First, I believe, they stole a woman. Then followed a guerrilla warfare, in which each side killed as they had opportunity, waylaying individuals, or rushing from ambush upon a party of venturesome stragglers from the enemy’s town. In this way a number were killed on each side; and the war, which was first undertaken more as a vain exploit or adventure than from any serious motive, was soon prosecuted with feelings of deadly hate and a purpose of revenge. Every night, from each town, the wail of mourning for the dead was wafted across the river; and curses were mingled with the mourning.
At length one canoe attacked another in the river, where they had been fishing. Immediately other canoes came to their help, and still others, ever so many of them, pushing off rapidly from each side until all the men of the two towns, young and old, were in the middle of the river where they fought to a finish. When fighting in canoes, whatever other weapons they may have, they carry a small battle-ax, which is used especially to prevent the capsizing of the canoe by those who are already in the water. Sonia told how that, again and again, at a blow they severed a man’s hand, or completely disabled him. They swim so well that they could still make a strong fight after being capsized. The battle was long, and the river ran red with their blood. Those who were killed were carried by the current out to the sea to feed the sharks.
The people of the new town lost. Those of them who were left pulled down their town and moved to another place. In a few years nothing remained of it but one or two skeletons with the grass growing through their ribs. But for years afterwards the superstitious native passing along the river in the dead of night heard again the noise of battle—fierce cries and dying groans. And whenever this sound is heard, they say, again the river runs red like blood.
One incident of the war, prior to the final battle, I recall, as Sonia told it that night.
The people of the old town captured a man of the other side, and his son, a little boy. They bound the father, and before his eyes deliberately killed his son—and ate his flesh. The main motive of cannibalism, under such circumstances, would be neither wanton cruelty nor a vicious appetite, but fetishism. By eating one of their number they render the enemy powerless to do them any farther injury. Some time afterwards they slew the father. But already they had broken his heart, and with hands uplifted he welcomed the death-blow.
The emotion with which old Sonia told this whole story indicated how his own heart had been wrung. He said not a word about any effort of his to dissuade the people from their cruelty; but I knew him well, and I was confident that the part he had taken was not unheroic. That is a story that was never told.
Sonia in his latter years, between long intervals of sickness, was a missionary to the Fang. They all regarded him with love and reverence. The oldest savage among them, and the wildest, were as children when they addressed him.
In the little graveyard, on the mission hill at Baraka, are the graves of those who have thought that life itself was not too great a price to pay for the saving of such men and women from degradation. Henry Drummond said that while in Africa he had been in an atmosphere of death all the time, and that he realized, as never before, the awful fact of death and its desolation as something calling for an answer. One of my first experiences in Gaboon reminded me that I was again in the land of death, when I assisted in the burial service of the beautiful young wife and bride of a fellow missionary, less than three months after their arrival in Africa. So far away from home we enter deeply into each other’s sorrows. I was standing by in the last hour, when with pale face the stricken but silent husband stepped to the open door and nervously plucked a flower growing there, a large crimson hibiscus, the beauty of the tropics, which he laid on the pillow beside his unconscious wife, and the two broken flowers drooped and died together, while the shadows darkened around us and the night came on. In the unconscious act there was something more affecting than in any words of grief. It seemed to relate this death to all death everywhere, in a world where forms of life appear only to vanish into darkness and day hurries to the night.
Soon after our patient sufferer had ceased to breathe, in the midst of the stillness that followed the prolonged struggle with the fever, a storm that had been gathering with the darkness broke forth with great violence that shook the house. I had only arrived in Africa. I went out into the storm unspeakably oppressed with doubt, to which it was a kind of relief. Was it a noble sacrifice? or an appalling waste? In the intervals of the storm, and mingling with it, there came the sound of a dirge, the hopeless death-wail, from a village close by, where the poor natives were mourning for one of their number who had died that day, a young man at whose bed I had stood a few hours earlier, the only son of a heart-broken mother. Those who have always known the words of One who brought life and immortality to light cannot realize the heathen view of death, and the abysmal darkness of the invisible world. There is no sound so well known in Africa, and none that so haunts the memory in after years, as the mourning dirge, in which with united voices they chant their sorrow for the dead—their despair and desolation; the sound that is borne upon every night-wind and becomes to the imagination the very voice of Africa. The groaning of the palm-trees in the darkness of that night, as they bent beneath the tempest, and in the distance the sound of the troubled sea, were the fitting accompaniment and interlude. But in our house, beside our dead, there was light—and doubt was vanquished. There, hope was whispering to a stricken heart sweet promises of life; and faith was saying: “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”