I peeped also into the second little house. There I saw a large idol, called Makambi, shaped like a man, and by his side stood a female figure, Abiala his wife. Poor Makambi is a powerless god, his wife having usurped the power. She holds a pistol in her hand, with which, it is supposed, she can kill anyone she pleases; hence the natives are much afraid of her; and she receives from them a constant supply of food, and many presents (I wonder who takes the presents away). When they fall sick, they dance around her, and implore her to make them well; for these poor heathen never pray to the true God. They put their trust in wooden images, the work of their own hands.
I looked into the third house, and there I saw an idol called Numba. He had no wife with him, being a bachelor deity. He is the Oroungou Neptune and Mercury in one—Neptune in ruling the waves, and Mercury in keeping off the evils which threaten from beyond the sea.
As I came away after seeing the king, I shot at a bird sitting upon a tree, but missed it, for I had been taking quinine and was nervous. But the negroes standing around at once proclaimed that this was a "fetich bird,"—a sacred bird—and therefore I could not shoot it, even if I fired at it a hundred times.
I fired again, but with no better success. Hereupon they grew triumphant in their declarations; while I, loth to let the devil have so good a witness, loaded again, took careful aim, and, to my own satisfaction and their utter dismay, brought my bird down.
During my stay in the village, as I was one day out shooting birds in a grove, not far from my house, I saw a procession of slaves coming from one of the barracoons toward the farther end of my grove. As they came nearer, I saw that two gangs of six slaves each, all chained about the neck, were carrying a burden between them, which I knew presently to be the corpse of another slave. They bore it to the edge of the grove, about three hundred yards from my house; and, throwing it down there on the bare ground, they returned to their prison, accompanied by the overseer, who, with his whip, had marched behind them.
"Here, then, is the burying-ground of the barracoons," I said to myself sadly, thinking, I confess, of the poor fellow who had been dragged away from his home and friends; who, perhaps, had been sold by his father or relatives to die here and be thrown out as food for the vultures. Even as I stood wrapped in thought, these carrion birds were assembling, and began to darken the air above my head; ere long they were heard fighting over the corpse.
The grove, which was, in fact, but an African Aceldama, was beautiful to view from my house; and I had often resolved to explore it, or to rest in the shade of its dark-leaved trees. It seemed a ghastly place enough now as I approached it more closely. The vultures fled when they saw me, but flew only a little way, and then perched upon the lower branches of the surrounding trees, and watched me with eyes askance, as though fearful I should rob them of their prey. As I walked towards the corpse, I felt something crack under my feet. Looking down, I saw that I was already in the midst of a field of skulls and bones. I had inadvertently stepped upon the skeleton of some poor creature who had been lying here long enough for the birds and ants to pick his bones clean, and for the rains to bleach them. I think there must have been the relics of a thousand skeletons within sight. The place had been used for many years; and the mortality in the barracoons is sometimes frightful, in spite of the care they seem to take of their slaves. Here their bodies were thrown, and here the vultures found their daily carrion. The grass had just been burnt, and the white bones scattered everywhere, gave the ground a singular, and, when the cause was known, a frightful appearance. Penetrating farther into the bush, I found several great piles of bones. This was the place, years ago—when Cape Lopez was one of the great slave markets on the West Coast, and barracoons were more numerous than they are now—where the poor dead were thrown, one upon another, till even the mouldering bones remained in high piles, as monuments of the nefarious traffic. Such was the burial-ground of the poor slaves from the interior of Africa.
