Chapter Nine.
The Father of the Hundred slaves.
Ahamadou, squatting upon his haunches before our camp fire, calmly smoking his long pipe, related to me the following story, declaring it to be a true incident. All wanderers in the Great Desert, be they Arabs or Touaregs, are born story-tellers, therefore I reproduce the narrative as he told it. It must be remembered that the Azjars were, at one period—not so very long ago—slavers who made many raids in the primeval forests south of Lake Tsâd, and that Ahamadou himself profited very considerably by that illegitimate trade. It was rumoured down at “the coast” that the leaders of these Touareg raiders were not Africans, and this story appears to substantiate a statement which was, at the time, ridiculed at the Colonial Office in London.
“Get up, you lazy devil. Stir yourself. We’re in a complete hole!”
“Hole? hole? Ah, your English tongue is indeed extraordinaire! A hole is a place in the ground, n’est ce pas?”
“Yes, and you’ll have a hole in the ground all to yourself, my dear Pierre, if you don’t bustle up a bit.”
Pierre Dubois, the man addressed, a bronzed, grey-bearded, stout, small-eyed Belgian of fifty, was lying tranquilly on his back on a pile of soft rugs, like an Oriental potentate, smoking his shisha, or travelling pipe, and being fanned by an extremely ugly negress. Dubois was the name he had adopted after leaving the Congo hurriedly, carrying with him a goodly sum belonging to the Belgian Government, in whose employ he had been for ten years. A native of Liège, he was one of the pioneers of that so-called Central African civilisation of trade, gin, and the whip; but after lining his pockets well, and making good his escape through the boundless virgin forests of “darkest Africa,” he had started as a trader in that most marketable of all commodities—black ivory.
Pierre Dubois and Henry Snape, his partner, were slave-raiders. They dressed as Arabs, and lived as Arabs.
Outside in the blazing noon, beneath the scanty shade of a few palms and mimosa scrub which surrounded that desert watering-place known as Akdul, a number of their heavily-armed followers were lying stretched upon the sand, sleeping soundly after their two-bow prayer to Allah, while here and there alone sat one of their number on his haunches, wrapped in his white burnouse, hugging his knees, his rifle at his side, keeping watch. They were a forbidding, evil-looking lot these Songhoi Touaregs, pirates of the forests and the desert, each with his black litham wrapped around his face concealing his features, a complete arsenal of weapons in his girdle, a string of charms sewn in little bags of yellow leather around his neck, and, strapped beneath his left arm, a short cross-kilted sword, keen-edged as a razor.