KIGAMBO.[1]
The rainy season was over. The moving wall of water was down. The travellers were no longer kept awake at night by the ceaseless roar of the rain. The lake lay stretched before them, sapphire dark under the milky blueness of the tropical sky. Kingfisher and fish-eagle, and all the birds that haunt those waters, hovered, or perched on the trees or along the bank, or skimmed the shining surface of the great fresh-water sea. And now the canoes were manned, and the three white men and their followers were setting their faces towards Manyema, the cannibal country, dreaded by Wangana and Wanyamwesis, and even by the bolder Makololos.
For this stage of their journey they were travelling in a stronger company, having accepted the fellowship of an Arab caravan faring towards the Congo; and this larger troop gave an air of new gaiety to their train. They had been forced to buy new stores of cloth and beads at Ujiji, Geoffrey's recklessness in rewarding his men, after every successful hunting expedition, having considerably reduced their stock. The cloth bought at Ujiji was dear and bad, and Cecil Patrington took Geoffrey to task with some severity; but his reproaches fell lightly upon that volatile nature.
"Remember that the measure of the goods we carry is the measure of our lives," said the experienced traveller gravely.
"Oh, Providence will take care of us when our goods are gone," argued Geoffrey. "We shall fall in with some civilized Arabs who know the value of hard cash. I cannot believe in a country where a cheque-book is useless. We shall be within touch of the mercantile world when we get to Stanley Pool."
"When!" echoed Patrington. "Hill and jungle, and desert and river, mutiny or desertion, pestilence and tempest, have to be accounted with before you see steamers and civilization. There's no use in glib talk of what can be done at Brazzaville or at Stanley Pool. Luckily we are going into a region where food is cheap—such as it is. But then, on the other hand, we may run out of quinine—and quinine sometimes means life."
Summer was in the land when they crossed the great lake, stopping for a night or two on one of the principal islands, under the hospitable roof of a missionary station, where it was a new sensation to sit upon a chair, and taste a cup of coffee made in the European manner, and to see an Englishwoman's pleasant face and neat raiment. There was an English child also, "a real human child," as Geoffrey exclaimed, delighted at the phenomenon—a round-limbed, fat-cheeked rosy baby, who sat and watched the landing of the party from her perambulator, and patronized them, waving a welcome with chubby hands, as they scrambled out of the canoes—a child who had entered upon a world of black faces, and who may have fancied her mother and father monstrosities in a place where everybody else was black.
What a contrast was this blue-eyed two-year-old to such infancy as they had seen in villages along their road, the brown naked creatures rolling and grovelling in the dirt, and looking more like pug-dogs than children!
When they had bidden good-bye to the friendly missionary and his domestic circle, they were not without childish life upon their way, for the Arabs with whom they had joined company had some women in their train, one a slave with a couple of children; and as the Arab law does not recognize slavery under adult age, these brats of six and seven were free, and not being goods and chattels, no provision was allowed for them, and the mother had to feed them out of her own scanty rations.
Geoffrey was on more familiar terms with the Arabs than either Patrington or Allan, and, on discovering the state of things with the native mother and her sons, he took these two morsels of dusky humanity into his service, and set them to clean pots and pans, and treated them as a kind of lap-dogs, and let them dance to his wild fiddle music in the firelight in front of the tents, and would not allow them to be punished for their depredations among the pannikins of rice or the baskets of bananas.