“But how did you get the first of your two slides? That was surely a representation of M’Bongwele’s own people.”
“Certainly. And our friend Mildmay very cleverly secured it with a camera which I set up and prepared for him in the pilot-house. He only had to release a spring at the right moment, and the thing was done. He developed the picture whilst we were making our little excursion out to sea and back. Well, the whole thing was a farce; but I believe it has effectually secured us from interruption during our researches among the ruins; and if so, it was worth playing.”
Chapter Nineteen.
King M’Bongwele turns the Tables upon his Visitors.
In reaching his palace that night king M’Bongwele dismissed his followers with but scant ceremony, and at once retired to rest. He passed a very disturbed night of alternate sleeplessness and harassing fitful dreams, and arose next morning in a particularly bad temper. He was anxious, annoyed, and uneasy in the extreme at the unexpected and unwelcome presence of these extraordinary visitants to his dominions—these spirits, or men, whichever they happened to be, who had taken such pains to show him that they despised his power, and were quite prepared to ride rough-shod over him unless he slavishly conformed to all their wishes; who had frightened and humiliated him in the presence of his immediate followers and most powerful chiefs, and entailed upon him a loss of prestige which it would be difficult if not impossible to recover. He was childishly jealous of the slightest interference with his supreme authority, and he fretted and chafed himself into a state of fury almost bordering upon madness as he reflected upon the veiled menaces to himself which had been only too distinctly recognisable in every manifestation of these strangers’ extraordinary power on the preceding day. He recognised that their deliberate intention had been to show him that during their sojourn in his country he must in all respects conform to their wishes, and model his conduct strictly in accordance with their ideas of what was right and proper, or take the consequences. And what were those consequences likely to be? Judging from what he had already seen, his dethronement and utter humiliation seemed to be among the least severe of future possibilities. Instead of remaining the irresponsible autocrat he had hitherto been, he would, during the sojourn of these strangers in his vicinity, be obliged to carefully weigh and consider his every word and action, in order that he might neither say nor do anything which could by any possibility prove distasteful to them. And if this state of servile, abject, slavish submission was to be his condition during the period of their stay—which might last the Great Fetisch himself only knew how long—his life would not be worth having, it would simply be a grinding, insupportable burden to him.
As these unwelcome reflections thronged through his mind he grew so madly ferocious that he issued orders for the instant execution of certain white prisoners which had fallen into his hands a few months before, countermanding the order almost immediately afterwards—and, happily, in good time—partly because they were women, and he still hoped, notwithstanding present difficulties and frequent former failures, to add them to his harem; and partly because he was under the apprehension that, among their other attributes, his mysterious visitors might possess that of omniscience, and, getting knowledge of the execution, object to and call him to account for it. It was a similar consideration alone which deterred him from solacing himself by the impalement of half a dozen or so of his principal ministers, the entire suite having an exceedingly lively time of it that morning, and being infinitely thankful when they were at last dismissed with whole skins.
The question which harassed and perplexed M’Bongwele for the remainder of that day was: could the visit of these extraordinary beings be by any means shortened or terminated? And, if so, how? Or if the visit could not be cut short, was there any possibility of subjugating the visitors? This particular African monarch possessed at least one virtue, that of perseverance under difficulties. He was not at all the sort of man to sit down and tamely submit to evils if he thought there was even the most remote and slender possibility of overcoming them. He had, on a previous occasion, encountered certain fair-skinned men so similar in appearance, and in every other respect, except dress, to these present troublesome visitors of his that they might well have been taken for beings of the same race; yet they had proved so thoroughly mortal that he had had no difficulty whatever in disposing of them. True, he had shot an arrow at one of these visitants yesterday, striking him fair upon the breast, and the arrow, instead of piercing him through and through, had fallen splintered to pieces at his feet. Yet this very extraordinary incident was not, to M’Bongwele, wholly conclusive evidence as to their invulnerability. Lualamba had on the previous day made certain suggestive remarks tending to strengthen his monarch’s belief that if these persons could by any means be separated from the huge structure which seemed to be their home they might possibly prove to be very ordinary mortals after all. He was inclined to believe that a great deal, if not the whole, of their power was centred in the gigantic fabric which they called a ship. And, if that should indeed prove to be the case, all that they had done on the previous day could be done by anyone into whose hands the ship might happen to fall. It could be done by him. As this reflection flashed across his brain he pictured to himself the immense accession of power and prestige which would come to him with the possession of that wonderful structure; of the conquests it would enable him to make, and of the boundless extension of his dominions which it would enable him to secure; and his eyes flashed and his bosom heaved with unsuppressed excitement as he inwardly vowed that he would achieve its possession or die in the attempt. All the conditions of his life, he angrily told himself, had been violently and permanently disarranged by the incidents of the previous day; he had been publicly threatened; publicly terrified into a cowardly and disgraceful state of submission; and it was quite impossible that he could permanently continue as he then was. He must fully recover all his lost prestige and add immeasurably to it, or must be content to see some ambitious chief rise up and wrest the kingdom from him. These presumptuous strangers had forced him into enmity against them, and they must take the consequences.
Lualamba was one of M’Bongwele’s most trusted chiefs, and shortly before sunset he and the head witch-doctor were summoned to a special conference with the king.