If the loads had not already been heavy enough, more of the pumpkins would have been carried away, and as it was, the two which Mpoko and Nkula carried were quite heavy enough before they had a chance to drop them. Iron was more important just then.
Nkula’s father was the smith and ever since they could remember, Nkula and Mpoko had watched the business of making iron tools and weapons. Very few boys outside the jungle know as much as these two did about the way in which iron is made into useful articles.
The iron as it is found in that country is not so mixed with other minerals as to be hard to separate. Sometimes a lump would be found almost pure. But in order to make it suitable for the blacksmith’s hammer, it had to be smelted. A furnace was made of clay, and a hole was dug in the ground, big enough to sink it in. Around this hole a clay wall was built up into a sort of chimney, and a tunnel was dug from a little distance away, down to the charcoal fire at the bottom of the furnace. The fire, which must be kept up to the very greatest possible heat, was fed with fresh air through this tunnel by means of a goatskin bellows with a stone nozzle. After two or three hours of uninterrupted heat, there would be a lump of pig iron, and the impurities could be hammered out and the metal worked into shape on a forge.
Nkula’s father knew how to make spear heads, ax heads, knives with leaf-shaped or curved blades, and iron wire, which, when passed red-hot over buffalo horn, blackened and became nearly rust-proof. Iron wire could also be polished and used for ornaments, although the people preferred brass wire, which would not rust. Among the things which Nkunda’s mother treasured was a necklace of grayish-brown mottled nuts like pairs of little pyramids set base to base, fastened together, not by a string, but by little links of iron wire. A cross formed of the nuts made a kind of pendant, and although nobody in the village knew it, the necklace had probably been made in some coast village, for a rosary, from the nuts of a eucalyptus or “fever tree” near a mission settlement.
While the preparations for the expedition were going on, even the monkeys appeared to know that it was a busy time, and they leaped and chattered and swung from tree to tree as if they too had important affairs on hand. As the Alo Man watched them, he was reminded of the story of the Scrawny Old Man and the Scrawny Old Woman.
I often tell [said he] of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman who lived in a hut in the forest. They always complained of being very poor and having hardly enough to eat, but by and by the neighbors noticed that after the two had visited at any house, something or other was always missed. Then one day a neighbor who was sick in bed awoke to see them going out of his hut with his bag of cowrie shells between them. He shouted and shouted at them, but they did not stop, and after a while some of the other neighbors heard and came running in to see who was being murdered.
“Oh, oh, oh!” wailed the poor sick man. “The scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman have been here, and they have taken all my cowries and gone away!”
The neighbors looked at one another and nodded. They told the sick man not to wail and weep any more, for they would attend to getting back his bag of cowries.
Then they went all together to the house of the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman and said, “Give us back the bag of cowries that you stole from the poor sick man, or we will beat you with whips of hippopotamus hide!”