The party who had brought me to this remote spot were of an entirely different race from those among whom I now found myself, and the fact that we were making our way toward what was obviously the aristocratic part of the town, coupled with the expressive conversation carried on by the leader of my custodians with three or four individuals who had joined us, led me to surmise—although of course I did not understand a word of what was said—that I had been brought up the river as a peace-offering or something of that sort, which conclusion was again the reverse of reassuring.
As we drew near to the exceedingly narrow gate in the palisade, which had been thrown open to admit us—and which, I presently saw, was strongly guarded by a number of warriors armed with heavy, broad-bladed spears, murderous-looking swords, and small round shields, or targets, of wood covered with what looked like crocodile hide—I became sensible of a horrible charnel-house smell; but it was not until we had passed through the gate, and were inside the palisaded enclosure, that I discovered from whence it emanated. Then, observing the direction of the wind which wafted this dreadful odour to my nostrils, I looked that way and presently noticed a large dead tree standing in the middle of the square that formed the centre of this part of the town. It was the immense number of birds that wheeled and screamed about this tree that first caused me to regard it with particular attention, but even then I could not, for the moment, see anything to account for either the birds or the odour. But a minute or two later, as we drew nearer the tree, the stench meanwhile becoming almost overpoweringly strong, I detected fastened to the trunk of the tree, in a manner that was not at first apparent, nine human corpses, some of them so far advanced in decomposition that even the birds would not approach them! Then I understood that I saw before me that detestable thing of which I had often heard as the most prominent object in the typical African native town or village, the “crucifixion tree,” upon which the petty despot who rules over that particular community is wont summarily to put to a cruel and lingering death such of his subjects as may be unfortunate enough to offend him! In some cases, I believe, the monarch is content to cause his victims to be securely lashed to the crucifixion tree by stout lianas, there to perish slowly of hunger and thirst; but King Banda, the potentate whose will was law in this particular town, had carried his cruelty to its utmost limit by adopting the time-honoured method of nailing his victims to the tree with spike nails driven through the hands and feet into the tough timber.
The enormous crowd who had followed us up from the beach were not permitted to enter the palisaded enclosure, which was strictly taboo to the common herd; our party therefore now consisted solely of those who had brought me up the river, four individuals who had joined us outside the gate—and whom I took to be officials of some sort—and my unworthy self; and, for my own part, I would very willingly have waived the distinction of forming one of the party. Marching up to what I conjectured to be the king’s house—from the fact that it was not only by far the largest dwelling in the enclosure, but was also distinguished by an exclusive embellishment in the form of a row of a dozen poles, each surmounted by a human skull, planted upright in the ground before it—we halted at a distance of some twenty paces from the entrance, with our backs turned toward the crucifixion tree, the leafless branches of which overshadowed us, and waited.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, passed, and the sun was within a hand’s-breadth of the horizon when a man emerged from the “palace,” bearing a massive chair of ebony, quaintly-carved, and draped with a magnificent leopard’s skin, which he placed immediately before the open door, midway between the house and ourselves, and departed. A moment later another man appeared—this time from the fetish-house on the opposite side of the square—also with a chair, decorated with most gruesome—looking carvings, which he placed beside the first. Then a tall and enormously stout man, clad in a leopard-skin moucha, and with a handsome leopard-skin cloak on his shoulders, came forth from the palace, leaning upon the shoulders of two other men, and advanced toward the chair which had first been placed in position, into which he subsided heavily, casting a strongly disapproving glance at the second chair as he did so. Then there arose a sudden tramping of bare feet upon the dry earth, and from somewhere in the rear of the palace there swung into view a hundred picked warriors, armed like those who had mounted guard at the palisade gate, who formed up behind and on each side of the chairs with very commendable military precision. Simultaneously with the appearance of the guards—for such they were—there emerged from the fetish-house a man who appeared to be incredibly old, for his hair and beard were as white as snow, and his once stalwart form was now bowed and wizened with the passage of, as it seemed to me, hundreds of years. Yet, although in appearance a very Methuselah in age, this individual had a pair of piercing black eyes that glowed and sparkled with all the fire and passion of early manhood, and, bowed as he was, and decrepit as he appeared to be, he tottered across the intervening space with extraordinary agility, and seated himself in the second chair. Thus I found myself in the presence of the two most powerful men in the district, namely, King Banda and Mafuta, the chief witch-doctor.
The contrast between these two men was most remarkable, for whereas Mafuta appeared to be the living embodiment of extreme age, King Banda could scarcely have been forty; and while Mafuta was an image of decrepitude, Banda, despite his excessive corpulence, appeared to be—what in fact he was—a man of immense physical strength. Yet, notwithstanding this marked dissimilarity in their appearance, there was one point of strong resemblance between them: the expression of their faces, and particularly of their eyes, was ineffably cruel.
Chapter Seventeen.
King Banda’s daughter.
For the space of nearly a minute there now prevailed an intense silence while King Banda sat glowering at our party, and especially at me, in a manner that caused cold chills to run down my back, as I reflected that this was the man who was responsible for the gruesome fruit borne by the tree, the branches of which overshadowed us, and that if he should by any chance take the fancy into his head to further decorate that tree by nailing a white man to it, there was nobody but myself within some hundreds of miles who would dream of saying him nay; and I somehow had a conviction that my disapproval of such a course would not very strongly influence him.