"Bambute!" he said. "No see us dis time; plenty poison dem arrows."
"So those are your pigmies, eh? Upon my word, Mbutu, they looked quite an interesting lot of little fellows. I liked that song of theirs much better than the 'man all alone', you know. We have a saying in my country, 'little and good'; many a little man has been a hero. There's Bobs, you know; ever heard of Bobs? Well, I'll tell you all about him some day. I declare I'm sleepy; there's no hut for us to-night; I think we had better climb that big tree there and sleep on the lowest fork, eh?"
"All right, sah! No dago man now, sah," he added.
"That's true; but we aren't out of the wood yet! We have done well to-day, I think; now for our leafy bed."
Mbutu was asleep as soon his head touched the bough on which he had perched himself. But Tom was awake for hours, pondering on many things. The night-wind swayed the branches all around him, waking a chorus of creaking stems, swinging boughs, rustling leaves. From below came the ceaseless scraping chirp of crickets, the shrill piping call of cicadas, the tuneless croak of frogs. In the distance he heard the harsh, rasping cry of the lemur, and a strange sound like the noise of a stick rattled against iron railings; this, Mbutu explained afterwards, was a soko or chimpanzee amusing himself with striking upon a tree. Once Tom was startled by a sudden crackle, followed by a rending and rushing and a heavy thump that shook the fork on which he lay. In the morning he found that a dead tree had fallen, crashing through the forest and overwhelming many a living tree with its weight. All these sounds, breaking in upon the sad rustle of the foliage, filled Tom's soul with a sense of forlornness. By and by the sounds were unheeded; his mind was occupied with thronging memories and thoughts. He was reminded of the sleepless nights he had sometimes spent in his father's parsonage, hearkening to the rooks in the trees just opposite his window. He thought of his boyish ambitions; of the pride and eagerness with which he had listened to his uncle Jack's stories when he came on rare visits to the parsonage; of the blow to all his hopes when his father died. Then he lived again in thought through the long months at Glasgow; heard the din of the engine-shop, and felt once more the dissatisfied longing of that dreary time. That appeared now to be far back in a dim remote past. It was only a few weeks since he had left England, and yet how much had happened in the interval! The events of years seemed to have been compressed into days. His thirst for adventure was more than satisfied; yet here he was, in the heart of an African forest, with who could tell what new experiences in store for him?
And as his mind rolled question after question round an empty ring, eerie shapes seemed to creep out of the darkness, mocking and jibing, whispering words of evil augury, prophesying comfortless days of weariness and pain, of aimless wandering in the immeasurable forest, where he would finally drop and die, a prey to jackal or vulture. He strained his eyes, as though to see if these were in very truth bodily forms surrounding him; then upon his mental sight another scene rose--reminiscences of his brief captivity with the Arabs; stark forms lying in chains upon the swampy path; men and women and children sobbing out their lives in slavery; the slaver's cruel whip descending on the backs of young boys and maidens, who writhed and shrieked and fell bleeding and exhausted, many to rise no more. His own dark fancies fled the horrors of the slave-trade came home to him. He forgot his own puny troubles, and even his present extremity. Once more he registered the vow that, if he were spared, he would strike a blow, however feeble, against this hideous traffic in humanity. Suddenly there fell upon his inward ear the cry of the Arabs in the fight by the bridge: "Allah-il-Allah! God is God!" A solemn quiet brooded upon his mind; the wind itself lulled and the rustle of the leaves around him ceased. Looking up through the canopy of green, he saw one star faintly twinkling. His depression passed away; he found himself murmuring the lines of a poem that had been a favourite with his father:
"God's in His heaven,
All's right with the world".
Thoughts of all the good things of life crowded through his mind; he felt contented and at rest; and with recollections his uncle, Dr. O'Brien, Mr. Barkworth, and the padre making a dancing medley in his brain with hippos and crocodiles, Arabs and pigmies, he at last fell into a dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER X: The Land of the Pigmies
Slow Progress--Forest Life--Hunger--Overtures--A Change of Diet--In Straits--A Man Hunt--At Bay