On the fringe of the dense forest they camped. The warrior guide went to acquaint Zalu Zako of their approach, else otherwise the sight of a white might provoke an attempt at massacre or flight. On the third day the man returned bearing greetings from Zalu Zako personally who remembered well Infunyana, the only white man whom he had ever met.
For two days, on a faint trail, in a steamy heat pulsing with chromatic birds and lizards, they journeyed through the forest, the skirts of the vast Ituri whose deepest recess is the home of the pygmy. One early forenoon they were halted by the warrior in apparently trackless jungle and bidden to camp. Mungongo was indignant, but protest was useless as the man refused to conduct them any farther, saying that Zalu Zako would come to them. So the carriers cut a circle and built a zareba and the messenger was swallowed by the green wall bearing presents of two rifles.
Chapter 14
About a mile from Birnier’s camp, through forest so dense that even the progress of a native clambering from trunk to trunk and over undergrowth ten feet deep was slow and tortuous, was the temporary village of Zalu Zako; some six or seven hundred huts of branches and creepers straggling over a wide area of ground which had been roughly cleared from undergrowth by a few slaves and women.
The hut of Zalu Zako, as those of most of the bigger chiefs and wizards, was furnished with reeds upon the floor to avoid squatting actually in the green slime, and boasted a palisade run from tree to tree enclosing the huts of his two wives, women and slaves. Every morning the leader of a long line of slaves bringing supplies from the villages in the open, chanting softly the song of the march, entered the village through a mass of creepers which hung like a curtain of humid green. Many hundreds of warriors with their chiefs had deserted their king after the flight from Yagonyana’s village.
In the mind of Zalu Zako was doubt and perplexity as in those of his people. All the accepted “laws” and “facts” of his world had been set at naught; it was as if buck lived in the rivers and fish ran roaring through the forests. Fear, curiosity, and resentment filled him. Sometimes it appeared that Eyes-in-the-hands [pg 153] had indeed proved to be a more powerful god than the Unmentionable One, of whom he was, or should have been, high priest and king; that he had eaten him up as they said; so perhaps the better course was to submit to this being invincible. Yet this very anarchy of his beliefs had released once more the passion for Bakuma whom he had renounced, the desire for whom had been inhibited by the sense of the inevitability of the mandate of the witch-doctors. Hereditary custom, which made him feel that it was incumbent upon him—a primitive sense of duty—to be king-god warred with this longing for Bakuma. The fact that he was not yet bound to celibacy quickened the seed of rebellion against the domination of the wizards. If he could escape the godhood then Bakuma was alive again. For to his mind a ban upon the personal ego was far stronger than any ban upon a second person.
Chewing the cud of this sweet grass of hope squatted Zalu Zako one morning in the dignified solitude of his compound on the threshold of his hut. Opposite him sat the brother conspirator of Bakahenzie, Marufa, a brown shadow in comparison to the gleaming of the royal insignia of the ivory bangles. They sat silent, motionless, save for the occasional sparse movement of snuff taking. In the steamy heat a continual mutter and rustle persisted, punctuated by the harsh scream of a green parrot or the squawks of a troop of monkeys. In the faintly spattered sunlight percolating through the bowered roof vivid lizards rivalled in colour the rare finger of an orchid clinging to the great tree beside the hut. Through the humid air came the faint chant of carriers at the end of a journey; swelled [pg 154] louder and ceased. At the mutter of greeting near by Marufa grunted.
“The beaten dog returns to nose in the garbage,” he mumbled.