The Seafarers

by John Bloundelle-Burton

But, of course, Gilbert could tell them no more than he had already done a dozen times, while repeating in substance all that he had said to his fiancée.

'I am sorry,' he had said on each occasion, and again said now, 'but I know absolutely nothing. I was insensible when I was taken into the dhow--as taken in I must have been, since I could never have got in by myself--and, as you are well aware, I was insensible when I was brought out. I positively know nothing.'

'The helmsman's death was as strange as anything,' Pooley observed. 'Fagg says there was no wound about him that he could see. What, therefore, could he have died of?'

'Sunstroke, I imagine,' the first mate said, in his usual emphatic, crisp manner. 'Sunstroke. It could not have been fever, otherwise these negroes would have it, too. Yet,' he went on, in a manner more meditative than usual with him, 'those Arabs, if he was an Arab, rarely suffer from that. It takes a white man to get sunstroke.'

'Well, come,' said the master again, 'let's go and see to them. The sun is on the horizon; it will be dark in a quarter of an hour's time.' Whereon he strode forward, accompanied by Charke, while Mr. Fagg, who had come up from the saloon, began to keep such watch as was necessary. And Gilbert, bidding Bella go and sit with Mrs. Pooley, strode after them, since he was anxious to have a look at the unhappy creatures who had been rescued at the same time as himself.

The male blacks had been put into a deck cabin (in which was usually kept an assortment of things such as spare lamps, a boat sail or two, and Mr. Fagg's bicycle, on which he disported himself whenever he got ashore anywhere), wherein some matting had been thrown down for their accommodation. And, as now they neared this cabin, they heard sounds proceeding from within it which were really moans, but, to their ears, had more the semblance of the bleating of sheep. Also, it seemed as if one of them within was chanting some sort of song or incantation.

'We shall have to stop this noise in some way, sir,' Charke said to the captain; 'it has been going on more or less ever since they came on board, and the men complain that it disturbs them in the fo'c's'le. It's a pity we can't communicate with them somehow. Perhaps Lieutenant Bampfyld might try, as he says he knows some words of Swahili'; while as he spoke he looked at the man who had once more, as he considered, or chose to consider, stepped in between him and the woman he loved. Yet, because he never forgot that he was a gentleman born, there was nothing in his manner that was otherwise than polite when he addressed Gilbert.

'I have tried,' said the latter, 'more than once to-day. And either my Swahili is defective, or that is not their language. I suspect that it's Galla, of which I do not know a word.'

Meanwhile, the captain had drawn back the cocoanut matting which hung in front of the deck cabin door, though, after peering into the sombre dusk for a moment, he started back, exclaiming: 'Good Heavens! what has happened now? Have they murdered one of their companions, or what?'

It was, in truth, a weird sort of scene on which he, as well as Gilbert and Charke, gazed, as the swiftly-failing tropical evening light illumined the interior of the cabin. Flat on the floor of it lay one of the negroes, undoubtedly dead, since there was on his face the gray, slate-coloured hue which the African assumes in death. Yet his eyes were open, only now, instead of that bright glassy look which all their eyes had had since they were brought on board, there was a dull filmy look, which told plainly enough that there was no life behind them. Still, dead as the man undoubtedly was, he did not present the most uncanny spectacle of all within! That was furnished by those who of late had been his comrades, and by the strange grotesqueness--a grotesqueness that was horrible in itself--of their actions. All three of the living negroes were on their knees in the cabin, which was roomy enough to amply admit of their being so, while, with their great black hands, they were pawing the man all over, feeling his breast and body, and endeavouring to bend his fingers and toes as well as his legs and arms; while, even as they did so, from their great mouths came that moaning incantation which resembled so much the bleating of sheep. Doubtless they felt almost sure that their fellow-slave was dead, and these actions were being performed as tests. Yet, also, there was a solemn, wild unearthliness attached to the whole thing by the manner in which, when one of the visitors standing at the door and peering in made a remark, all turned their sightless eyes towards that door and then held up each a hand, and emitted a hissing noise through their great pendulous lips, as though enjoining silence and respect for the dead. They held up those hands with the fingers stretched enormously apart and with the palms towards the intruders. Their eyes were bright enough as they glared at the three white men outside, whom they could not see, yet, somehow, the gleam in them and the knowledge that they were sightless gave so creepy a feeling to those regarding them that they could not restrain a shudder.