Across Prempeh's evil face there spread a sickly smile. He was an ally of the great Mohammedan chief, and saw at once that Samory had sold the son of their mutual enemy into slavery.
"Your queen-mother," he said, "has times without number sent her armed hordes over the border to raid our villages, and it is the fetish that has delivered you, her son, into our hands. The fetish has not sent you hither as a sacrifice, but as a hostage. Therefore your life shall be spared together with that of your white friend, but you shall both be given as slaves to our trusted Ocra Betea. Let the sacrifice proceed. Prempeh, King of all the Ashantis, has spoken."
Next second a poor black wretch was dragged along in Omar's place and the sword fell heavily upon him, while we were both hurried away in charge of a caboocer to the residence of the man who was, according to Omar, one of his mother's bitterest foes. Glad were we to escape with our lives from that awful scene of inhuman butchery, but it seemed that as slaves of this court favourite to whom we had been given, there would be but little brightness in our lives.
As day succeeded day our gloomy forebodings were only too truly realized. Betea, the most powerful of the King's Ocras, seemed to delight in making our lives a burden to us, for amid luxurious surroundings we were beaten, starved, and ill-treated, until even death under the executioner's knife seemed a preferable fate.
Six months passed; six weary months of slavery and wretchedness. Our position seemed absolutely hopeless, and I began to fear that we should never escape from the City of Blood. The scenes we witnessed there were so revolting, that I cannot now reflect upon them without a shudder. The ghastly "customs," the absence of all protection for life and property, the grinding oppression, the nameless horrors of all kinds, were terrible. Blood was continually flowing, for every anniversary demanded fresh holocausts, and the "Golgotha" presented a sight of indescribable horror. The unwritten code of laws were of such a sanguinary nature, that the public executioners formed a numerous section of the community and were constantly employed collecting their victims, leading them for exhibition through the capital and then hacking them to pieces in presence of the king. Soldiers, slaves, retainers of the nobles and conquered tribes possessed no defined rights, and their lives and property were practically in the hands of the royal and governing classes.
Close to the house of our inhuman master was the fetish grove, a horrible place, surrounded by rank grass, dirt, and reeking with odours pestilential. Once or twice I wandered in that grove, treading upon human bones at every step—the heaped-up remains of thousands of miserable creatures slaughtered to please the Ashanti ruler's lust for blood. Poor crumbling bones, mouldy and sodden as the rotten wood of older trees, yet once clothed with form and vigour, lay everywhere, while under the cotton wood trees skulls were heaped and vultures hovered about in hundreds.
One evening we attended our master on one of his official visits to Bantama, the fetish priest's village where we so narrowly escaped execution, and were able to thoroughly inspect the gruesome place. The most horrible blood-orgies known to superstition and fetish-worship were almost daily practised there, and in nearly every abode there were stools and chairs smeared with human blood, drinking bowls were stained with it, and some vessels were half-filled with black clotted blood. In the priests' inner chambers, dark dens filled with foul odours, to which we entered with Betea, we found not only the whole apartment smeared with blood, but bones and portions of human remains lying about openly, or wrapped in rags to serve as charms. One building, probably the residence of one of the chief priests, was embellished with mud-moulded panels and scroll work, and the columns facing the principal quadrangle were fluted. The colours were the prevailing white clay, and red ochre plastered upon the wattle and mud pillars.
Suddenly, as in the dusk we left this house, a loud horrible shriek sounded. At first we thought some poor wretch was being sacrificed, but again and again it sounded, and all turned pale, even the royal Ocra himself.
"What's that, I wonder?" I asked Omar, who, bearing our master's sword, was walking at my side.
"The gree-gree!" he gasped, looking round in fear, while at that moment there sounded two ear-piercing blasts upon a horn.