Hatibu’s look of anger and indignation when he heard this craven counsel was a sight worthy of a painter. He rated the men who made it as cowards and dogs, and said the idea that men from “the island” should become slaves to these heathen was not to be entertained for one instant. Those who wished to be slaves could go at once, and there would be more food and more powder for those who remained behind. The effect of his fiery indignation was to put a stop to all mention of surrender, and all we could do was now to wait patiently for assistance, or for the deliverance from our sufferings by death.
Two or three times the natives seemed to make up their mind to take us by assault, but each time when they came within range of our fire they faltered and fell back, and never pushed their attack home. Soon they confined their annoyance to insults and gibes, and in the darkness of night sending men armed with our muskets to keep us on the alert by a dropping fire. As we were well sheltered in our pits, we did not care for this last form of offence at all; in fact we were rather glad of it, as we knew that they were expending their powder uselessly.
On the third day of our blockade we were destined to a fresh and more painful experience than we had yet encountered. One of the men who had been very slightly wounded with an arrow on the fore arm came to Hatibu and complained that he felt shooting pains in his arm. We did all we could by bathing it with cold water; but his pains increased, and soon he fell into most frightful convulsions. He begged for water, being consumed by thirst, but was utterly unable to swallow owing to the convulsive action of his throat, and soon his jaw became locked. He now endured the most frightful agony, his body becoming at times as rigid as a bar of steel, while pieces of wood which he gripped in his hands were crumbled into splinters. Sometimes the action of his muscles was so powerful as to bend him like a bow backwards, and then there were spasmodic relaxations and twitchings which seemed to tear him in pieces.
For four or five hours he endured this agony, and before he died three more of our wounded men were seized in the same manner. We could do nothing whatever to relieve them, but could only remain passive spectators of their horrible and intense agony. All four had been wounded with arrows; and five others, who had also received arrow wounds, became so powerfully affected by seeing the sufferings of their fellows, that they too fell victims to the fell demon of lockjaw. I cannot describe a tithe of the extraordinary things they suffered, and if I did I do not think that I should be believed; but one of them in his agony seized a hardwood spear-shaft in his teeth and bedded them so deeply that after death it could not be taken out of his mouth.
Curiously enough the remainder of the wounded men, whose wounds being from spears were much larger and apparently more serious than those from the arrows, did not suffer from lockjaw, and all their wounds healed up kindly. The sufferers themselves ascribed their torments to the arrows being poisoned; but I afterwards found that it was not the case that our enemies used poisoned arrows in war, but reserved them for hunting. Their fighting arrows were tipped with pieces of excessively hard wood made as sharp as needles; and I believe that the truth is, that a punctured wound is likely to cause lockjaw, while a cut or a gash will not.
All these nine poor fellows died, thus reducing our number to twenty-four. We had hard work to make shift to bury the dead; but this, however, after much toil we managed to do, scraping and digging their graves to a depth of about four feet, and arranging over their bodies a screen of grass and branches so that no clods of earth should fall directly on them. Hatibu, who had been brought up in the house of Hamees ibu Sayf’s father at Zanzibar, recited some verses of the Koran over them. All was done by the survivors that lay in their power to render the poor fellows’ funeral decent according to their ideas.
This dreadful visitation seemed to depress the spirits of our people very much, and whispers as to the advisability of our surrendering began again to be heard. At last I hit upon an idea to inspirit my companions, which, when I mentioned it to Hatibu, he approved of immensely. Our besiegers, in order to shelter themselves from the weather, had built thatched sheds close against their boma, and, time hanging heavy on their hands, they had amused themselves with making screens and divisions of grass, which now through the action of the sun were as dry as tinder.
My proposal was that about four in the morning, when all would be sound asleep, I should creep out with a fire-brand and set all these grass erections on fire. Hatibu did not wish me to run the risk alone. I pointed out that one man would have a better chance of success than many, and that as through his kindness to me I owed my life to him, I begged to be allowed to undertake the task by myself. After much discussion he consented. As he saw we ran the same risk as our enemies if our camp was set on fire, and unlike them had no place of retreat, he gave orders for all our thatch and screens to be pulled down and burned, care being taken to prevent a general conflagration.
The natives outside seemed to take this as a sign that we were about to surrender, and in the evening we could hear drums and marimba and signs of rejoicing. They kept up singing, dancing, and drumming till nearly two in the morning. At this I was very glad, for I knew they would sleep extra sound for the rest of the night. At last, all being quiet and still, I crept out and made my way to a hut as big as a haystack where Mona Mkulla had his head-quarters, and arriving at the boma of the natives I hurled my fire-brand over it into the hut. I thought I had been the only one to quit our camp, but as this big hut burst into flames I saw three other places had been fired likewise, and on regaining our camp I found that Hatibu and two other men had gone out the moment after me on a like errand.
The natives’ huts blazed up merrily, and we could see them working hard to try to save their belongings. About five minutes after Hatibu and the others had returned to the camp, the large hut that I had fired fell in, and immediately after there was a great explosion. Evidently the keg of powder which had been abandoned by our men had been placed there and had now blown up. For a few moments after the explosion there was a deep silence; but soon there arose shouts and yells and sounds of mourning, and it was evident that some great person or persons had been killed by the gunpowder.