CHAPTER XII—IN NEW GUINEA
It was close on midnight when the Bird of Paradise dropped anchor off the coastal township of Tumba-Tumba. It was the Papuan kidnapper’s native home on the coast of New Guinea, north-west of Astrolabe mountains.
“Keep near me, dear Tombo,” whispered Gabrielle, as the little cabin-boy ran into the cuddy full of excitement at hearing the anchor go. Before the little fellow could make any response to Gabrielle the Rajah lifted his foot and with a straight kick impelled the boy forcibly out on deck again. Then he went away forward to give orders to the bustling crew. Two or three Herculean Dyaks stood with revolvers in their hands by the main hatchway. They had apparently thrown over all the dead bodies of the victims who had died in the hold. Gabrielle looked through the port-hole and saw half-a-dozen terror-stricken brown faces peep over the rim of the hatchway. She saw the clutching brown fingers of old men, girls and youths curled on the hatchway rim as the slaves struggled to get a purchase and stare up at the blue, star-lit sky before the hatch was slammed down again.
She ran out on deck and stared shoreward in her despair. They were anchored about a quarter of a mile from the line of coral reefs that loomed afar, looking like grim, gnarled monsters of the sea, where the ridges lifted their wave-washed backs for miles and miles. There, before Gabrielle’s eyes, were the wild coastal forests and mountains of a strange land. Away to sea on the starboard side she saw strange figures with mop-haired heads; some had curly, dishevelled hair, and their heads sticking out of the moon-lit water made them look like dusky mermaids, distinctly visible, as they crawled about searching for pearls on the reefs. They were not mermaids. They were simply Papuan women and girls and men searching for bêche-de-mer in the shallow waters.
“Solo bungo mass!” (“My flower of life!”) whispered the Papuan skipper into her ear. He had approached her silently. She looked up into his face. The pallor of her own face, the despair in her blue eyes as they shone with intense beauty of sorrow, had no effect on the man before her. Indeed, her despair only increased his desire to get her completely in his power.
“Cannot I stay here? Must I go?” she said in a voice the appeal of which cannot be described. The swarthy man was staring shoreward at his native land, a half-wild look in his fiery eyes as he thought of the helplessness of the trembling victim who stood beside him. He only shook his head in reply, then gazed into her eyes in a way that struck terror to her soul. She knew that she must obey. She had no belongings to pack, and so in a few moments she was ready, standing like some helpless condamné awaiting the fall of the guillotine.
It was almost a relief to the girl’s mind to hear the sudden clamouring just over the vessel’s side. And as she looked over she saw dozens of strangely ornamented canoes and outriggers crammed with mop-headed, tattooed savages.
“Sowan! Tiki, soo, Rajah!” shouted the barbarian horde, as the Rajah looked down upon them, bowing grandiloquently in response to their savage salutations. For the Rajah was the one “quite civilised” man of their primitive heathen coastal township, and so looked upon with almighty respect by his fellows. It was a momentous event in the life of the population of the coastal village when the Bird of Paradise came in. The Rajah usually dropped anchor leagues away to the north, near the Bismarck Archipelago. It was there that he usually got the biggest prices for his freightage of trembling captives, destined for the slave markets of German and Dutch New Guinea. But the Rajah on the present occasion was in a mighty hurry to get ashore, so he had decided to take Gabrielle with him and leave his mulatto mate to sail the Bird of Paradise to the next port and dispose of his terrified human cargo.
When Gabrielle arrived under the cover of night on the shores of that barbarian hut city, and saw the savage-looking women and men staring at her, as tattooed ridi-clad chiefs shouted, “Cowan! to mita putih purumpuan! (‘Welcome to the white girl!’) she trembled in her terror, and even felt glad of the Rajah’s presence as they mobbed her and pinched her white flesh deliciously. The population rushed out of their huts by hundreds. Hideous old tattooed chiefs (bare as eggs down to the loins, bone ornaments in their ears) moaned and blew with their blubbery lips as they spotted her whiteness. The deep-bosomed tawny women who stood beneath the sheltering ivory-nut palms by their huts stopped their unintelligible hubbub as the Rajah hurried her past.
“Cowan! The Rajah! The Soo Rajaaah!” they shouted, as they recognised that cultured heathen in civilised attire, the great squire, the lord of the manor in Tumba-Tumba. The news spread like wildfire. “Cowan!” (“Friend!”) gabbled the girls, women and youths, as they rushed out of their small thatched homesteads to see the great Rajah and the beautiful putih purumpuan. The thick-haired half-caste Malayan girls, dancing beneath the festival palms, jingling their leglets and shell-threaded armlets, stopped chanting to see so unusual a sight. They laid their hands in a romantic way on their hearts and sighed out, “O wean soo loo,” as a white girl with wondrous golden hair tossing to the breezes was hurried along a prisoner in the Rajah’s loving grip.