Erich von Harben looked into the faces of the tall, almost naked, black warriors whose weapons menaced him across the gunwale of their low dugout, and the first thing to attract his attention was the nature of those weapons.
Their spears were unlike any that he had ever seen in the hands of modern savages. Corresponding with the ordinary spear of the African savage, they carried a heavy and formidable javelin that suggested to the mind of the young archaeologist nothing other than the ancient Roman pike, and this similarity was further confirmed by the appearance of the short, broad, two-edged swords that dangled in scabbards supported by straps passing over the left shoulders of the warriors. If this weapon was not the gladius Hispanus of the Imperial Legionary, von Harben felt that his studies and researches had been for naught.
"Ask them what they want, Gabula," he directed. "Perhaps they will understand you."
"Who are you and what do you want of us?" demanded Gabula in the Bantu dialect of his tribe.
"We wish to be friends," added von Harben in the same dialect. "We have come to visit your country. Take us to your chief."
A tall black in the stern of the dugout shook his head. "I do not understand you," he said. "You are our prisoners. We are going to take you with us to our masters. Come, get into the boat. If you resist or make trouble we shall kill you."
"They speak a strange language," said Gabula. "I do not understand them."
Surprise and incredulity were reflected in the expression on von Harben's face, and he experienced such a sensation as one might who looked upon a man suddenly resurrected after having been dead for nearly two thousand years.
Von Harben had been a close student of ancient Rome and its long-dead language, but how different was the living tongue, which he heard and which he recognized for what it was, from the dead and musty pages of ancient manuscripts.
He understood enough of what the black had said to get his meaning, but he recognized the tongue as a hybrid of Latin and Bantu root words, though the inflections appeared to be uniformly those of the Latin language.