"Accursed dog and son of a race of dogs!" thundered the King, spitting a quid of something like beetel-nut full in the face of Baylis; "we have learned that you white men take our people away in shiploads to fatten them for food, in a land far beyond the sea!"
On this, a yell similar to that we had first heard made wood and welkin ring. Violent hands were again laid on us, and we expected instant immolation; but their purpose at present was merely to denude us more fully of anything we had about us.
On having his shirt torn from him, poor Hartly endeavoured to protect or conceal a little gold locket, which contained the hair of his dead wife and of their little ones, and which was hung at his neck by a black silk riband. But he received a blow from a carved war-club which covered his face with blood; he reeled backward, and the prized relic was instantly appropriated by the King, who, no doubt, deemed it the white man's fetish, a "great medicine," or amulet.
Mrs. Baylis became insensible, and was delivered over to a crowd of women, who shouted and laughed like devils as they bore her into a wigwam, while her husband, Hartly, six seamen, and I, were, by the King's order, conducted through the town of huts, and driven like a herd towards the summit of a high mountain, where we fully expected to be put to death in some barbarous fashion.
Mounted on his dromedary, the King accompanied his savages, one of whom, brilliantly smeared over with ochre, was an esquire of the royal body, I presume, as he sat behind, and held outspread a broad umbrella of grass matting.
CHAPTER XL.
THE GABON CLIFF.
A sad series of barbarities, suffering, danger, and death make up the remainder of my story.
We were in the hands of a tribe addicted to fetishism of the lowest kind. Worse than the ferocious Bisagos, who pay divine homage to a dunghill cock, or the people of Benin, who worship their own shadows, they adored the devil and all snakes, from the little adder to the great cobra-capello, and maintained temples and priests in their honour; remaining, in this age of steam, gas, and electricity, as ignorant as the people mentioned by Ælian, who worshipped flies, and offered up full-fed oxen on their shrines!
Amid a yelling horde, who, by their menacing tones, seemed full of animosity, and no doubt were pouring upon us their whole vocabulary of abuse, though we understood it not, we were led up the steep rough slope of a mountain, which rose at a very sharp angle to a great height. The side on which we ascended was covered with loose stones, amid which the wild coffee and tobacco plants, with innumerable thorny trees—the persea of Theophrastus—grew in tangled masses, with serrated grass, having blades as sharp as knives, with many a nameless bramble that tore our tender skins, while gnats came upon us in swarms, and well-nigh drove us mad; and all this we endured, while the well-armed crew of the Princess, in ignorance of our fate, were within a few miles of us!