“Black Ivory.”
Having arranged to recommence their search at dawn of day, our friends turned in to rest that night, leaving one of their Zanzibaris on guard. This man had thus far shown himself fairly reliable, and being a very great coward, had proved a most excellent watchman, seldom failing to alarm the camp, at least once every night, with the fearsome news that bloodthirsty foes, in some shape or form, were close upon them, the attacking force, nine times out of ten, existing only in his fertile imagination, and turning out to be either hungry and inquisitive beasts of prey, or the grey mists of early dawn rising to greet the sun.
These constant scares had naturally had the effect of inclining everyone in the camp to cry “Wolf!” turn over in his blanket, and, after roundly anathematising the alarmist, to go comfortably to sleep again; but when Kenyon was roused by this man on the night in question, a single glance convinced him that the fellow was, at all events, in desperate earnest, for his knees knocked together, and his face was fairly grey with the horror of some new and unexplained phenomenon, as he stammered out his statement to the effect that several hundred men were silently creeping upon their position, under cover of the mist, and asserting that he could see them sufficiently clearly to count their numbers by the moonlight.
“Let my master,” he said, “open his white eyes as clear as crystal, and see my tongue, for there is no lie upon it.” Picking up his rifle, Kenyon roused Leigh, the pair quickly following the watchman outside the tent, and this was what they saw.
Slightly to their right, and entering ghost-like the suspected mountain gorge, was a long train of human beings moving silently, yet swiftly, westwards.
The camp was completely shrouded in mist, and altogether invisible to these people passing it within stone’s-throw, but its occupants by lying down could see tolerably well beneath the thick grey curtain, which overhung them in every direction, and it did not require a second glance to satisfy the Europeans that the spectacle they were watching was simply an African slave caravan, of unusually large dimensions, on the march. For some minutes the pair gazed in silence, and then with a fierce but subdued ejaculation, Leigh endeavoured to spring to his feet, but was held still by the iron hand of the detective.
“Down! man, down! for your life!” he whispered. “The game is only just beginning.”
“But curse it all,” growled Leigh, “don’t you see that most of the slaves are white, and that many of them are women?”
“I see it all,” was the answer, in a stern incisive whisper, “but I see little beyond what I expected to see when we arrived here a month ago. Just wait a while, and if I know anything of my work, these people will lead us to your cousin. If we follow them to their destination, there I am convinced shall we find Richard Grenville, if he be still in the land of the living.”
For fully half an hour did the wretched troop continue to file past, and then captives, white and black, male and female, together with their countless guards, were engulfed in the eerie shadows of the rocky gorge, and entirely lost to human ken. Not a sound had the anxious watchers heard from first to last, and when the hindmost figure vanished from sight, Leigh could not refrain from rubbing his eyes to see if he were really awake and not dreaming; then, becoming satisfied that the former was the case, he seized his rifle, turned eagerly to Kenyon, and begged him to get on the trail of these nocturnal wanderers without another moment’s delay.