeed so.
“In truth, Amakosi,” he concluded, “well was it for you that Mushâd preferred to take his revenge cool, else had these been too late.”