The Crescent Moon

by Francis Brett Young

A strange people, the Waluguru. He remembered that once Godovius had told him that they were of Semitic blood, a remnant of those Sabæans whose queen had corrupted the court of Solomon, a fair-skinned people who had sailed to Africa for gold. And Godovius was a Jew. . . . It was plausible, plausible. And yet, in these days . . .

For all that, the Jews had never failed to be attracted by the worship of lascivious Syrian deities. Ahaz, he remembered, who “burnt incense in the valley of Hinnom and burnt his children in the fire after the abominations of the heathen. . . . He sacrificed also and burnt incense in the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.”

“The high places and on the hills . . .” Kilima ja Mweze: the hill of the moon.

He remembered the denunciations of the prophet Ezekiel: “For when I brought them into the land for the which I lifted up my hand to give it to them, then they saw every high hill and all the thick trees, and they offered there their sacrifices. . . . Thou hast built thy high place at the head of every way and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredom.”

And then, with a chilly heart, he passed from these prophecies to the awful legends of Tophet and the sacrifice of children in the fires of Moloch. These passages, in their mystery, had always seemed to him among the most terrible in the Old Testament. He seemed to remember a lecture in which he had been told that Moloch was the male counterpart of Ashtoreth or Astarte, the great goddess of fertility; that the worship of both, and the licentious rites with which their mysteries were celebrated on Syrian hill-tops, were really ceremonies of homoeopathic magic by the practice of which the fertility of fields and cattle might be increased.

So far, at any rate, the planter, Godovius, if he believed in any such superstitions, had an object. But there must be more in it than this. It was possible that in his rôle of hierophant he might be able to exert a more terrible power over his slaves, the Waluguru. A man will do almost anything for the lust of power; and one presupposed that Godovius was in some way a psychopathic and a megalomaniac. Those were the two types of mind in which the moral decadence of modern Germany had been most productive. Was this the ecstasy which had won him the name of Sakharani? Or was it a simpler, more crudely carnal passion, for which this worship gave him an excuse, a celebration of those phallic rites with which the Cilician high places had been defiled?

“Soon, at any rate, I shall know,” he thought. Perhaps the Waluguru, whom the boy Onyango had feared, would kill him, before he had surprised their secret. For a long time he lay on his bed contemplating the dangers of his new duty. And then, for a long time, he prayed.

III

Now, at any cost, he was determined to see for himself. Nothing must stand between him and his duty. This was a man’s work. He decided that Eva must have no part in it; and so, a little later in the afternoon, when the fiercer heat of the day was waning, he left his locked room by way of the folding windows and took his way towards the forest. This time he went there with none of the vague terrors which had troubled him before: apart from a suspicion of shame in his deliberate secrecy, he had no misgivings. He was happy to find himself so firm in his purpose, thankful that the fever had left him free to meet this ordeal.

By the time of sunset he had reached the edge of the forest, in the very hour at which its life awakened. As he passed into its shadow he was conscious of this, as of a faint stirring in many millions of awakened leaves suddenly aware of his presence. In this he found nothing sinister. He was only filled with a wonder which had never come to him in moments less intense at the existence of these countless multitudes of green living creatures to whom the power of motion was denied. He was impressed with the patience and helplessness of vegetable life, seeing an aged and enormous tree strangled where it grew by the writhing coils of some green parasite. And yet it seemed to him that life must be far easier for a tree than for a man. A light breeze, herald of the evening, threw the plumes of the forest edge into tossing confusion. The ways of the wood were full of gentle sound.