His brown eyes twinkled, “Certainly,” he said, “especially if you will give me a fill of that English tobacco you’re smoking. Years ago I learned to smoke English tobacco, but it hasn’t too often come my way.”
I threw him my pouch with a laugh and went to find a chair. That was the beginning of many conversations, but none of his stories interested me more than the one he told me that night. He had half hinted of strange happenings away back there in remote districts, as well as of more commonplace although sufficiently interesting journeys and adventures, and it was to the less usual that I was drawn that evening. There was that about Père Etienne which made one feel that the commonplace world was of secondary importance, and that he, like the poet at Charing Cross, might find Jacob’s ladder reaching heavenward in any place. Thus, while the light died swiftly out of the sky and the stars shone out over that far-off range which runs up to the Para Mountains and giant Kilimanjaro and that far-flung plain which lies embraced beyond, between them and the great lakes, I put my question and he answered it. “Tell me the queerest of all the queer things you have seen, father,” I said.
“Queer?”
“Yes,” said I. “Unusual, I mean. Not necessarily supernatural, and not horrible. But the thing, perhaps, that more than all else draws your mind back to Africa.”
“You ask a big thing,” he said, smiling friendlily.
“And I believe you can answer it,” said I, impulsively.
He nodded more gravely. “I believe I can,” he said.
“I shall tell you a little story that seems to me singularly arresting and tender. True, I believe that it may arrest me because it occurred in a village—or perhaps I should say a town—which I have visited but once though I have often tried to get back to it again. Now I shall never go. Very likely it is for that reason, then, that it lingers in my memory as a place of great beauty, though in my opinion there are other causes. However, let me begin by describing it to you.
“From the slopes of Kilimanjaro you can look westwards to Mweru, a still active volcano little known and rarely visited, and from Mweru a chain of heights runs west once more till they end abruptly almost in a precipice that descends to the plain. At its foot rises a small river, bubbling up from half a dozen springs in a slight depression, and flowing swiftly off, very clear and cool, towards the great lake which is visible on the horizon from the mountain behind. Just below the pool of the source, on the right bank, shaded with trees, ringed with giant aloes and set in fields of millet and maize, stands a somewhat remarkable native town. There is stone in the hills, and the natives have drawn and worked it for their huts—not a usual thing in tropical Africa. They may, of course, have learned the lore themselves, or some wandering Arab traders may have taught them; but I have another idea, as you shall hear. Be that as it may, there the neat houses stand—grey walls, brown thatch, small swept yards of trodden earth before them within the rings of neat reed fencing. Great willows grow along the bank and trail their hanging tendrils in the water, and the brown kiddies swing from them and go splashing into the stream with shouts of delight. The place is remote, and in a corner out of the path of marauding tribes. Not too easy to find, its folk are peaceable, and I can see it again as I saw it on my first visit when, from the height of the precipice behind, I could make out the thin spires of smoke rising on the evening air and just perceive the brown herds of cattle drifting slowly homewards to the protecting kraals.
“The tribe is a branch of the Bonde, iron workers and a settled folk. How they came to be there, so far north and west of the main stock of their people, I do not know, but of course one comes across that kind of thing fairly commonly and the explanation is nearly always the same. Fear of some kind drove out a family who wandered, like Abram from Charron, until they found a promised land. These folk knew that they came from the south and east a long long time ago; more they neither knew nor cared to know. They were not many in number, and although Arab safaris had passed by, they were not enough to tempt a permanent trader to cross the barren lands north and south, or dare the mountain way from Mweru. The chief’s oldest councillor spoke to me of a slave-raid that had been defeated when he was a young man, but since then they had dwelt in peace. No European had been there within living memory.