This red light mingled with the pale white lustre of the moon, which was just rising at the horizon, from whence its splendour cast long and steady shadows across the streets, and thereby favoured alike our concealment and escape.
As we hurried along the empty thoroughfares towards the town wall, Hartly found at the door of a hut, a war-club, of which he immediately took possession. It was formed of teak-wood, black as ebony, ponderously heavy, and its knob was covered by elaborate carvings.
While our hearts alternately glowed with hope, or sank with apprehension, unseen we reached the high wall of wood and clay, and ran alongside it, in search either of an outlet, or some means of surmounting it; but no wild creepers, no gourd vines or climbing convolvuli were permitted to grow there.
We had been out of our prison at least half-an-hour without being met or seen by a single negro.
At last we reached a place where, for more than a hundred feet, the wall was breached by the recent storm of wind and rain, which had overturned and beaten its ruins flat on the ground.
With mutual exclamations of joy, we were proceeding to clamber over the fallen piles of rotten palisades and clay, when a wretched negro, who appeared suddenly, on perceiving the whiteness of our skins in the bright moonlight, uttered a loud cry of wonder or alarm!
In an instant we heard the clatter of steel, and at least a dozen of the King's armed women issued from a kind of wooden tower which stood near the fallen wall.
Hartly uttered something very like an oath; he struck the negro to the earth by a blow of his club, and crying—"Follow me, Jack!" sprang over the scattered ruin, and rushed into the moonlit country beyond.
Swift of foot and active as these "fair viragoes" were, they proved no match for us in a race for life or death, especially when encumbered ty their muskets, asseguys, and red petticoats, which were covered with heavy beads, lions' teeth, and grass braiding.
Two shots were fired after us, but where the balls went, Heaven only knows; fortunately, they fell far from us.