CHAPTER XVI.
FRIENDLY ARABS.
With the Bateke I believe I stopped about a year more; then I was traded to some other chief who was desirous of being the proud possessor of a white man. In this manner, passing from hand to hand and tribe to tribe, I gradually got further and further into the interior of Africa, and my hopes of ever again seeing my native country, or my father and brother, grew less and less.
I lost all interest in life, and mechanically ate and drank what was given me, but scarcely noticed what occurred around. Of this part of my life it would be very hard for me to give a connected description. I have vague memories of many journeys, of fevers, of fights, of times of starvation and times of plenty, but perhaps least vague of all of a party I was with being attacked from trees and bushes by dwarfs with tiny poisoned arrows, the wounds from which proved fatal almost immediately. That this is a true memory I know, because I have even now a basket-work quiver, covered over with a substance like pitch, full of these arrows. This was the only thing I had with me when found wandering in the woods, some two hundred miles west of Lake Tanganyika, by Hatibu, one of the slaves of Hamees ibu Sayf, an Arab merchant.
The way I fell in with him was on this wise. My companions had, I suppose, all been killed by the poisoned arrows of the dwarfs, or had made good their escape from them without caring to wait to see whether I was among the slain or not. I had been wandering alone in the jungle for some days, subsisting on berries and lichens gathered from the trees. I had to devour these raw, having no means of making a fire to cook them or to warm myself. Nearly starved and quite weary I laid me down, as I thought, to die, and was in a sort of semi-torpid state. I was roused up by yells and shrieks. Lifting my head, I saw that some men were attacking a troop of sokos or gorillas, and that one of the sokos had seized a man by the hand with his teeth.
Evidently these men were only a portion of those engaged in the chase of the gorillas, for I heard the sound of guns. I soon saw a man coming up with a white skull-cap on his head. Besides a cloth round his loins, he wore a kind of sleeveless waistcoat, and bore in his hand a gun which had been recently discharged.
The sight of a gun brought a flood of memories rushing into my head, and raised hopes that people who
A SOKO HUNT.
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