Lord of Darkness

1

At Masnganu I lived a most miserable life for the space of six years without any hope to see the sea again.

How swiftly I am able to say that! It takes me not even two dozen words to encompass that statement of simple fact. And in so saying, so quickly and easily, I reduce to a seeming trifle what was indeed a most doleful burden. Not even two dozen words to tell of it! But the actual living of six years cannot be done in one hour less than those six years, as even a fool will attest; and I do swear to you by the Savior’s own beard that to dwell at Masanganu for six years is much like living anywhere else for sixty, or perhaps six hundred.

Yet did I endure it, day by day, minute by minute, which is the only way such a thing can be done. When I think back to the years of my servitude there, the time does indeed fold and compress in upon itself, so that I can speak of six years and make it seem to have gone by as rapidly as it takes me to tell of it; and yet also I can still feel the weight of those years within me, hanging on my soul as iron gyves did once hang on my legs. A prisoner can put down his chains, when his pardon comes, but I can never put down my years at Masanganu until that last day when I do lay down all the freight that my soul does carry.

I have told you already something of this place, which lies at the meeting of the waters of the Kwanza and the Lukala, toward the inner side of the Angolan coastal plain, in a region both foggy and most stifling hot. Among the swamps and marshes of Masanganu stands the pale stone fort of the Portugals upon a little headland, in a zone where the heat is greatest, the sun hanging overhead all the day long, and, I trow, half the night as well, since it is no cooler in the hours of darkness than at noontide. This fort is well situated to guard the inner lands, for it looks toward the mountains that rise in Angola’s interior, and any hostile force descending out of those jungled uplands must of necessity come within notice of Masanganu before it can hope to menace São Paulo de Loanda. So there is at Masanganu a permanent garrison to guard against any intrusion of enemies from the east or north.

Permanent, that is, in the sense that there always are men stationed at Masanganu, to a number of several hundreds; but the men themselves are far from permanent, being constantly carried off by the maladies of the place. That God chose to excuse me from those ailments is, I suppose, an example of His great mercy toward me, that He showed in many ways during my adventures in Africa; but all the while I was there, I moved among men who had been stricken horridly by this plague or that, and I learned not to form fast friendships, since there was slender chance that any such would last. There is in that place a colic that is most deadly, and a bloody flux, and a kind of headache that gives a pain beyond all understanding; and there is also the fever that smote me on my first visit, which I saw carry off any number of others, though it left me alone after the one time. And as well there is a kind of worm in Masanganu that covertly enters the body, most commonly in the fleshy parts, as the thighs, the haunches, the breasts, or even the scrotum and the yard, and I think the malady this worm causes is the most worst of all. The worm generally shows itself by the swelling of the flesh; in some it causes violent agues, with great shiverings; others it torments with intolerable pains all over the body, so that they cannot rest in any posture; others it casts into a violent fever, and continual deliriums. But those men that are afflicted in their private parts suffer beyond any others, and in their torment grow perfectly mad and outrageous, so that it is requisite to bind them very fast. The only way to cure this loathly disease is to take hold of the worm very gingerly as soon as the head has made its way out of the swelling, and make it fast to a small piece of wood, on which it is slowly and carefully drawn forth by winding the stick, sometimes for a whole month, until it emerges entire. If the worm should happen to break by being too hastily drawn out, that part which remains in the body will soon putrefy or break out at some other part, which occasions double pain and trouble. I saw men thus served, for whom no other remedy could be found to preserve their lives than cutting off a leg or an arm, or the privy parts; and if the worm is lodged in the trunk of the body, and broken, it is almost a miracle if the man does not die of the gangrene working to the vital parts. From my arrival in Masanganu in the latter part of 1594 until my departure from it early in Anno 1600 there was no single day on which I did not search my body for the intrusion of this worm, with fear and tremblings until I was sure it had not penetrated me.

Strange to say it was the Portugals at Masanganu who suffered worst from these maladies, but the blacks were rarely touched except by the worm; and there were various Moors and Gypsies there who also seemed safe against the fevers. These men had been sent to Masanganu by banishment, even as I. The Gypsies or Ciganos had been expelled from Portugal by King Philip, under pain of death if they did not quit the kingdom four months after his decree, and many of these folk had gone to seek their fortunes in Africa, which is where their kind originally did proceed from, they being Egyptians by ancestry. The ones at Masanganu were all criminals sent down from São Tomé or the Kongo, and a dangerous bunch they were, that would cheerfully slit you open just to see the color of your inner organs. As for the Moors, they were Moriscos from the land of Morocco, who did compete with the Portugals in the trading of slaves along the Guinea coast, and these had been captured and imprisoned for their pains. I never knew many of these Moorish men, who were proud and aloof and spoke a language among themselves that they would not teach to others. But I did befriend a few of the Gypsies, simply because they and I, not falling victim to the evil diseases of the place, were thrown together over a long span of time and grew accustomed to one another.

In those years the Portugals did often make war against the black nations of the interior. The mainmost of these expeditions was led by Don João himself, who had, I think, never gone before into battle. This was an entry up the River Mbengu, which lies north of São Paulo de Loanda a little way, and the purpose of it was the pacifying of the blacks along the upper reaches of Angola’s boundary. In this excursion the shrewd and farsighted Don João proved himself every bit as rash as the unlamented Don Jeronymo, for against all advice he commenced it at the worst time of the year, which is March, and very quickly he lost two hundred men by fever. This I know because reinforcements were summoned from the Masanganu garrison upon these fatalities, though I was not one of those chosen. With these additional men Don João did conquer the district, and, as though to revenge himself on the natives for his own losses through diseases and ignorance of the country, he treated the defeated chieftains with unusual severity. I have it on good authority that many of the hapless sobas were placed in his heavy guns and blown forth by a charge of powder, to the terrible sundering of their limbs.

Well, and I suppose the Portugals may treat their fallen foes in any manner they wish, but I could not come to see Sir Francis Drake ever blowing enemies from guns, nor any other Englishman so doing. Why, I think not even our crookbacked King Richard III, that was the great enemy of our Queen’s grandfather, and is said to have committed such foul crimes in our land an hundred years ago, would have stooped to such a villainy. But the souls of most of these Spaniards and Portugals, methinks, are deficient in the substance that makes other men shrink from monstrous cruelties. Perhaps it is the hot dry air of their forlorn Iberian Peninsula that bakes the mercy out of them, or possibly it is the Popish teachings by which they are reared, that cause them to hold the lives of those of other faiths to be of no account. But I doubt that latter, for the Genoese and the Venetians and the Burgundians and many others are Papists just as well, and they do not stuff their conquered adversaries into cannons.

While Don João was engaged in these pastimes, his captain-major João de Velloria, the Spaniard, was marching through the land of Lamba, which lies between the Rivers Kwanza and Mbengu, and he was doing many the same things. For these triumphs Velloria was nominated as a member in the Order of Christ, which is some holy confraternity of the Portugals, and was granted a pension of twenty thousand reis, which be six pounds a year, and was named to the office of Marcador dos Esclavos, or administrator of slaves, that brought him a fee for every slave taken in this territory. How many blacks he slaughtered in the campaign that won him these honors I cannot say. But at least none of them went to be slaves in the sugar-mills of Brazil, so to that degree he gave them a kindness: it is a quicker death to perish on the field of battle than to bleed your life away cutting cane and hauling millstones.

And I did take no part in all these heroic and pious exploits, being penned up in the hellish presidio at Masanganu. My chief duty there was to bury the dead. The colic or the flux or the fevers carried them off, and then I was summoned, along with three Gypsies and two Portugals who also were reputed to be proof against these diseases, and we did dig a grave and carry the bloated and blackened and sickening corpse to it, and give it its interment. For a time I counted the number of these dead that I saw into the earth, but then I lost the tally, when it was well above an hundred. For indeed this Masanganu was a place, as Thomas Torner had declared in fright long before, where men do die like chickens. But when a chicken dies, no one need labor to dig a great buggardly hole in the ground to put it into, under a sun that gives the heat of a thousand thousand furnaces at once.

Beyond such activities there was little. We marched patrol; we repaired the fort, which was constantly crumbling, owing to the poorness of the mortar in this clime; we made clearings in the jungle, to what end I never was told; we cleaned our guns and swept out the streets. Sometimes we hunted for coccodrillos or river-horses by way of small diversion. We had for our pleasure the native women, many of them poxed, and the soldiers did use them freely, in whatever way that suited their fancy, including one that I think would have had them burned at the stake if the Jesuits got wind of it, that is, by sodomizing them. This became the common fashion at Masanganu at a time, so that when one heard a woman screaming painfully at a distance, one could be sure that some merry Portugal had flipped her on her belly and was ramming himself between her hinder cheeks. This I never chose to do, thinking that it was folly to go poking about in the hole of foulness and excrement when God had afforded us a much sweeter and more natural entrance nearby. From time to time I did take me a woman by the ordinary usage, rarely the same one twice, and never more often than the fires of lust within me did absolutely require. A Gypsy of my acquaintance kindly showed me a remedy for the venereal pox, that was to make a sort of ointment of palm-oil and a new-laid egg, and to rise after carnal doings and immediately to rub that substance all over one’s yard and ballocks and thighs. The which I unfailingly did, despite the foul sliminess of the medicine, and I had me no poxes at Masanganu, though I cannot say whether that was owing to the efficacy of the Gypsy medicine or to my own good fortune.

So did the months and years pass. I felt sure I would give up all the rest of my life in this place, and, curious to relate, I do confess that for some span of time I did not resent that at all. What, you say? Andrew Battell resigned to captivity, a mere passive drudge? Yea, so it was. But I pray you remember that I had left my home in the spring of ‘89 and this was six and seven and eight years after, and for most of those years I had been a prisoner—sometimes under comfortable circumstances, sometimes less so, but at scarce any moment my own master. That had not broken me, but it had dulled my sharp edge of spirit. Though ever yet I dreamed of escaping this dark and sultry land and going again to England, that became little more than a will-o’-the-wisp to me, as remote from reality as is the hope of heaven to a small child.

I labored. I ate. I slept. I sweated. Those were the boundaries of my life at Masanganu. And I tell you, it let the time fly faster by, if I did not give resistance to my captivity. In that place where there is scarce any change of season, where even day and night are nigh the same length all the year round, when only by alternation of wet and dry seasons can one tell winter from summer, and the terrible heat dominates everything, time does indeed appear to glide by in a single unbroken sheet of hours, and I knew not whether the year was 1595 or ‘96 or ‘97. Somewhere far away was an England where yet they had the Easter and the Christmastide and the midsummer frolic, where a Queen ruled in grace and glory over a sparkling court of dukes and lords and knights, where maids were wed and turned into mothers, where constant change and transformation was the rule: and here I toiled in a timeless place of the greatest discomfort and dreariness, and each day was the twin of the last.

Only one interruption in our life of routine occurred, when King Ngola, that was the greatest of the enemies of the Portugals in these parts, did rise up and lay blockade against our presidio. That was in Anno 1597, I do believe.

We had ample warning of this, for our scouts all through the province did tell us an army was massing, with drums of war beating, and a great shouting and flourishing of weapons and ringing of wooden bells by the sorcerers, that are the preliminary rituals of war among these folk. Then they came upon us, first a procession of wizards and warlocks with their bodies wrapped in the strong leaves of the matteba, a tree much like unto the palm, so that it seemed the forest itself did walk toward us; and then the warriors themselves, in all their wild battle-dress, their high headdresses and iron chains and jingling bells and such, the like of which I had seen before in the attack by Kafuche Kambara. There were thousands of them, capering like grotesque phantasms and incubi before us, letting fly with their arrows and darts, and crying out in hoarse whooping tones, and doing a dance of death.

But we had builded well, and were not vulnerable behind the walls of our fort, so that they did rage and bluster for week upon week while doing us no harm. Nor could we harm them, I do add, and had the siege continued many weeks longer we should all have perished of starvation if not of the plagues of the place. We dared not come out of the presidio to our burying-ground, so whenever one of our number died of a malady we did burn his body and scatter the ashes, which may not have been pleasing unto God and Church but which spared us from the spreading of disease. And after a time the main force of the Portugals came up from São Paulo de Loanda under the command of the general Balthasar Rebello de Aragao, and drove off the blackamoors as though they were nothing more than vapors, and set us free. After which, this Rebello de Aragao did descend the Kwanza and build a new presidio near the village of Muchima, in the constructing of which I did take a part.

But then we returned to the old weary life at Masanganu, and again I lost count of the months and the years. There was a day when I learned by chance that I was now living in the November of 1598, so that it was my fortieth anniversary of my birth. That seemed a very great age for me to have attained, especially in the teeth of such many hardships. “I am forty years old,” I said aloud to myself several times over, and strange it sounded in my ears. And then also it was the fortieth year of Her Protestant Majesty’s glorious reign, if indeed she still held the throne. But did she? God save me, I might have been on some other star, for all the news of England I had. Did the Queen still live? And if she had gone on, who now held the throne? Was it James of Scotland, or some French prince, or the King of Spain, or someone altogether other? Nay, I could not imagine anyone else on our throne but she, that virgin and miraculous she; and I could not imagine myself being forty, which meant that my lost Anne Katherine, whose maidenhood I had had from her when she was fifteen, must now be seven-and-twenty, long past the bloom of her youth, almost a matron. Did she still wait for my return? Only a fool would think so. Perhaps she grieved for me, but certain it was she had given her love to someone else, and had by now two children or three, and was growing plump and had a little line of golden hair sprouting on her lip, eh? November of 1598! Forty years old, aye, and a slave in Masanganu!

So the time journeyed, and I grew ever harder and more enduring, and I came up out of my long resignation and bestirred myself to think of escaping this place, before my life’s time was utterly expended.

There was a certain Gypsy of Masanganu that over the years I had come to trust, and he the same for me, because that we had labored long side by side, suffering much and sharing much. He called himself Cristovão, though also he had a Cigano name in their own language, that he did not offer to others. This Cristovão was a small man, very dark of skin, with a hawk’s nose and eyes of the most penetrating sort, and the strength of his body was extraordinary, he being able to lift weights of the heaviness of myself, though being but half my size. On one day of amazing heat, when he and I and some few other Gypsies did labor to rebuild a breach in the wall of the fort, suffering like Jews under Pharaoh, an overseer named Barbosa—but surely no kin of my fallen friend—came upon us as we paused a moment to refresh ourselves. Cristovão had a leathern flask of palm-wine, that he drank from by holding it high overhead and letting a stream of the sweet fluid squirt to his open mouth; and he took a deep draught of it and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Andres, it is time you learned how it be done.”

Whereupon I imitated him, but badly, getting the stream of wine on my cheeks and throat, and he laughed and the other Ciganos also, and Cristovão took the flask from me to show me the trick of it. And while he held it above him, this taskmaster Barbosa appeared and did strike the flask from Cristovão’s hands, crying, “Why are you drinking, and not working?”

I saw the fury in Cristovão’s eyes. Humbly did he stoop and pick up his flask, the wine of which was mainly spilled, and then he cleansed his face where the wine had stained it, and he took several deep breaths of the hot air to constrain his temper, so that he did not strike the taskmaster dead, as Moses did in the land of Egypt. And quietly he murmured curses in the Cigano tongue, for he did seethe with hatred and rage.

Then I said, taking him by the arm and leading him a little aside, “Can you bear this any longer? For I cannot. I am minded to flee this place, Cristovão.”

“On your oath?”

“Indeed. This very night will I go, for I think it better for me to venture my life for my liberty than to live any longer in this miserable town,” said I, the words rising up out of some powerful spring within my soul where they had too long been penned.

He pressed his face close to mine and grinned widely, so that I saw a fortune in yellow gold inlaid into his crooked teeth, and he said, “I will go with you, Andres, and we will take our risks together.” And he clasped his arm against mine in an intricate and interwoven way that was, I think, a sign of blood-bond among the Cigano kind.

So were we resolved, and then we were swept along in our own vigor, never hesitating. Whilst we worked we planned our plan, which was to steal a canoe and slip from the fort under darkness, not just the two of us but a whole band of escapers, for we agreed there would be safety in numbers when we were abroad in the jungle. Cristovão said he would procure ten of his fellows to go with us, and so he did, seven Portugals and three more Gypsies, all of them known to me as strong and trustworthy men.

In that tropic land the night falls swiftly once the sun goes away, and if there is no moon the darkness is absolute, owing to the thickness of the jungle vapors and the heaviness of the twined vines that tangle with one another through the tops of the trees. This was a night of no moon; and in the second hour of darkness we rose from our huts and went out from the compound surrounding the fort. We aroused no suspicion among the guards because we did go a few men at a time, and also because that they were lulled by the heat and sluggishness of the place, that in time can turn even the most vigilant of men into an imbecile and dullard.

Through the moist and fevered glades of that close-walled jungle we went one by one until we were at the little quay beside the river. There I found that Cristovão and another Gypsy had overcome the sentinel of the canoes. Simao, one of the Portugals, did take from his sleeve a blade, and make ready to thrust it into the man’s belly, but quickly was he stopped by Cristovão, who seized his wrist most forcibly.

“Nay,” he whispered, “be not a fool! If we slay him, and then we are retaken, what will become of us?”

I had my doubts of that, thinking it mattered little, for if we were retaken it would go hard with us whether we had this sentinel’s blood upon our souls or no. Yet never have I favored slaying the innocent, and this man had done me no wrong. So I gave my agreement, and instead of killing him we did tie him with ropes of living vine pulled down from the trees, and stuffed into his mouth a thick wad of herbage to silence him.

Then we selected the best of the canoes, that was long and trim and stood like a proud lordling above the water. Aboard it we stowed our muskets and powder and shot and a little supply of the golden wheat called masa mamputo, which is Guinea wheat or more accurately American maize, that was the only food we were able to obtain as we departed.

“Go, Piloto,” said Cristovão. “Get you to the bow, and guide us, and I will stand in the stern.”

We twelve escapers then did clamber into the canoe, I taking my place fore, and each of us wielding an oar as we pushed ourselves free and set off down the black and swiftly coursing river in the dead of the night.

2

Free men!

That morning slaves, and by night we were our own masters on a voyage of departure!

In silence we did glide on the Kwanza’s dark breast. Along both sides of the river the trees rose like towering palisados, and animals of the night cried out their terrible howls. With sharp dedication did we keep ourselves to the center channel, lest we crack ourselves against the shore. Sometimes in the night we saw red eyes gleaming, or yellow ones, along the margin of the river: hippopotamuses, or coccodrillos, or perchance some monster even worse. One of the Portugals, a certain Pero, began to tell a story of a journey by canoe he had had on the Mbengu in the campaign of Don João de Mendoça, saying, “It was like this, by night, and the river much narrower, and as we paddled east we were halted by an eddy in the current, and then there rose beneath us a river-horse as big as an elephanto, that overthrew our craft entirely, and scattered us in the water.”

“Be quiet,” said the Gypsy Duarte Lagosta, “or we will feed you to the coccodrillos. We need no such gloomy tales to dishearten us here.”

“I meant only to tell you how we escaped, when—”

“Tell us after we are overthrown,” said Duarte Lagosta, and the Portugal was silent.

I brooded little about meeting a river-horse in the night, but gave much more thought about fetching up into some one of the muddy isles that dot the river. For that could easily happen, and if we were beached we would be coccodrillo-meat before we could get ourselves afloat. Many times had I navigated this river, but never at night, and not in six years; yet I strained at my memories of it, contriving to recollect from the curves and swerves of it the places where the islands lay. Perhaps I did overlook a few, but yet we did not go aground. And as dawn began to creep into the sky above the treetops we found ourselves in a better part of the river, that I knew to be the territory of a little lord styled Mani Kabech, that has a territory in the province of Lamba, which is subject to Portugal.

Morning showed us a heavy sultry world of huge trees, palms and cedars and ironwood, and most especially the great bulging ollicondis, that are like houses in themselves, all spongy within, with trunks that hold rainwater, from which birds do drink. All of this was woven together like a tapestry by the festoons and drapings of the gigantic green creepers, thick as the greatest of serpents, overhead. Though it was daytime the forest was dark— O! it was dark dark dark!—and that was a good thing, for we had had more than our necessary share of sun in the Masanganu labor, and this was a kind coolness to us.

Here we went on shore with our twelve muskets, powder, and shot. We sunk our canoes, because they should not know where we had gone on shore. We made a little fire in the wood, and scorched our Guinea wheat, to relieve our hunger. Later we gathered some honey from the crotch of a great tree, where bees did fly about. And a Gypsy showed us which palm-trees were good to eat, by felling the slender young ones and biting out the pale tender succulent shoots that came from the heart of them.

All morning we rested here and ate, and talked of our plans. Since that we had had no sleep on the night of our escape, we took it now, some of us closing our eyes and some standing watch. Our vigilance was addressed more against deadly beasts of the jungle than against Portugals, for we did not think we would be pursued as far as this point.

As soon as it was dark, we took up our journey again, and marched all that night through the most difficult of thick enforestation, taking what we hoped to be a direction of north-north-west. In this everyone turned to me for counsel, I being regarded as a skilled navigator, and in every opening of the vines I did study the pattern of the stars and draw my sage advice, so it seemed, from the array of the constellations. But also I took good care to note the position of the river, that was far more useful, for it was flowing along on our left hand a short way below us and was a present guide to our way.

But then the river diverged from us, which could not be helped, for our goal was the kingdom of the Kongo in the north, and the Kwanza, if we followed it, would bring us to the sea some leagues south of São Paulo de Loanda, a city we did not dare approach. So now I did navigate by guesswork alone, and by bluff, doing my best. It is far much easier to find one’s way on the open sea betimes, for all its dearth of landmarks, than it is when one is in a jungle where every tree does look the image of his brother, and giveth one false information, which is worse than none at all.

Our second day was a grievous one, for the land grew very much more dry as we entered a great plain, and there was no water anywhere. It seemed sure that in a country so moist and lavish there would be ample springs and brooks for us, but there was not a drop, and the sun’s heat did punish us cruelly, drawing the moisture up out of our bodies and making us grow dizzy.

Gonçalo Fernandes, that was a Portugal who had been shipwrecked on the other coast of Africa some time before, now told us a pretty story, saying, “I was cast upon a desert island, and in all this island we could not find any fresh water in the world, insomuch that we were driven to drink our own urine.”

“And do you suggest that of us now?” asked my Gypsy friend Cristovão, making a sour face like unto an old prune that has been left in the sun a dozen year.

Gonçalo Fernandes replied, “You see me here before you not dead of thirst, and there is your answer.”

“It is a very hard extreme, though,” said Duarte Lagosta.

“That other time,” said Gonçalo Fernandes, “we saved the urine in sherds of certain jars, which we had out of our pinnace, and set it all night to cool therein, to drink it the next morning. And I tell you by God’s Mother that this sustained us. The urine we voided became exceeding red, I think because it was the same water constantly passing in and out of our bodies. But we did not die. And I tell you another thing, that when we found a way to get over to the mainland, we came upon a little river of very sweet and pleasant water, and my companion Antonio overdrank himself, being pinched before with extreme thirst, and within half an hour he died in my presence. So we must remember to be sparing when water comes to us again.”

Well, and we drank no urine that day, but we suffered mightily of thirst. I think had we had any drinking-vessels with us in which to retain the stuff, we would have overcome our niceness on that score. But we did not. We pressed onward, thinking to find ollicondi trees and suck the moistness therefrom, but these trees were not native on this plain. And after a day of such travel we were dizzied and unhealthful, all but one or two of the Gypsies, who seemed of such strength that they needed neither food nor water. That night we were not able to go, and were fain to dig and scrape up roots of little trees, and suck them to maintain life, as I had done that other time of my shipwreck.

The third day we met with one of those great serpents that do inhabit these parts, this being as long as five men stretched head to toe, and as thick through as the thigh of a very stout man. The monster was sleeping and I think had lately eaten, for its middle was a bulging place that was swollen as big as a pig or a goat. We talked of killing it for its meat, but the Portugals among us were loath to eat serpent-flesh, and one of the Gypsies swore that if we angered it, the creature would breathe flame upon us and destroy us; and this argument became so impassioned that in the end, hungry as we were, we let the serpent be, and walked far around it, and continued on our way. Which led to further dispute, some saying they would rather eat serpent than starve, and others preferring starvation: and we did consume much effort in noisy parley of this kind.

But later that day we encountered an old Negro who was traveling to the town where Mani Kabech has his capital. It gave us great surprise to see any man in this forlorn place. This man was wizened and ancient, but strong, and when he saw us he at once began to run. Two of our Gypsies, being most fleet of foot, gave chase and brought him to the ground, but he struggled so keenly fierce with them that it was an amazement, he being white-haired and his skin withered by age, hanging in dry folds. When he was subdued we took from him his waist-cloth of sturdy palm fiber and bound his hands behind him, and I spoke with him, telling him in Kikongo words I had learned from Matamba that we meant no harm, if he would help us.

He looked at me most gloomily, as though I would sell him tomorrow into slavery.

“Nay,” I said, “we are no slavers, and we love the Portugal government no more than you.”

Mamputo is what I said for “Portugal,” that being the native word for that nation, and I did pantomime my disdain by saying the word and spitting, and the like. The Portugals among us were displeased by this, but I made them hold their tongues.

With great patience I explained to the old man that we were fleeing our enemies, the Mamputo folk, and hoped to take refuge in the land of Kongo, and needed him to lead us to the lake of Kasanza, which we knew to be in that direction and where we could refresh ourselves. He understood my meaning and pledged himself to do that for us. One of the Portugals asked me to tell him that if he worked any treachery he would die a terrible death, but I allowed the old man enough wisdom to comprehend that without my saying it to him.

This Lake Kasanza was well known to some of those with whom I journeyed. It is eight miles across, and issues into the River Mbengu. It doth abound with fish of sundry sorts, and on its shore lives the greatest store of wild beasts that is in any place of Angola. So there we thought we might provide for ourselves as we undertook the continuance of our march into the land of Kongo.

The old man did not betray us. Traveling all that day in this extreme hot country we came to the town called Kasanza, which is near to the lake. As we neared it we crossed a small river that runs out of the lake, which was the first water that we had seen in a very long while. But the old man cried out as we ran to drink from it, saying in his tongue that the river gave bad water; and, having faith in him, I warned my companions not to take any. This was difficult for them to forego, but when we came to the edge of the water it was easier, the river being so shallow it was near dry, and the water being black and foul, with a thick scum or crust over it, and flies so numerous they were like a curtain that buzzed.

So we went onward unslaked, and a little while after came to Kasanza town. Here we were only twelve leagues east of São Paulo de Loanda. It was but another two or three miles from the town to the lake, but some of our people did not have the strength to proceed any further owing to thirst. Therefore we released our old blackamoor and went into the town to seek aid.

This town was one of those subjugated by Don João de Mendoça in his military expedition through the valley of the Mbengu, and we feared there might be a Portugal garrison here. But there was none, only a population of Negroes, that greeted us very coolly, and when we asked for water they fled into their houses and would not come out, and gave us nothing to drink.

“Let us torch the place,” said that Portugal Simao who had wanted to slay the sentinel of the canoes, and who vaunted himself for bravery and resource, but to me was not much other than a common criminal.

“Aye,” said Gonçalo Fernandes, who had once survived by drinking urine. “If they defy us, let us burn them like rats in a stack of hay.”

“It is not the wisest way,” I replied. “We can frighten them in easier style.”

And I did array our party in a military fashion, and we aimed our muskets into the houses, and fired very sparingly but in a regular way, shooting into this house and that and that according to what must seem like a pattern of attack. This drove the people into the open, making gestures of surrender, and their lord the Mani Kasanza now came to us with fair speeches, inviting us to stay the night in his village, and saying we could have water.

So that night we slept under a roof again. But it was not a restful night nor a merry one, except that it is possible to see merriment in a discomfort so extreme that it takes on a character of absurdity.

This is what befell. They gave us for sleeping, one of their largest palaces, which of course was no palace but only a building of brush and straw and plastered mud, but it had many rooms. When we had eaten and had our fill to drink, we took to our chambers gladly, and quickly our joy was dissipated. My bed was against the wall, which was of fat clay ill put together, and might well be called a nest of rats; for there were so many of them and so large, that they troubled me very much, running over me and biting my toes. To prevent this I caused my bed to be laid in the middle of the room, but to no purpose, for those cursed creatures knew where to find me. The others had the same difficulty, and when an hour had passed thus plagued by the rats, Cristovão and I went to the dwelling of the Mani Kasanza, to protest the place we had been given.

He was not at all surprised at our complaint, but said he would provide us with an infallible remedy against it. This was a little monkey that would secure me against the rats by blowing on them when he spied them, and by giving off a kind of musky perfume that the rats found displeasing. We took this small agile creature to our house, and indeed it did its duty; for he was quite tame, and picked through my hair and beard for hidden creatures, which he devoured, and after doing me this service did lay down at the foot of my bed. When the rats came as they were wont, the monkey blew hard at them two or three times, and made them run away; and then he went on into the other rooms and did the same for my companions.

Thus I had perhaps two hours of sleep without interruption, which my body sorely needed after my long march across the hot land. But just as I was sinking into the true depths of my slumber, that is the most nourishing part of the night, several blacks did rush helter-skelter into the chamber, crying, “Out! Out! The ants are broke out, and there is no time to be lost!”

I was fuddled with weariness and scarce understood what they were saying, so without waiting for me to stir, they lifted me upon my straw bed and did carry bed and me together out of the building. The same was occurring to the others of my party, and we gathered outside, now thoroughly awake. The nimbleness of the blacks stood me in good stead, for the ants had already begun to run upon my legs, and get to my body, and bit in like prickling needles. A certain Portugal named Vaz Martin, much agitated by the sight of them, said, “We should give God thanks that we were delivered from these pismires, for they are most deadly.” And he told me how this thing often happens in the kingdom of Angola, that men are taken in their sleep and unable to stir and are eaten up alive by them, and also cows are found devoured in the night by these ants, and nothing left of them but the bones. It is no small deliverance to escape the troublous insects, for there are some that fly, and are hard to be removed from the place where they lay hold: but God be praised that my body was not devoured by them alive.

To rid the village of the small attackers the blacks took straw, and fired it on the floor of the four rooms, where the ants were marching already above half a foot thick. But while this was being done the fire took hold of the thatch of the house, and fearing the fire might increase with the wind, we drew back to a further distance. And also the pismires broke into a neighboring cottage, where again the blacks did burn them; but the hut being all of straw, it was consumed as well as the ants, which made the blacks get out of their houses for fear the wind should carry the flame about and burn all that quarter. This may all sound amusing in the telling of it long after, but I assure you we found that comedy of rats and monkey and ants and fire to be no cheering comedy at all, but rather exceeding somber. We were without sleep that night once all this commenced, and before dawn we departed, more weary than we had come, and hied ourselves off to the shores of the lake of Kasanza.

Here at least we had some repose, and took some fish and birds for the benefit of our bellies. And at dusk the next day we proceeded onward to the north until we arrived at the river. To cross the Mbengu entailed us in great danger, for that the place is a nesting-ground of coccodrillos, in such number that they reminded us of the swarms of ants. I have told you that coccodrillos have a musky scent, but here they were so numerous that the water itself was rank with their flavor, which was distasteful in the extreme. And they are roaring beasts, that in the night do call to one another, especially toward break of day, with a sound much resembling the sound of a deep well, that might be easily heard a league away. But we found a place where we could safely ford the river between two great lairs of these monsters, and we lit torches, which they seemed not to like.

All the following day we crossed another dry hot terrain and toward night we came to the River Dande, the next one north of the Mbengu. Owing to the bleakness of the land we turned east and traveled so far that we were right against the mountains of Manibangono, which is a lord that warreth against the King of Kongo, whither we intended to go. Ahead of us we saw a village, but we were uncertain of our reception there and so we slipped most secretly into his outskirts, and hid ourselves in a field nearby.

God’s death, that was folly! For we had planted ourselves right down in the great burial-ground of the village, and hardly were we established there when a procession came wending out of the town to perform some funeral rites. We could not flee, for the lay of the land was such that we would surely be seen; so we had no recourse but to huddle ourselves down behind some of the great heaped-up tumuli of the dead and hope that we went unnoticed.

So they came forth, and when they reached the edge of the cemetery they all paused while some hens were killed by their painted sorcerers, and the blood liberally scattered around. Cristovão, beside me, whispered, “D’ye know the import of that?”

“Not at all,” said I.

“It is to prevent the soul of the dead person from coming to give the zumbi to any of the townsfolk.”

“I know not this word zumbi.”

“It means an apparition of the deceased one. They are of the opinion that to whomsoever it shall appear, that person will presently die.”

“Have we then escaped the ants and coccodrillos only to deliver ourselves up to the zumbi?” I asked.

To this he laughed quietly, and we fell silent and watched as the ceremony of lamenting proceeded, with much singing and dancing and weeping, and the sound of drums and iron bells and ivory horns. Then the corpse, wrapped in bright clothes and blankets, was taken into its grave. They did cover it with rich goods, blankets and robes and ornaments and the like, and poured an ocean and a half of palm-wine over it, the which I would gladly have had for my own use just then, and covered the top over with straw mats. And then the sorcerers did go back and forth with a thousand superstitious interlacings and interweavings, after which the earth was heaped high. Then to the sound of a beating drum they all withdrew back into their town, and during the night we heard from afar the sounds of merriment, and I know not what idolatrous delights and abominable pleasures.

There was no sleep for us that night. Who could tell what mourners lurked about, or what sentinels, or what zumbi? With the first pink streaks of dawn in the sky all did seem quiet, and we stole away to the north. And we passed the river, and rested again, and proceeded by the day, crossing, as we hoped, into the kingdom of Kongo, and thinking of ourselves as much like unto the children of Israel, wandering out of the desert toward the promised land.

3

Being two leagues north of the River Dande, we met with a party of Negroes, a dozen or more young huntsmen or warriors, well armed, but seemingly friendly. They spoke the language of the Angolan blacks and asked us whither we traveled.

“We go to Kongo,” I said.

“You go the wrong way, then,” said they, which much surprised me, for that I was sure I had the plan of the territory clear in my mind. But they said they would guide us, for they were Mushikongos, that is, Kongo-men, and would carry us to the land of Mbamba, where the Duke of Mbamba lay, who was one of the chief princes of the kingdom of the Kongo.

I was ill at ease at all this, and to his credit so was Cristovão and his Gypsies. But the Portugals who were with us had come to mistrust my leadership and were willing to be guided by these blackamoors, and so firmly did they argue that I yielded, thinking I might after all be mistaken about the proper direction of our travel.

So we went some three miles east, up into the land, till we became certain that we were in the wrong way. For we traveled by the sun and the sun plainly lay behind us in the afternoon as we went up into the hills. So we turned back again to the westward. At this the blacks quick took up a position before us with their bows and arrows and darts, ready to shoot at us.

I looked toward Cristovão and he to me, and I said, “We must go through them.”

“Aye,” said he, and we levelled our muskets at them. The blackamoors not showing fear at this, we discharged six muskets together, which killed four of them and greatly amazed the others, who fled into the woods. But they followed us four or five miles, and hurt two of our company with their arrows.

The next day we came within the borders of Mbamba, that is the south-west province of the kingdom of the Kongo, and traveled all that day. At night we heard the surge of the sea. This gave me great pleasure, I having lived all the happiest days of my life within earshot of the sea, and like any Englishman I begin to feel narrow-souled and strained when I am herded into some great dry flatland far from the surf and the ocean-breezes. But there on my ear was the rise and the fall of the waves, that is the sweetest sound our world can bestow.

My plan was this, to make my way to some civilized part of the Kongo, for that is a well-ordered land, whose people are far from backward and do obey the behests of Jesus. The Portugals have great influence there, but I did not fear falling into their hands, since they would have no knowledge of my condition in Angola, and perhaps I might pretend to be a Dutchman, shipwrecked somewhere and seeking rescue. Or else the blackamoors themselves might aid me to reach a port, and I might take ship for England. I had some other such schemes, too, in case these did not fare well. But in the final event all my planning was doomed to perish frustrate, because calamity overtook us as we made our wearisome track northward, running a few miles in from the shore of the sea.

It was in the morning and we were, I think, ten leagues or a little more above São Paulo de Loanda. To our great dismay we saw suddenly coming after us a troop of Portugals on horse, with a great store of Negroes following them. I think we had by grievous error stumbled across some outlying garrison of the army, who did patrol this region against enemies, and peradventure we were mistaken for scouts of an encroaching force.

Our company was so disheartened by this that our seven faint-hearted Portugals hid themselves in the thickets, crouching down like squirrels in a hole, where they would certainly be captured. I and the four Gypsies thought to have escaped, but the soldiers followed us so fast that we were fain to go into a little wood. As soon as the Portugal captain had overtaken us he discharged a volley of shot into the wood, which made us lose one another, for under that deadly fire we did crawl this way and that, and were separated.

I lay alone, steeped in my reeking sweat but still unwounded. All about me sounded the cries and alarums of the Negro auxiliaries, who were thrashing foolishly about in the wood, shouting halloo to one another as they sought for us. But there were so many of them that even in their folly they were like to blunder upon me, and I bethought myself that if those Negroes did take me in the wood they would kill me in some barbarous ugly way, and drag my bloodied corpse to the captain of the Portugals to claim a reward. I believed my time was up, but I preferred to die in clean warfare rather than be pounded and mangled by savages in some tangled jungly place of chaos. Therefore, thinking to make a better end for myself among the Portugals, I came presently out of the wood with my musket ready charged, intending to give a good accounting for my life.

But the captain, thinking that we had been all twelve together and I was leading my fellows from refuge, called to me and said, “Fellow soldier, I have the governor’s pardon; if you will yield yourselves you shall have no hurt.”

I, having my musket ready, answered the captain most truthfully that I was an Englishman, and had served six years at Masanganu, in great misery; and came in company with eleven Portugals and Gypsies, and here am left all alone; and rather than I will be hanged, I will die in the defense of my liberty.

“Nay,” he said, “you will not be hanged. Are you Andres Battell the Piloto?”

“That I am.”

“Deliver thy musket to one of the soldiers, Piloto Battell. And I protest, as I am a gentleman and a soldier, to save thy life for thy resolute mind.”

These were right noble words, even though they came from the mouth of a Portugal. I thought it wiser to accept his pledge, for all my mistrust of such blandishments, than to reject it out of hand and die gloriously; for there is no repair of dying, glorious or otherwise. So did I surrender. And you will not be amazed to learn that I tumbled thereby into fresh misfortune.

The captain did command all his soldiers and Negroes to search the woods, and to bring us all out alive or dead, which was presently done. Then they carried us to the city of São Paulo de Loanda, which looked much enlarged and greatly more prosperous in the six years since last I had seen it, and thrust me with the three Gypsies into prison. There I lay for months with a collar of iron upon me, and great bolts upon my legs, in the very dungeon I had known before, among the rats and spiders. So I was not hanged, and the captain did keep his promise to me to that degree. But once again I was a captive in chains.

Everything becomes more skilful done with practice at it, and I had had by now such training at being a dungeon inmate that I was a fair expert at it, and carried off the task with high great virtuosity. No longer did I expend my breath in loud railings at my fate, or denunciation of mine enemies, nor did I brood long and hard upon dire revenge. Instead I quickly let myself slide into an altered condition of awareness, a kind of mystical trance, in which for hours at a time I did lift my soul from out of this dreary place and let it rove the bright realm of fancy. I think I would have gone mad in all my many captivities, had I not had that skill.

Therefore did I imagine myself in England, walking through the tangled grimy lanes of London and strolling the sweet green fields of Essex. To Plymouth I went, and Dover, that shines so fine in the sunlight, and I knelt in the great Cathedral at Canterbury, and walked on the old walls of Chester, and journeyed by cart to York, and even across into dark stormy Scotland on some errand to those dour turbulent folk. I consorted with great lords of the court and met with learned geographers, to whom I did tell my tales of Africa. I sailed again to France, and to Spain, even which I imagined now was bound by treaty of peace with England. And I pictured myself coming home to a loving wife I called Anne Katherine, though here my fancy failed me, for I could not even summon up a face to give her, nor any character of person. The Anne Katherine I had once known was only a figment, a child long outgrown, and though in pretense I could see myself married with her, she had no substance for me.

In such playing did I consume the days and the nights. I reflected often upon my own life, also, the strange twistings and turnings of it, that had me in and out of these Portugee dungeons, and back and forth up strange shadowy rivers, and moving like one ensorcelled through a realm of naked savages and man-eaters. It was as though I had fallen asleep on an April day in Anno 1589, and had entered into a long dream from which there was no awaking.

In dreams anything can happen, and nothing is cause for surprise. So now upon the failure of my bold escape from Masanganu did I resign myself to the dream-like flow of event, and let myself be carried along on its strong tide, without ever once expecting any further relief from prison and punishment, and without showing the slightest amaze when my life did undergo new transformations. By which I mean that I had lulled myself into a great calmness of spirit, from which nothing could rouse my tranquil pulse. Thus when warders came to me and smote the bolts from my legs and the iron collar from my neck, I asked no questions, and it was all the same to me, whether they were taking me next to the place of execution or to put me on board a ship to England. My blood ran quiet. My soul was accepting of anything equally.

So they took from me my rags and gave me rough but serviceable clothes of the kind a common yeoman might wear, and led me into the presidio courtyard and out into the heart of the city. And under the drumbeat blaze of noon I marched between them, a little weak in the leg from so long being cramped into a cell, but my shoulders straight, and I never asked a word, never demanded of them to know where they went with me or what fate was to be mine.

They conveyed me to a residence of the most palatial kind, with facings of white stone inset with gleaming tiles of Portuguese manufacture in blue and yellow, and sentinels with muskets patrolling outside. I thought I remembered that place from my former life in São Paulo de Loanda, but I was not sure, and the clouds did not clear from my mind until I was within. Then I realized it was the dwelling place of Fernão da Souza and Dona Teresa, but greatly rebuilt and made more splendid over the years. And setting foot in that place broke me at last from my placid trance, and put a dryness into my throat and squeezed my heart like a secret hand within my breast.

We went down a lengthy hall hung with heavy tapestries and into a drawing-chamber, where once Dona Teresa had fed me sweetmeats from a little tray. There was a woman standing there, of the greatest majesty and beauty. She wore a long black gown of Venetian silk, and a triple strand of shining pearls, deep blue in color and no two of the same shape, and in her ears were broad hoops of gold from which great emeralds depended. So opulent was her costume that the blaze of it nigh eclipsed her features, and I was slow to recognize her, even though this was, of course, Dona Teresa that I beheld.

“Leave him with me,” she said.

Her voice was cool and measured, the voice of one accustomed to command. She held herself like a queen.

I thought me back six years and more to my last view of her, when she had crouched near naked in my cottage, sweat-shining and as wild as an angry animal, her clothes in tatters and red scratches across her skin, and her bare breasts heaving up and down from frenzy and wrath. And there flashed into my mind also an earlier and happier time, when I was new in Angola and scarce recovered from my Masanganu fever, and in my prison cell she did drop her shift away and show her brown nipples to me, and wrap her thighs about my body. She had been mere eighteen then, mysterious and poised but still showing the soft unformed look of youth about her. But that was ten years past, or a little more, and she had ripened into something regal, and awesome in her strength. And yet was she so beautiful still, more beautiful even than she had been, that I could have wept for anguish at the perfection of her face and form.

I should have been frighted of her, I suppose. For in our last meeting, those six years back, she had shown herself to be a true witch, a dark sorceress, a woman of the greatest malevolence: qualities which I had seen in her from the beginning, but which had risen to their peak of envenomed power that time she had contended with Matamba. She was a magnificent creature: but yet was she a kind of monster.

Strange to say, I did not fear her.

Was it that fear had been burned from my soul, under the hot sun of Masanganu? Or that I had broken her grip on me, when that I had hurled her little idol into the river-waters? Or was it only that I knew she could do me no further harm, since that I had nothing whatever left to lose? Perhaps that last was the essence of it. Whatever, I faced her most coolly, with my heart altogether still. I felt anger toward her— aye, an anger most surpassing!—but not a shred of fear.

We stood apart, with a massive burnished bronze table between us, and she studied me as though I were some rare curio from the treasure-houses of Byzantium.

Then she said, “I feared your hair would have turned white. I am much pleased to find it golden still.”

“I am white-haired within, Dona Teresa.”

“Indeed? How old are you now, Andres?”

“I think I will be two-and-forty this year.”

“Very old, yes. Turn around. Let me see you from all sides.”

I obeyed, turning as if I were displaying some new mode of cloak for her, or fashionable breeches. For I did not dare let go of my tight rein upon myself, and come into reach of my true feelings, lest I launch myself at her and throttle her to death.

She said, “You look strong and vigorous, Andres.”

“Aye. Slavery agrees with me well.”

“Has it been slavery for you, then?”

“Six years at Masanganu, Dona Teresa,” said I most quietly. “It is not a pleasure-resort there. And then some days crossing the wilderness on foot, and afterward some months in these dungeons here, where the food is not of the finest.”

“Oh, Andres, will you forgive me?” she asked, and the steel went from her voice and she seemed almost a girl again.

“Aye,” said I bitterly, “for it was a light thing you did to me, to betray me on the eve of my escape, and prevent me from regaining my native land. Why should I hold a grudge for that?”

“Upon the cross, Andres, I had nothing to do with betraying your escape! It was some Portugals in the Dutchman’s crew, that learned of your plan and told Caldeira de Rodrigues.”

“Ah, so it was. You merely invented the tale of my raping you by force, that was all.”

She lowered her eyes. “I was greatly angered with you.”

“For refusing you?”

“For that, and for taking the slave-girl in my place.”

“You were not my wife. Was I to sleep alone, the rest of my days, except when you chose to favor me?”

She did answer to that, “I would have favored you often. I could not bear you coupling with that animal.”

“No animal, milady, but a good Christian, better than some in this city, that pretend to Christianity but deal also with the Devil. And having a warm and kind heart, where there are some here that have none whatever.”

“Why did you buy her?”

“To spare her from evil, in being shipped into a fatal servitude.”

“And to make her your concubine?”

“That befell afterward, which was not my prime design for her. And I had thought you were dead, do you forget? They said you had been thrown overboard on your way to Portugal.”

“But that did not befall me. Why did you not put her aside, when I returned to São Paulo de Loanda?”

I drew my breath in deep, and released it slowly. “What value is there in discussing these matters, Dona Teresa? She was my servant and my companion. You had taken a husband. You and I had separate lives to live, and she was a part of mine. When I told you these things, you would not grant them, but flew at her with your claws like a wild beast, and then told a monstrous lie, that put me under sentence of death. But why poke and prod into this stuff? It was long ago.”

She came alongside the table, and moved closer to me, so that I smelled the perfume of her, and I imagined there was a throbbing heat coming from her, a warmth like that of the sun, radiating out of the twin points of her breasts and from that dark hot woolly place below, that I knew so well.

She said, “It was a shameful thing that I did, accusing you falsely that way. But I was enraged, Andres, I was maddened, I was not in my right mind. Afterward I relented within myself, and felt great guilt over my sin toward you, and went to Don João and did plead for you to be pardoned from the sentence of death.”

“Ah, then I owe you my life,” I said, half-mockingly.

“That overstates it some, for Don João had already relented. He could not find in his heart the will to hang you, and so he delayed, leaving you in the prison. When I spoke with him, that strengthened his hand, and he decided to alter your sentence to one of banishment for life to Masanganu.”

“A passing gentle place.”

“Gentler than the gallows, Andres, is it not?” She stretched forth a hand to me, but did not quite touch me. “As you say: it was long ago. My fury sprang altogether out of love for you. I did repent my falsehood, and I have done private penance for it within my soul. And I beg you now to forgive me.”

“What will become of me now?”

“You are again under the sentence of death, for that you have broken forth from your banishment unlawfully. But again Don João hesitates to hang you, out of an ancient fondness for you. And again I plead your case with him.”

“Don João is still governor, then?”

“He is old and sick, and I think will not hold his post much longer. But for the moment he does still rule. Don Fernão argues for your death, as does Caldeira de Rodrigues. But I am opposed and Don João is unwilling, and I think we will prevail.”

“Ah. Your husband still seeks vengeance for the rape that did not occur!”

“I have told him it did not occur.”

“Then why hang me? Does he not believe you?”

“He believes me. He holds no grievance privately against you. But the old accusation is still remembered here. For the sake of his position, he must make a public show of enmity toward you, for having dishonored his wife.”

“His position?” I asked. “And what is that?”

“He is second viceroy under Don João, and will, I think, succeed him in the governorship.”

I smiled at that. “So you have almost accomplished your plan, then. Soon you shall be the governor’s wife, and because he is a vain and silly man, you will in good sooth be the governor in fact, though he wear the chain of office. I applaud you, Dona Teresa! I salute you in greatest admiration!”

“Andres—”

“Why the soft word? Why the outstretched hand? Dona Teresa, you sent me into six years of terrible imprisonment.”

“And saved you from hanging, and will save you again, and will pledge to do all in my power to atone for my harming of you. I ask that you give over your hatred of me. I ask that you remember our love, that burned so brightly.”

I closed my eyes and looked away.

“You will not spurn me again!” she cried, and all the tenderness that had crept into her voice was gone from it again.

“Ah, do you command me to love you, then?”

“I command nothing!”

“What do you want from me, lady?”

“Nothing but what we had before.”

“We are not who we were before,” I said.

“I tell you, nothing has changed.”

With a nod did I say, “Aye, aye, you are right. Nothing has changed, but that I have had six years of prison on your account, whilst you dressed yourself in silks and pearls and lived in splendor by the sea. You have sipped on fine wines and I have been drinking bile. You have eaten rare fowl and I have smelled the reek of coccodrillos. But nothing has changed.”

“Andres—”

“O, to think I wept when I believed you dead, lady!”

“Andres,” she said again, and again her voice did make the journey from steel to velvet. “Listen to me, and put aside your fury for the moment. From the first time I saw you, I loved you. You were like the sun, I thought, you with your golden hair and your blue eyes—to look upon you gave me a warmth, a strong heat, even. And ever since have I prized you above all men. If I betrayed you—and, yea, I did betray you most shamefully—it was out of excess of love, it was from a superfluity of passion, that does turn to rage and foul sour juices when it is thwarted. But if you will only restore yourself to me, I will make full amends, I do vow it!”

“What is it, in sharp exactness, that you want from me, Dona Teresa?”

“I thought I had said it.”

“You have spoken of large vague things. Name the service you would have me do for you.”

Across the gloss of her eyes there slipped a veiling cloud of new wrath.

“Andres, please—”

“Name it!”

“Nay,” she said, and turned from me. “This is of no avail. Too much time has come between us.”

“Time, and other things, too.”

“Indeed. Go from me, Andres.”

“And am I your enemy?”

“Never again,” she said. “But go! Quickly!”

I could readily feel the hot waves of desire that still surged from her, and I knew that even now I had only to move toward her, to touch my fingertips to her bare shoulders, and she would be mine in a moment. I hesitated. Through my mind there blazed the image of Dona Teresa pressing some mysterious catch and causing her gown to fall away, so that she was naked before me but for her pearls and her emeralded ear-hoops, with the dark turrets rising hard out of her high round breasts, and the lust-musk perfuming her loins, and then I would kneel before her and she would stroke my thick tangled hair and draw my cheek against her smooth thighs, and I would press my face into her womanly delta, with my tongue seeking the little pink bud that was hidden within, and then—and then, and then, and then—

O! How easily I would yield myself up to her tender fleshly snare!

But I did not do it. God wot, I am no man of iron self-discipline in these matters of lust, as surely I have made quite plain by this time to you. But even so, there is a time when coupling with some certain woman becomes inappropriate, and that time had long ago arrived between Dona Teresa and me.

She was Dalila. She was Circe. She had had me in her spell, and she had used me as her plaything, and she had thrown me away when I no longer suited her needs. And in throwing me away, she had given me the strength to break from her. If I put myself back into her hands now, I might never escape again.

Ah, she was beautiful, and never more so than now, in the full ripeness of her womanhood! But I knew her so well! She was perilous, a woman-demon, a Lilith, an instrument of seduction and domination, who could pose at girlishness, or even at kittenishness, when it was to her advantage. I trembled, thinking how simple it would be to take her in my arms, and how great an error. I understood all that she was claiming, of having betrayed me simply out of wrath and jealousy. Nor were such motives unknown in the world before her time, since even Jove’s queen Juno had vilely enchanted many of her rivals and ensorcelled her unfortunate lovers, and many lesser women, I trow, had done that also. But I would not be deceived again. Rather would I couple at random with some whore of the streets, than give myself into the keeping of a shedevil that I had mistaken for a true woman. I must hold my distance from Dona Teresa, for wisdom’s sake, and for honor’s sake, and for safety’s. So I did not move toward her, as so easily I could.

I said instead, with a great distance in my voice, and a light frost, “Well, and we shall not be enemies, then. I wish you all comfort and blessing, Dona Teresa.”

4

Though I would not submit to her, nevertheless by Dona Teresa’s good offices I was once again made a free man. But it was a limited sort of freedom, nothing like that which I enjoyed in the old days when I was pilot of the governor’s pinnace. There still lay over me the double charge of treason and rape, for which I had been banished to Masanganu, and there was on top of that the crime of escaping from that fort; and I was given to understand that I still would have to undergo some penalty for those offenses. Yet I would not have to bide my time longer in the dungeon here, nor was I was going to be returned to Masanganu. So my condition had improved somewhat over its former state.

I was not restored to my former cottage by the sea-breezes. Instead was I given a much humbler place, a room on the ground floor of the barracks where the common Portugal soldiers dwelled, nor did I have any servants this time. Yet I could hardly have expected anything better than that, and even the barracks was a goodly step upward from the vileness of the dungeon or the malign vapors of Masanganu. So there I resided without complaint, and took my meals with the soldiery, dining as they did on humble gruels and porridges and the stringy stewed meat of unknown beasts, and washing it down with the stale beer and flat palm-wine they were supplied.

Among these troops I formed no friendships, for they were all half my age, having come out from Portugal or its other colonies in the last few years. They looked upon me, I trow, as some sort of phantom, and found me frightening: a gaunt tall Englishman, with wild eyes, who was said to have committed terrible crimes, and who had done hard years of service in the interior of the country, a place that they dreaded. They did not understand why I was come to be in Angola at all, nor could they begin to approach me as a companion, I being so alien from their minds. There were times when I came nigh to saying, “Nay, I am only good-natured Andy Battell, who means you no harm,” but I did not. For already I was beginning to see that good-natured Andy Battell, that amiable young man who had set forth from England to win a little gold with which to marry his sweetheart, was long since dead and buried within the husk of the man who now bore that same name. I had been innocent and cheerful, sweet-souled, even; and for all my sweetness God had seen fit to let me pass from captivity to captivity, from torment to torment, and it had altered me greatly, very little remaining of the original save a certain stubborn persistence and, I hope, a certain measure of honor.

Other alterations had taken place around me in this land. The most obvious was the growth of São Paulo de Loanda, which had been but a place of mud streets and thatched dwellings when Thomas Torner and I were dumped down into it in the June of 1590, and now, after ten years and some, was becoming a true city, which had fair palaces and churches and govermental halls everywhere about. That did tell me that the Portugals must be pumping heavy profits out of this place, and had made it their great headquarters along the Atlantic side of Africa, shifting themselves almost entirely from their former domain within the kingdom of the Kongo.

There had been changes among people. I have already spoken of the changing of Dona Teresa from handsome girl to formidable and awesome woman, virtually the queen of this place. A few others whom I had formerly known were yet in evidence, much enhanced. Pedro Faleiro, my shipmate in the coastal voyages, now was the high admiral here, with my other sailing-fellow Pinto Cabral as his lieutenant. Mendes Oliveira was dead; Manoel de Andrade was in the south, commanding the harbor at Benguela; Manoel Fonseca, who had had authority at Masanganu when I was brought there after the Kafuche Kambara massacre, now was the captain of the presidio at São Paulo de Loanda. His predecessor in that role, Fernão da Souza, I saw occasionally being borne to and fro in a hammock by native slaves that were arrayed in the most pompous of costumes. Souza still inclined himself toward ornate dress of wondrous color, but looked softer, less gallant, for he was beginning now to slide into the sort of middle age that overcomes some of these dashing Portugals when they rise too high and are given overmuch to wine and sloth. I had no encounters with Souza and desired none. As for my other enemy of old, Gaspar Caldeira de Rodrigues, he had lately taken himself off, to my great relief, to the Portuguese lands in India.

Another whom I saw only from afar was Don João de Mendoça, and the look of him greatly saddened me. He had gone puffy and liverish, his face almost green of hue and much bloated, and his eyes, hidden within folds of unhealthful flesh, were barely to be noticed. He walked slowly and with a painful limp, and it was plain that the hand of death was closing about him in a gradual but inexorable way. I had no direct dealings with Don João. Gone were the days when he would summon me to his palace for a feast of many meats and wines, and speak with me about his dreams and hopes for this colony. I had fallen now far beneath the notice of all these great men of Angola.

Of all the transformations I observed, though, the most somber was that of one who had been closest of all to me, that is, my former slave Matamba. I found her again by accident only, and so changed was she that I nearly passed her by, unknowing.

There was now in São Paulo de Loanda a kind of whoring district, behind the main market, where soldiers who did not regularly consort with some black or mulatto woman could go, and find natives who would lie with them for a handful of cowrie-shell money. Sometimes in the early days of my return to the city I passed this place and looked in with idle curiosity, but I did no more than that, for I have never greatly favored hiring the bodies of strangers in that way, except when need is extreme. Yet from time to time the itch does become so strong in me that I fain must scratch it. It happened that an errand took me down to the harbor one day, and there I saw a few Angolan girls of thirteen or fourteen years splashing naked in the warm surf, and the sight of their firm outthrusting breasts and rounded plump buttocks, all gleaming with sea-water and sunlight, did reawaken in me the desires of the flesh. So I went next to the quarter where whores did consort, and looked about to find me some reasonably clean and unpoxed black lass on whom I could ease this sudden pressing want.

There were several young and likely ones, among whom I stood choosing, when an old beggar-woman—as I thought—plucked at my sleeve and said in a low downcast way, “Por favor—”

I would have handed her a shell without glancing at her, and continued about my business, but some familiar note in her voice did strike a deep level of my soul, and, not knowing why, I turned to her. I beheld a woman in tattered and flimsy cloth of a faded orange color, with stooped shoulders and a broken, defeated look about her: yet her eyes still retained a glow, a spark, of some finer nature, and to my great horror I came after a moment to understand that this was no old beggar woman but one I knew full well; in sooth it was my Matamba, aged more than I could easily credit in these six years. For I might just as easily have believed this to be the mother of Matamba, as the person herself.

“Is that you?” I asked.

“I am—I forget the words—”

“You know who I am, Matamba?”

“The English—Andres—”

“Yes! But I can scarce believe this change, Matamba. Can it truly be you?”

She seemed to tremble, and closed her eyes a moment, as if reaching into some great depth of memory, out of which at length she fetched, saying the words in a weak quavering voice, “Essex—Sussex— Somerset—York—”

I was fair close upon weeping.

Instantly did I sweep her out of that whore-market and to my barracks, where I ordered a meal for her, some palm-wine, some boiled grain and meat. She ate hastily and in desperate greed, with both her hands, as if she had not had food a long while, and feared it might be taken from her before she was done. I watched her with pity and dismay. She was then no more than two-and-twenty years of age, and looked close upon forty, and a much-used forty at that. Her breasts, that once had stood out before her like two firm globes, now were sagging and shrunken. Her face was haggard, her nose showed the mark of some injury, her rich brown skin had grown ashen-dull in its color, her woolly hair was flecked with bits of gray. She was thin and slack-muscled, who I remembered as sturdy, a joyous athlete. There was a tremor to her hands, not a great one but unceasing.

When she had done with her meal I took her by the chin and lifted her head, and said, “We are both much less pretty now, eh, Matamba? But at least we have both survived. Tell me your tale of these six years, and then I’ll tell you mine.”

“The words—too fast—”

“Forgotten your Portugee, is that it?”

“I speak—little—”

“Ah. Yes. We can talk in your Kikongo tongue, if you like. I have some words of that lingo now.”

“No—Portugal—”

Aye. She wanted the language back.

So I was gentle and slow with her, and we talked a little, and she rested, and we rehearsed some words anew, and I ordered more food for her. Then she was tired, and lay down, and later I joined her in the bed; but I had forgotten all lust by this time, and merely held her in my arms until morning. Her naked body was a sorry sight, with the lines of childbearing making a map across her belly, and her thighs that had been so taut and vigorous now puckered and loose, and so on, a terrible ruination of all her beauty. Yet already, in just a day and a night, she seemed to be brightening and returning to herself. God’s wounds, how she must have suffered from want and misery, before I found her among the whores!

It pained me to watch her those early days as she hobbled about my room, sighing much, pausing often to mutter a prayer and to cross herself, and always struggling to find the strength to go on. For she was a wreck, a beached hull, that had endured the worst of the elemental furies and showed all the signs of it. She did weep often, and tremble with some inner chill, or maybe the memory of an ague. But each day she was less ruined than on the day before, for the which I gave deep thanks to Him who is our preservation.

In a slow and very gradual way did she make her recovery, regaining some strength, and finding once more her command of Portuguese as her body offered sustenance to her mind. Within a week or so, months of suffering had dropped away from her, so that she was not near so frightsome to behold. But beyond doubt she never again would be that girlish black goddess I had bought in São Tomé, but at best only a shadow of her.

She told me the tale of her hardships, which chilled my blood like a wintry northern gale.

She said that after my arrest she was taken by my other servants and beaten severely, and hurled naked from my cottage and left to crawl away. Some Portugal soldiers found her and merrily had her behind a bush that very hour, one after another until she was bloodied and raw, and then they abandoned her. Later she was seized by order of Dona Teresa, and was scourged with whips—the marks still remained faint along her back and buttocks, and I think will never fade—and afterward was she given over into slavery to one of Dona Teresa’s grooms.

“But this is vile!” I cried. “None of this was deserving unto you!”

“It was not the worst of it,” said she very quietly.

For then was she used badly by all who came upon her, she declared: for to the men of the city it was considered a way of showing regard for Dona Teresa, to abuse the Englishman’s former paramour, and Matamba was raped and maltreated more than she could tally. All this she did tell me in a soft low voice, with no fire in it, as though she were relating some events that had happened to another person in the reign of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, far away. Yet her tales made my own blood run hot and my heart to pound for wrath, and I marched up and down the room like some caged beast as she spoke, and I wished for an hundred hands, that I might punish all those malefactors at once—as if I could do the slightest thing, I that had no privilege left to me in this land.

“The groom my master wearied of me and gave me to a fisherman,” she said. “And he was as rough and scaly as any fish he ever caught, and his breath stank of fish, and his hair also, and his whole skin. He lost me by wager to an innkeeper, who hired me out as whore to his guests.”

“It is not so!”

She shrugged. “In that time I bore three children. One lived two weeks, and one lived four, and one for a month and a half. My breasts were ever aching with milk. When they came to use my body, I did beg them to suckle at me, to ease the pain. And some did, and some would not.”

She fell ill, too, of some colic that brought her close to death. For which release she said she prayed daily to the Madonna: her Christian faith still remained strong with her, God alone knowing why. But not even death was granted her. And upon her recovery, she said, she was subjected to whoring in the whore-market that had sprung up. Owing to the ravages of disease and childbirth and overmuch other suffering, she had grown ugly and aged too early, and only rarely did men choose her, so that she was hard pressed to pay for her food, and endured long sieges of bitter famine. And so it went for my poor Matamba, from bad to worse in year upon year, and often she thought she would simply set out into the interior one morning, hoping to be fallen upon by a lion and released from her woes. But she could not, since that self-destruction was forbidded to her by her creed.

All this, and only because I had bought her out of slavery!

I think I had done her no service by that, after all. No one can say what would have befallen her if she had gone to the New World as she had been destined to do, but perhaps it would have been no worse than this, and might even have been somewhat better, if only it had been a swift death of some killing pestilence. For I suppose there are times when death is preferable to life, if it be life of the sort Matamba had been made to swallow these years just past.

Yet was she still alive, and had hope of better things in time to come, which the dead do not have. I did what I could to atone for the cruelties she had had at the hands of others by feeding her and nursing her until some proper color returned to her skin and she began to hold her shoulders erect again and show some little semblance of vitality. Even so, she went about my room as though expecting to be whipped for any small failing, and constantly did she jump at the slightest sound like a wary cat, and cringe, and crouch; but some of that timidity passed from her, in time.

We slept each night in the same narrow bed. But I did not make any approach to her, knowing how often she had been taken by cruelty, and thinking that the act of carnal pleasure must have lost all its savor for her, being so intermixed with brutality and pain. So I would not add to her woes with yet another penetration. But one night her hand did steal shyly down my belly until it grasped my yard, and stroked it up and down to make it grow to its fullest size at once.

“Nay,” said I softly. “You need not, Matamba.”

“Do you not desire me, Andres?”

“You have suffered so much that I would not ask of you any such—”

“But I desire you,” she said, “as in the old days. Even though I am ugly now, will you not grant me that pleasure?”

“You are not ugly.”

“Yet you have no desire for me?”

“Never did I say such a thing.”

“Then let us not hold back,” she replied, and eased one leg across my body and did straddle me and slide me quickly into her, so that we were at last reunited in the innermost of ways, and she did tickle me in that strange African way of hers, and bite me lightly here and there and scratch me some also, and pump her loins against me with steady and increasing vigor. Then was she gasping and breathing hot against my neck, and coming to her pleasure twice or thrice or even more, peradventure the first pleasure she had known out of this act since my banishing, and in the wildest moment of her delight did she bring me to mine. And after our coupling we did both cry and laugh together, but mainly did we laugh.

Thus did I restore Matamba to herself, and to me. It gave me great keen joy to see her flourishing again, howbeit never would her early beauty be regained. One cannot pump new tautness into fallen breasts, one cannot put a cosmetic of miracles to scars and skin-gullies. I think even if she had not suffered so in those six dark years, it would have been much the same for her, since that the girlhood does go swiftly and mercilessly from these Africans: they are all black Venuses at fourteen and mere shriveled hags and crones at thirty or thirty-five, and there seems to be no help for it. I did often long for the tender and bright-eyed lass that I had bought out of slavery on São Tomé, but I knew that hope to be as idle as it would be to long for my own youthful unlined face and resilient body: folly it is to bid time return.

In that same season I discovered what punishment I was to have for my escaping from Masanganu, and for other offenses both real and alleged. The governor now proposed to send four hundred men, that had been banished out of Portugal for high crimes, up into the country of Lamba to subdue a rebellion, and from there to any other district in need of pacifying. When these criminals arrived from Lisbon I would be joined to them, and dismissed forever into these border wars, marching endlessly here and there to keep the frontier of Angola safe against Jaqqa incursion and native uprising.

I sought Don João out to appeal against this sentence, but he would not see me, I suppose out of guilt and shame at using me this crass way. So I made ready to take up my life as a soldier. It was something better than hanging, at any rate, and I think also a better fate than further duty at Masanganu, where I might die of boredom if one of the plagues did not take me first.

Yet many weeks passed before my departure from the city. I was at that time largely left to my own devices, and spent my hours with Matamba, or wandering by myself along the shore of the perplexing ocean, looking longingly off toward invisible Europe, and England shining beyond.

England! Would ever I see England again? Had such a place as England ever existed, or was it only my dream, and had I indeed been born full-grown in Africa?

Matamba said, “Speak to me in English, Andres.”

“Aye, that I will! If I can remember any, lass!”

And I did speak to her, but the words were snailish slow in curling their way around my tongue, so used had I become to the Portugal way of framing speech. Yet did I persevere, and fiercely fight my way back to reclaiming my native Englishness, that has ever been so precious to me. I wondered, if I were to be dropped by angels into Essex this day, would anyone there recognize me as being of English blood, or would they run screaming, thinking me some new yellow-haired kind of Saracen, or some species of demon out of the nether? For surely I was mightily transformed, within and without, by my years in this tropic sun under such dire servitudes. But I made myself to remember my lost former life.

“These are the kings of England,” I said to Matamba. “At the first there was William, who did come from Normandy to lord it over the old Saxons. And then was his son William, who was slain in the forest, and then his other son Henry, and then Stephen of Plantagenet did seize the throne, and then another Henry, and after him Richard of the Lion Heart, and John—” and so I went, telling her all the kings, the Edwards and the Henrys and the Richards, up until my Elizabeth’s glorious time. And I made the black woman repeat the names after me, until she knew them as well as I, and put the second Richard in his rightful place between Edward and Henry Bolingbroke, and knew that the fourth Edward and the sixth Henry did change the kingship back and forth some several times during the wars of York and Lancaster, and could tell me how Henry Tudor did come out of Wales to defeat the crookback tyrant Richard, and so forth: all the names that had been dinned into me when I was a boy training for a clerkship. It did me great good to recite all that again, by way of reminding me that there once had been an England, and it existed yet. What sense it all made to Matamba, God alone can say; but often as we lay entwined at night, my yard deep in her and slowly moving, she would murmur to me, “Henry, Henry, Henry, Edward, Edward, Richard, Henry, Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth,” like unto a kind of litany, saying the names in a wondrous foreign way, “Ay-leesh-a-bate,” with an outrush of whooshing breath, “Ainree,” “Reezhard.”

And I told her about our poetry, that was the great pride and wonder of our race, our special music. She asked me to chant her some verse, but when I reached into my mind all was void and dark, a dry empty well, until suddenly some scraps and shards came into view in the dusty corners of my spirit, and I did speak her some lines from Marlowe’s play of Faustus, that was the newest thing upon the boards when last I was in England:

I thought I had all that speech by heart, but the rest was gone from me except the striking of the clock, and the last smallest bit:

She listened all agape to those words, thinking them a magical music from the sound alone, as in sooth I think they are. But then she did pray to have the meaning from me, and when I translated it into her understanding, speaking part Portuguese and part Kikongo, it so terrified her that she clutched herself away from me, into a frightened quivering ball, and I had to comfort her with the laying on of my hands. Methinks she thought I was conjuring up Satan in our very chamber.

So I eased her with gentler songs:

And also:

And then:

And all these she loved, and had me recite many times, even though on most my memory failed me, and I could but give her stray nips and fragments, and hardly ever the complete verse. Yet did the sound of them delight her, and the sense, and her eyes did gleam, and she put her hands to mine and held me while I magicked her with these incantations of my homeland. She asked me had I composed any of these, and I told her sadly nay, I was no poet but only a frequenter of poetry, and that other men with finer and more far-ranging souls had set down those words, which led her ask me how anyone could have a soul more far-ranging than mine, which had carried me so far. “There is a difference,” said I. To which she shrugged, and called for more poems. Any that I said gave her pleasure, even Tom O’Bedlam’s song, though when I thought close upon its meanings it made me melancholy, and I would not say it twice:

And that was all of England that remained to me, a list of kings and some jingling rhyming lines, a burning spear and a horse of air, as I lay in the black woman’s arms ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end. Yet did I not abandon hope of home. Yet did that hope not leave me never.

5

Then it came time for me to take up my musket and go to the wars for the Portugals, I being by then half a Portugal myself, I suppose, by the mere contagion of living among them so long. So off I went with all that rampscallery roguey army of cutpurses and rackrents and dandiprat costermongers, the dregs of Lisbon, that had been sent out by the government of old King Philip to defend Angola against the forces of darkness.

I said my farewells to Matamba, most long and lovingly and tearfully, doubting I would ever see her again, and marched off with my new companions to Sowonso, which is a town ruled by a lord that obeys the Duke of Mbamba, and from thence to Saminabansa, and then to Namba Calamba, which is under a great lord, who did resist us. But we burned his town, and then he obeyed us, and brought three thousand warlike Negroes to join our force. From thence we marched to the town of Sollancango, a little lord, that fought very desperately with us, but was forced to obey; and then to Kumbia ria Kiangu, where we remained many months. From this place we gave a large number of assaults and brought many lords to subjection. We were fifteen thousand strong, counting our blacks, and marched to the mountain known as Ngombe. But first we burned all Ngazi, which is a country along the north of the River Mbengu well eastward of São Paulo de Loanda, and then we came to the lord who ruled at Ngombe, at his chief town.

This lord of Ngombe did come upon us with more than twenty thousand archers, and spoiled many of our men. But with our shot we made a great spoil among them, whereupon he retired up into the mountain, and sent one of his captains to our general João de Velloria, signifying that the next day he would obey him. In the morning the lord of Ngombe entered our camp with great pomp, with drums and fifes and great ivory trumpets, and was royally received; and he gave great presents, and greatly enriched General de Velloria and his officers. We went into his town upon the top of the mountain, where there is a great plain, well farmed, full of palm-trees, sugar-canes, potatoes, and other roots, and great store of oranges and lemons. Here is a tree called the ogheghe, that beareth a fruit much like a yellow plum that is very good to eat, and has a very sweet smell, and is a remedy against bile and the wind-colic. Here, too, is a river of fresh water, that springs out of the mountains and runs all along the town.

We were here five days, and then we marched up into the country, and burned and spoiled for the space of six weeks, and then returned to Ngombe again, with great store of the cowrie-shells which are current money in that land. Here we pitched our camp a league from this pleasant mountain, and remained there for months.

In telling you of these adventures, and our burnings and sackings and conquerings, I am aware that I have told you nothing of what passed through my own mind, in those several years of marching up and down the inner provinces. That is because very little passed through my mind in those years. I had taught myself the trick of shutting off my mind, and concerning myself only with my private safety, and my three meals a day, and doing as I was told. For by now I had arrived to the central philosophy of my African life; which was, to resist nothing, to glide along uncomplainingly, obeying all my orders, serving whoever my master of the moment might be, and biding my time until I could seize some opportunity of quitting this land forever. To resist, to think for mine own self, to show independence of the spirit—I had learned that all these things led only to the dungeon, and, on the field of battle, might very well bring me a summary execution.

So I mutinied no mutinies, not even inward ones. I marched, I ate and drank, I fought. I fought well. It mattered not to me that I was fighting for Portugal. What I was in deepest truth doing was fighting to stay alive. We all every one must do our God-ordained task, whatsoever it may be, and if God in His mysterious wisdom had appointed Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex to pass certain of his days as a soldier in the armies of Portugal, well, so be it. So be it!

Now and again I suffered a wound for my masters’ sake. These were in the main not serious ones, but the trifling things one collects in battle, a slash here, a bruise there, a twisting of a leg or an ankle that has one hobbling for a week or two, and the like. But in the last of my battles in this region of Ngombe I took an arrow deep within my right thigh, that struck so heavily among the tendons and the thick muscles that I thought the leg was all to destroyed. I heard the dread whistling sound that the arrow’s feathers made as it came toward me, but there was no hiding from its onrushing point, and when it went into me it made a sound like the striking of a hatchet against a tree. A cunning surgeon pried the arrow out, and bound me in such a way that my sundered tissues would quickly knit; but all the same, that put an end to me as an infantryman in that campaign, since that I would not be able to stand or walk for so many months. Along with many other wounded men I was carried to the city of São Paulo de Loanda to be cured. And most grateful was I, both that I was leaving the field of battle and that God had spared my leg, God and that Portuguese surgeon, who did not tell me his name. He had a gray beard and a squinted eye and great skill in his hands, that is all I know of him.

Now did my fortunes take a kinder turn.

As soon as I could leave my bed I was summoned to the palace of the governor to speak with Don João de Mendoça. This was the first meeting I had had with him in long years, seven or eight, since my attempt to sail home on the Dutch ship, and I knew that he was not sending for me merely to chastise me or to renew my banishment.

The sight of him was greatly shocking to me. Don João had grown immensely fat, and it was not the healthy copious flesh of an inveterate glutton, but rather something sickly and evil, a sort of spongy growth of a vegetable kind, that billowed and eddied about him like a vast flabby blanket, with the original man trapped somewhere deep within. The greenish pallor that I had noted on him earlier was now more pronounced, and did make him seem like one from the next world, who has escaped the grave and wanders among us. I could not disguise my horror at the look of him. But he seemed to take no notice of that; he sat in his great chair, slumped and old, and studied me in a most careful way, searching my face as though to read in it all that I had experienced since last we had met. He did not speak, and I dared not. I felt myself to be in the presence of Death himself.

Then Don João shook his head slowly and said, “Andres, Andres, how long has it been?”

“Very long, Don João.”

“It seems forever.” He stared at me interminably in silence, so that I thought he might have fallen to sleep with his eyes not closed, and after a time he did say, “You know I never would have hanged you, don’t you?”

“It was my prayer that you would spare me.”

“It was a bad time, you know. That time when Dona Teresa said you had abused her, and screamed most fiendish, and offered to display her injuries. And Souza was clamoring like a fury for your neck, Souza who never was more than a pimple in fancy dress, and now of a sudden was full of spirit and rage. I might have had to string you up, if Souza had pressed more sternly; but he is a weakling, and the fire went swift from him. And then Teresa admitted it was all a lie about your forcing her, a lie coined out of anger and jealousy, which much abashed her in the telling of how she had slandered you, and—well, Andres, well, it matters very little now, does it not? Nothing matters. I shall soon be dead, I think. I promised to send you home, eh? And I never did. I’m the one going home instead—in a box, d’ye follow, a long box of dark African wood, plainly joined.”

“Good Don João—”

“Nay, say me no kindnesses. Can’t you see the bony hand about my throat? Going home, Andres, taking with me all the elephanto meat and manatee meat and the thick wines of this place and everything else that’s gone into the making of this great vile belly of mine.” He grinned, showing me a gaping snagtoothed hole of a mouth. “You fought well for us, Velloria tells me. You were ever in the midst of it, no mind to the risk. You were one of his most valiant soldiers. I wonder: why did you war so hard for Portugal, eh?”

“I fought because it was my trade, Don João.”

“Ah. I should have foreseen that answer. You always affect the blunt and simple way. But your trade is the sea, so I did believe.”

“When I am at sea, my trade is the sea. When I am a soldier, my trade is war.”

“You say it so calmly. What has happened to you, Andres? Have you no anger in you?”

“Aye. Anger enough, I trow.”

“Then why this doldrum calm? Why not rage and roar, and play the lion? This land has stolen half your life away from you.”

“But it is too late for raging, Don João.”

“Is it? You could leap this room and choke the life from me in a minute, if you could but find my throat beneath all this swaying flesh. You could slit me like a swollen coccodrillo. The way they did in Loango when it ate those slaves, eh?”

“I would not do that,” I said.

“Why not? I am at your mercy.”

“Killing you will not give me back those years, but only cost me the ones I have remaining.”

“Ah. Always the philosopher, Andres!”

“And I bear you no malice, Don João.”

He did look genuinely surprised by that: animation for the first time came into his face, a light did glimmer in his small reddened eyes.

“No malice? No malice? But I could have sent you home, and I did not.”

Sighing, I said, “I soon ceased to think you would. It makes no difference. Would you send me home now?”

“Will you do one more voyage for me, first?”

“I have heard that aforetimes,” I said, with a little laugh.

“Indeed. Well, and I have no ship going to Europe this year. But later there will be one, and we’ll go on it together, eh? I in my coffin, and you to guard it. And in Lisbon they’ll set you free. That I pledge you, and this is a true pledge: by God, who will have the disposal of my soul soon enough, that pledge is true. The next ship to Portugal, for both of us. How do you feel about that, Andres?”

“I feel nothing, sir.”

“Lost interest of going home, have you?”

“Nay, I would never lose my interest of that. But I have lost belief in pledges.”

He nodded solemnly. “As well you might. But this one’s sincere. One more voyage, and then home! By the cross, Andres! By all my hope of heaven, slender though that may be!”

“Just one more voyage?”

“Just one.”

“And where am I to go, then?”

“Southward,” he said. “Benguela, and beyond it. Will you do that?”

“How can I refuse?”

“Nay, do it gladly, Andres!”

“I will do it,” I said. “Let that be sufficient, Don João.”

So it befell that I did go to sea again, in a frigate to the southward with sixty soldiers, on a trading voyage, with all kind of commodities. My assent to this task did gladden Don João greatly, and he pressed my hand between his clammy fleshy ones, and I knew I would never see him alive again, which he also must have known. As for his promise to free me, why, I had heard that music before, and cared not to hum the tune again. I thought only that it was better to go to sea than once more to face the arrows of the blackamoors while wearing Portugal armor under that hot inland sun, and God would bring me to England again in His own good time.

I embraced Matamba, who said, “We are always bidding each other farewell,” and I had no answer to that but to hold her close against me. “You are only newly returned to me,” she said, “and now you must go again. What will I do? What will I do?”

“You are under the protection of Don João de Mendoça,” I said to her, for so had I engineered it with the governor. “No one will harm you. You will not be forced back into your old sort of life.”

“And when Don João dies, as you say soon will happen?”

“God will provide,” I said, not knowing what else.

She and I did have a most passionate and tempestuous last night together, and by dawn I slipped away in morning mist and down to the docks, thinking the fondest thoughts of this slave-girl who had so deeply entered my soul. I thought of our talking English together, and her learning my bits of poetry, and her devout Christian way, that had her kneeling every day to her little shrine, and her skill at the venereal arts, which she performed with gusto and force and subtlety. And it seemed to me odd that the track of my life should have passed through such diverse women as Rose and Anne Katherine and Dona Teresa and Isabel Matamba, that had so little in common one with the other save their womanhood: yet had I loved them all, and they me, each in a different way.

We rode our frigate easily to the southward until we came into twelve degrees below the Line. The people of this place brought us cows and sheep, Guinea wheat and beans; but we stayed not there, but came to Bay of Vaccas: that is, the Bay of Cows, which the Portugals also call Bahia de Torre, because it hath a rock like a tower. Here we rode on the north side of the rock, in a sandy bay where any ship may ride without danger, for it is a smooth coast. Here all ships that come out of the East Indies refresh themselves. For the great carracks of the Portugals heavily laden with goods now of late come along this coast, to the town called Benguela, to water and refresh themselves.

This province is called Dombe, and it hath a ridge of high serras, or mountains, that stretch from the serras or mountains of Kambambe, wherein are the supposed silver mines, and lie along the coast south and by west. Here is great store of fine copper, if the people would work it in their mines. But these people, who are called Ndalabondos, have no government among themselves, and are very simple folk, though treacherous, and do not do mining, taking no more copper than they wear for” a show of bravery. The men of this place wear skins about their middles, and beads about their necks. They carry darts of iron, and bows and arrows in their hands. They are beastly in their way of living, for they have men in women’s apparel, whom they keep among their wives. This I saw, those simpering foolish queans, among the women, which did not please me. Some of the Portugals caught one of these men-women and did strip him of his robes, the silly creature whimpering all the while in fear, and we saw the male parts underneath, just like any other man’s, though we had thought these disguised women might be hermaphrodite.

Their women wear a ring of copper about their necks, which weigheth fifteen pound at the least; about their arms little rings of copper, that reach to their elbows: about their middle a cloth of the bark of the nsanda tree, a kind of wild fig of many slender trunks; on their legs rings of copper that reach to the calves of their legs.

From these folk we bought great store of cows, and sheep—bigger than our English sheep—and very fine copper. Also, we bought a kind of sweet gray wood which the Portugals esteem much for its perfume, and great store of Guinea wheat and beans. And having laded our bark we sent her home; but fifty of us stayed on shore, and made a little fort with rafters of wood, because the people of this place are treacherous, and those that trade with them must stand upon their own guard. In seventeen days we had five hundred head of good brown cattle, which we bought for blue glass beads of an inch long, paying fifteen beads for one cow. The governor sent us three ships, on which we shipped these cattle to São Paulo de Loanda, and then we departed for the town of Benguela.

This is a small outpost that I think will grow important in later years. It lies behind a morro, or great cliff, that rises straight from the sea and is covered by the thick fleshy thorny little trees without leaves that are so common in these dry regions. The bay of the town has good anchoring ground, and on the north side of it stands the fort of Benguela, built square, with palisados and trenches, and surrounded with houses shaded by banana, orange, lemon, and pomegranate trees; and behind the fort is a pond of fresh water. About it are seven villages, which pay the tenth part of all they have, in tribute to the Portugals of Benguela.

The air of Benguela is very bad, and the Portugals who live there look more like ghosts than men. In command of the small garrison was Manoel de Andrade, that had been my companion on several voyages long ago up the coast: he had aged much, and was feeble and loose-jointed. I learned from him that he had committed some grave infraction, that he would not name, and had been sent to Benguela by way of punishment. This was true also of all the other Portugals there.

There was little trading for us at Benguela, the Portugals of the place having been too indolent or too sickly lately to carry on any business. We therefore did not stay long. While we were there Andrade took us to a native town, where I saw a marketplace for dog-flesh.

“In some parts of Angola the people do love dogs’ flesh better than any other meat,” he said, “and for that purpose they feed and fatten them, and then kill them and sell them in an open market of meat.”

In that shambles or market Andrade showed us the different sorts of meat, squeezing and handling them in an expert way, while the vendors did cry out to us in their own language, praising the qualities of their product.

To me Andrade did remark, “They breed their beasts for flavor. Last year a fine sire was sold by exchange for two-and-twenty slaves. Which is to say, at ten ducats the slave, a fortune paid for a single dog!”

“Ah, the meat must be much delectable,” I replied.

Andrade, with a laugh, said, “I would not know. I am no eater of dogs. But you are a man who craves adventure, eh, Piloto? Here, will you sample this meat at your dinner this night?”

“Nay,” I said, “it does not overly tempt me. I think I will live my life without the eating of dog-flesh.”

And I turned away, shuddering a little. Yet dog-eaters would soon seem mild and innocent to me, by comparison with what awaited me just down the coast.

For we did move a short distance beyond Benguela and saw a mighty camp pitched on the south side of the River Kuvu. Being desirous to know what those men were, our commander, one Diogo Pinto Dourado, chose a party to go on shore with our boat, and I was among that party, owing to my skill with the native languages. When we came within close range of the beach I peered forward, and what I saw did make my blood run chilly, for these were naked men, painted here and there in white and well armed, many of them of tall stature and powerful form: I knew them to be Jaqqas.

Catching the wrist of our boatswain, I said, “Let us turn back, for we are traveling to our deaths. Those are the man-eaters!”

“Are you certain of that?”

“As I am a Christian!”

This boatswain, Fernão Coelho by name, was a dark-complected man, but he grew pale as a sheet, and at once signalled for the boat to be swung about, we being a dozen and they on shore at least five hundred. Yet as we rowed back to the frigate, Captain Pinto Dourado appeared on the deck and shouted to us, demanding to know why we had not landed, and when we told him the shore was held by Jaqqas, he said with violent gestures that we must go to them anyway.

“Nay,” said I under my breath, “they will have us boiled in a trice!”

The boatswain had some similar idea, for he continued leading us back toward our frigate; but Pinto Dourado caused muskets to be aimed at us, and, under point of gun, we had no choice but to head once more toward the beach. Silent as ghosts did we take our way thither, and the Portugals crossed themselves often. Yet I did find courage, remembering the Jaqqas who had led me to safety when that I was lost in the desert after the massacre of Kafuche Kambara, and I told myself that these might be merciful. For all that, yet I was in no cheerful frame of mind, what with muskets primed behind me and man-eaters waiting to the fore.

We came onto the shore and a troop of hundreds of men met us at the waterside. We were armed, but we kept our weapons down to provoke no attack. Fernão Coelho looked to me and I said, “Aye, Jaqqas indeed.”

With a curse, Coelho said, “Then Pinto Dourado has sent us to our doom! Be ye sure?”

“They have the Jaqqa traits. They knock out four of their teeth, as a mark of handsomeness, and they paint their bodies here and there in white patterns, and they carry clusters of weapons by their belts.”

The Jaqqas now circled round us, saying nothing, only staring hard, as if we were men down from the moon for a visit.

Coelho said to me, “Can you speak their language?”

“Nary a word. But I speak other languages, which perhaps they know also. I will essay it.”

I tell you that I fully expected to die that day, perhaps within the hour. Yet was I strangely calm, as I think men often are when they are in the presence of the certainty of death. I looked about me and found the tallest and most awesome of the Jaqqas, and spoke to him in the Kikongo tongue, saying we came in peace, as traders, and were emissaries from the great ship that did lie off shore.

The Jaqqa said nothing, but only looked intently upon me.

Coelho said, “Let us return to the ship, since they will not talk with us.”

“Peace, boatswain. We cannot leave so soon.”

“Why not? We were sent to learn who they were, and now we are certain, and therefore—”

I bade him hush. The tall Jaqqa spoke, most deep and solemnly, in words I did not understand, and then, haltingly, in Kikongo. And what he said was, “What world come you from? Are you spirits?”

“We are men,” said I, “from a land far across the sea.”

The Jaqqa did make a long oration to his fellows in their own tongue, and several of them broke away and ran up the beach to the main camp, as messengers. To me he said, “Are you Portugals?”

“These men my companions are Portugals. I am an Englishman!”

“And what is that?”

For answer I swung my head vigorously from side to side, so that my long golden hair did fly about and sparkle most brightly in the sun, and the Jaqqa, at that, did widen his eyes and look deeply amazed.

With my arms uplifted and my hands outstretched I cried, “An Englishman is a son of Albion, and a lord among men. And we serve Her Most Protestant Majesty Elizabeth, who is paramount among the princes of the globe.”

This fine speech did cow the Jaqqa by a trifle, as it was meant to do. Coelho, who comprehended not a word, leaned close to me and said, “What is all this babbling about?”

“We are in no danger, I think,” said I. “For these are Jaqqas who have never seen white men, and know of Portugals only by rumor and repute, and may believe me a god, for the color of my hair. I think they will not dare harm us.”

“Let us pray you are right,” said Coelho sourly.

The long-shanked Jaqqa spoke again. I did not follow his words; but it was some flowing grand announcement. Then there was a stir among the general mass of cannibals, they moving back and away from the center, and I saw that a new figure had arrived among us, led by the messengers who had gone to the camp. He strode into the middle of our group and stood regarding us with the deepest attention.

I think this man was the most frightful vision I had ever beheld, as terrifying as the fiercest of coccodrillos or the most savage of howling wolves. He was of great size, a true giant, and black as the darkest of nights. Yet for all his blackness his face looked something other than pure Negro, with a straight nose and narrow harsh lips that made him all the more cruel of visage, somewhat like a Moor, though much darker. His hair was curling and very long, embroidered richly with knots of the shells called mbambas, which are whelks or trumpet-shells. About his neck was a collar of other large shells of shape of twisted turrets, that I know are sold on these shores for the worth of twenty shillings a shell; and about his middle he did wear a string of beads cut from the stuff of ostrich-eggs. His loins were wrapped in a blazing bright swath of scarlet palm-cloth, fine as silk. The rest of his body was bare, but was painted with red and white ornaments of the most terrifying kind, and where he was not painted, his skin was carved and cut to raise it with sundry decorations that rose a startling height in relief, as if it were a branched damask, all covered over with pretty knots in divers forms. And he gleamed with a high gloss, so that I thought almost I could see a reflection in his skin, like unto a mirror. In his nose he wore a piece of copper two inches long, and in his ears also. In sum he was naught but the utmost image of barbarism.

And his eyes! God’s death, those eyes! They were pools of night surrounded by a field of dazzling white, and they drew me and held me like the most powerful of lodestones. I felt weak of the knees when I saw those eyes.

I was minded once again of that time long ago in the isle where I had been cast away by Abraham Cocke’s treachery, when a vast allagardo or coccodrillo did step from a river and smile at me and put out its tongue, and I stood transfixed, and then had gone not away from it but toward, like one who has been magicked. This Jaqqa king magicked me in the same way.

The tall cannibal who spoke Kikongo said, “You are in the presence of the great Jaqqa, Imbe Calandola.”

And I felt as though I had fallen rather into the presence of the Lord of Darkness himself, the Prince of Hell, the Great Adversary, the vast Lucifer of the Abyss: Satan Mephistopheles Beelzebub, the Archfiend, the King of Evil.

6

In the silence of the beach the crashing of the surf was a noise like the roll of the drums of Judgment. This Calandola did come forward and stand by me, so that I smelled the reek of his skin, which I learned afterward came from his being daily anointed with the fat of human victims, to give him that burnished gloss. Yet I dared not flinch from him as he inspected me close.

The bigness of him was overpowering. I saw now that he was not in sooth the tallest of this company, and indeed was only two inches greater in height than I, I being of no mean stature myself; but what gave him his look of great size was the enormous breadth of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck and the power of his arms and hands, which could easily seize two men by their heads and crush them at the same time like eggshells.

And those great hands did go to my own head, but not in any violent way. He scooped up my hair and let it drop again, and ran his hands through it, most lightly as if handling a fabric so fragile that it would melt at a harsh breath. He stared me deep in the eyes, as though seeking to read my soul. Rarely have I been stared so deep. He walked around me, studying me from every side, and touched my hair with the tips of his fingers, and my beard, and drew his fingers even across my eyebrows, which are thick and very golden. While so doing he muttered words to his high princes, and to himself; and when he had done with me he clapped his hands and let forth a loud diabolical laugh, as if to say, “Your strange hair gives me a great pleasure, Englishman!”

Then he swung round and marched up the beach to his camp, and Jaqqa Longshanks made a signal to me that I should follow, with my companions.

Which we did, and came before Imbe Calandola again when he was seated upon a sort of high stool in a tent. Five of his princes stood to his side, and two man-witches, and two women that might have been sisters, for both had heavy breasts, and the same face, with four of their teeth pulled out for beauty’s sake and their hair piled high with mbamba-shells thrust into it.

A great bowl of palm-wine was brought, and Calandola drank of it, and then it was proffered to me. And when I had had some sips of it Calandola did dip his hands into it, and shake the sweet heavy wine out onto my hair, as though he were anointing me. After I was thoroughly drenched in the stuff he took my head very gently between his hands, and rubbed the wine deep into my scalp, all the while saying things in his language, with a low rumbling voice, to the man-witches beside him. To which I submitted without hesitation, for when one is in the camp of the cannibals and their king would bathe your head with wine, and they are five hundred and you are one of but a very few, one does not play the fastidious fop and refuse the honor.

When I was thus soaked, the long-legged Jaqqa who spoke the Kikongo tongue said, “Imbe Calandola would know why you have come to this place.”

“To trade upon the coast,” I replied. “We deal in goods of all kinds, and mean to purchase cattle and any other useful merchandise.”

This he told to Calandola, who made a reply.

To me the Jaqqa said, “The Imbe-Jaqqa makes you welcome here, and instructs you to have your people come on shore with all your commodities.”

I did translate this for Coelho, who showed great sign of relief, and would at once have boarded the longboat to return to the safety of our ship. But first there were certain rituals, and more passing about of the palm-wine; and then when it was plain we could go, Calandola gestured that I stay behind, with two others of the Portugals.

At this I sank into leaden despond, for my despairing imagination at once threw forth a likely sequence of event, by which Captain Pinto Dourado, fearing some trap, took his ship and crew away from these waters the instant his longboat returned, abandoning me and my two fellows here. I was an old hand at being abandoned, and ever mistrusted my position. And I doubted much that Pinto Dourado would want to march his own precious self into a den of man-eaters. Even did I take the picture a little farther, and see myself as the grand feature of the cannibal feast, at which all these Jaqqas did jostle and shove to get themselves some morsel of the flesh of the golden-haired god.

But my forebodings proved to be mere vapor. Pinto Dourado indeed hastened to come ashore with all his crew, and heaps of beads and gibcracks to trade with: if he had any much fear of Jaqqas, his love of profit altogether eclipsed that fear. We went into the Jaqqa camp, which was very orderly, entrenched with piles of wood; and we had houses provided for us that night, and many loads of palm-wine, and cows and goats and flour for our use.

There was after darkness a mighty feast, and here I expected to see human flesh upon the banquet. But no: the Jaqqas dined that night as we did, on roasted goat, and beef, and copious draughts of the palm-wine. With this was much loud harsh music of a very barbaric kind, made on drums and fifes and mpungas and a thing called a tavale, which is a board rising on two wooden sticks that they beat with their fingers. And there was dancing by the women, who wore nothing but masses of beads about their necks and arms and legs. They leaped across the fire like prancing witches, grinning widely to show their gap-toothed mouths, and laughing and screaming. And in the midst of all sat the king-demon Calandola on his stool, his oiled body glittering by firelight, his huge legs thrown far apart, his head back as he roared out his great cries of pleasure. And at all times there were three or four women about him, doing foul things to him, rubbing him and tonguing him and taking his giant yard into their straining mouths, whilst he idly stroked their woolly hair.

I felt the powerful presence of that man as a real and heavy pressure on me. Waves of force and might rolled from him like the booming of drums, like the crash of the tempest. There was no escaping him, no hiding from him.

I saw him as a giant mouth bestriding the breast of the world, and feeding, feeding, feeding.

We slept but little that night, for the festivities went on almost to dawn. And when the first early light came, and sleeping Jaqqas lay sprawled like ninepins everywhere, sleeping Portugals, too, there was a conference among Imbe Calandola and his interpreter-Jaqqa and Captain Pinto Dourado and me, and I discovered then why the king of the Jaqqas had been so glad of letting us come on shore.

Through the interpreter, whose name was Kinguri, we were told that Calandola was determined to overrun the realm of Benguela, which was on the north side of the River Kuvu. That is, he did not intend to menace the small Portugal settlement there, but he would have his way of conquest with the Benguela folk, who were ruled by a prince named Hom-biangymbe (or so it sounded to me.) For this he did want our help, in bringing his men over to the other side of the river with our boat. “If you will aid us,” said Kinguri, “the Imbe-Jaqqa will let you have all the captives to take as slaves, for we know you are hungry for many slaves for selling.”

This astounded me, that we should go in league with man-eaters to subjugate a native tribe already giving tribute to Portugal. I did not think we would do such a thing, and was forming in my mind the words of refusal, when Pinto Dourado said unto me, with his eyes gleaming with money-lust, “Aye, it will be worth fortunes to us! We will do it!”

“Can that be so?”

“We will do it,” said he sternly. “Tell him. Give him our warm pledge!”

And so it was agreed. All that day long, preparations for the war went forth briskly among the Jaqqas, and by night there was another great feast, as wild as the one before.

The women danced to the drums, and some young ones performed an obscene rite, dancing in pairs, one following behind the other and the second one aping the gestures and movements of a man pursuing a woman. At a certain moment, when the pounding of the drum came to its most envigored moment, the girl who played the man’s part did grasp hold of the other and turn her around. Then they held one another by the shoulders and in a fierce and frenzied way did mime out the sexual act, with a thrusting of loins and a grinding of bellies and a rubbing together of the dark hairy zone of womanhood in high mock and counterfeit of copulation, until they fell exhausted to the ground. Then a second such couple did the like, and a third, and when everyone was suitably inflamed the chieftains of the tribe did select women from the dance and drag them aside, and spread their legs and have them in the open, all the while making hard growling sounds more suited to the coupling of savage dogs or hyaenas. But I noticed that the Jaqqas took care to pull out and spill their seed on the bellies of these girls, and not to plant it in their wombs: which I learned afterward was a feature of this rite, and not the general Jaqqa custom of coupling.

This festival ended by midnight and there was sudden silence, like a falling curtain, and everyone slept. I lay on my rough pallet a long while, listening to the soft breathing of the cannibals everywhere about, and through my mind tumbled the spectacle of the day: the naked women miming copulation, the huge Jaqqa warriors spurting their seed onto them, the Jaqqa smile with the missing teeth, the fires blazing high, and always Calandola, Calandola, Calandola, presiding over these hellish games in broad delectation, singing and shouting among his playfellows with a wondrous roar.

In the morning, before break of day, Calandola did arise and strike his ngongo, which is an instrument of war that has the shape of a double bell, and presently made an oration with a loud voice, that all the camp might hear. I had already in a single day learned enough of the Jaqqa tongue so that I knew something of what he was saying, which was that he would destroy the Benguelas utterly. This he cried with such vehemence as to shake the earth.

And presently they were all in arms, and marched to the river side, where they had built jangadas or rafts out of a light wood that grows abundantly on the swampy banks of the rivers. Owing to the strength of the current, poling these jangadas across the rivermouth was an awful task, that would strip the warriors of their vigor before they reached the other side; which was why they wanted the use of our boat. They swarmed about us, every one eager to have the credit of being first into the campaign, and Calandola was fain to beat them back to keep them from overflowing us. He picked his prime men and we took a load across, the bravest of the cannibals, and then another group.

On the second trip some warriors of the Benguelas appeared, and took up into a warlike position to menace the first party of the Jaqqas, who were sore outnumbered. But Pinto Dourado said, “Fire upon them,” and we did shoot off our muskets, which slew many of the Benguelas and drove the others off.

By twelve of the clock all of the Jaqqas were over on the other side. Then Calandola commanded all his drums, tavales, mpungas, and other screeching and thumping instruments of warlike music to strike up, and give the onset, which began a bloody day for the Benguelas.

We took no part in the slaughter, but watched from afar, and I saw the troops of Calandola sweep down upon that helpless village the way the voracious army of ants had invaded my sleeping hut in that other village by Lake Kasanza. There was no holding back the Jaqqas, nor slowing them. With terrible wailing shrieking devil-cries did they rush upon the Benguelas, who staunchly stood fast a little while, and then, knowing the dread nature of their enemy, gave way to fright. They broke ranks and turned their backs to flee, and a very great number of them were slain, and were taken captives; man, woman, and child. These Jaqqas are mainly men of very great stature and power, and they fight with such frenzy and such energetic wielding of their swords and lances that there is no checking of them once they are fully aroused in martial fervor.

The prince of this land, Hombiangymbe, was slain, along with more than one hundred of his chief lords, and their heads were lopped off and thrown at the feet of the great Imbe-Jaqqa Calandola, who sat on his stool of state most solemnly witnessing and savoring his victory. Then the men, women, and children of the tribe were brought in captive alive, and the captive men were made to carry the bodies of the dead Benguelas that were heaped up to be eaten. For these Jaqqas are the greatest cannibals and man-eaters that be in the world, and love to feed chiefly on man’s flesh, notwithstanding that they have vast herds of cattle. And I think they had made this war on the Benguelas principally because for some weeks they had been wandering in a land without settlements, and had not had the opportunity for making a dinner on their favorite sort of meat.

What happened next was frightful, though for my part I had seen something of its like among the man-eaters of Brazil long years ago, and so my soul was hardened somewhat to the sight.

The Jaqqas did build a great fire, and threw upon it much wood from the houses of the captured, and added to it certain stones and powders that their man-witches carried, to cause the flame to rise up in blue and green and violet and other stark hues. While this was being done, some older men of the tribe, using long copper blades that they wielded with great skill, worked a butchery on the dead corpses, making them ready for the meal by cutting away such parts as the Jaqqas do not prefer, and opening certain slits in the skin for better roasting. For sometimes the Jaqqas do boil their prey and sometimes they roast it, but they had not brought their great kettles with them over to this side of the river, so that it behooved them to do the roasting now. They took certain long spits and mounted them with great care, and plainly they were much practiced and expert at this task; and then they did slide the bodies of the dead upon the spits like oxen, and turn them and grill them nicely and baste them with juices as the very best cooks would do that ever served in the kitchen of a king. The meat did sizzle and crack and char quite well, and a flavor came from it that—God help me, it is the truth!— did smell most savory, so long as one kept one’s back turned, and did not let one’s self perceive the source of the savor.

Calandola called out to us quite jovial in his loud roaring way, and it was not hard to divine that the words he was crying were something like, “Come, Portugals, join in this our feast! We will set aside the finest cuts for you, since you are our friends!”

But of course we did not accept the hospitality of him, and in good sooth many of our men went lurching off into the woods, and I heard the sound of retching and puking coming from their direction. I myself was not so hard affected, though it did not enter in my mind to take part of this grisly feeding. As for the defeated folk of Benguela, they were made to stand in two long ranks, naked and weaponless, and to watch as the cookery proceeded. What thoughts went through their souls I cannot say, for they were very silent, except for some wounded who did groan a little, and I could not tell from their eyes whether they were deeply grieved, or else so stunned and numb that they did not comprehend the sense of what was taking place. I think if this had been Essex, and two hundred English men and women had had to stand by while their brothers and sons were roasted, we would have heard some little outcry from them, and more than a little: but these are different folk here, and their way of thinking is very foreign to me. Yet am I fair certain that they grieved, however far inward, for this terrible thing.

When the meat was ready came another great strangeness. For one of Calandola’s man-witches brought him a beautifully worked wicker basket of great size, that I remembered we had carried over specially from the Jaqqa camp on the other side. And from it the witch took certain vestments and utensils of an unmistakably Christian kind, and did hand them one by one to Imbe Calandola. There was the black cassock of a priest, and the mantle called a cope, and a richly worked chasuble, which is the thing they wear when they say the Mass. All these several garments had been slitted open and reworked with rope, so that they could fit over Calandola’s giant body; for the Portuguese priest to whom they had once belonged must have been a much smaller man. When Calandola had donned these things he took up a crucifix, which he held by the short end, and in his other hand he raised up a silver chalice, and with a mighty laugh he did clatter the end of the crucifix against the side of the chalice, like the ringing of a bell to summon men to dinner. And at the sound of this ringing, a great shout did go up from all the Jaqqas, and a whoop of joy, for that they knew it must be feeding-time.

It mattered little to me what blasphemy the Imbe-Jaqqa cared to work with all these Popish vestments and utensils. But I thought it would matter a good deal to my Portugal comrades. Indeed they were taken aback, and I saw their lips clamping tight and their nostrils flaring. Yet they cried out nary a word of protest. In this they took their cue from their scoundrel commander, Pinto Dourado, who stood by with his arms folded, smiling as sweetly as though this were some chorus of Christmastide revelers happening here, and not the shouting of sacrilegious cannibals. Did Pinto Dourado not mind the insult to his faith? Or was he shrewdly thinking that a protest might merely add some Portuguese meat to the banquet? Perhaps some of each; but I think also that he was keeping careful watch over his business arrangements with the Jaqqas, and would not venture any disapproval of his host’s ways until the dealings were consummated.

Well, and well, the feast began.

There was Calandola waving his chalice and crucifix about, and straining his mighty shoulders against the constricting garb of some murdered priest, and there were his long-legged naked warriors turning the spits, and there were the kinfolk of the victims standing silent aside, and then the butcher-Jaqqas commenced their carving, and a great juicy haunch was brought to the king, who threw back his head and roared his vast laughter and dug his teeth into the meat.

As he ate, he pointed to his lieutenants and captains, and they one by one came to take their fill, Kinguri Longshanks first, and then each in order of precedence. Nearly all the Jaqqas are tall and straight-limbed, though some few are short, and the short ones are very brawny in the arms and legs. Since they do multiply themselves by adoption, stealing children out of other tribes and raising them as Jaqqas, there is little blood-kinship among these man-eaters; and yet they resemble each other, as if their bloody life does make them grow to look like one another. Or perhaps it is that they choose a certain shape of captive preferably to adopt into their number. But I was greatly struck by the bigness and strength of them, as I had been from the very first, long ago, when I saw a Jaqqa much the size of Kinguri standing alone and mysterious by the side of the River Kwanza.

And again Calandola beckoned us to eat, crying out what must have been the words, “You are our guests! Eat, eat, eat!”

But we did not do that.

From a distance I did watch the feast, though. And a very strange thing happened to me after a time which you may find hard to comprehend, that is, I ceased to be amazed or repelled, and looked upon what was occurring as quite an ordinary event. What, you say? How, was I become a monster like these cannibals? I think not. I think a kind of wisdom was entering me from having witnessed several previous of these cannibal banquets, going back even to my time in Brazil, and those wild Indians the Taymayas.

And what this wisdom said was, We eat cattle and we eat sheep and we eat fowl, and we think nothing amiss of that; and these folk eat man, and they think nothing amiss of that, and we are all God’s creatures, are we not? I mean by that only that in this huge world there are differing customs, and what seems strange or loathsome to one race is quite usual to another. Are we to be angry with a Frenchman because he will speak no English, and we cannot understand his palaver? But he is French: French is his usual speech. And the flesh of humans is the usual diet of Taymayas and Jaqqas and the others of that kind. And I believe it is not fitting to condemn them out of hand for that.

Possibly, you say, I have dwelled too long among cannibals, and my soul has been tainted by their ways. Possibly; but I think otherwise. I think only that I have come to a wide understanding of the world’s variety, from having lived so long on its outer edges. I dare say that somewhere on this globe is a race that not only dotes on human flesh but also would puke at the thought of eating cattle or fowl, claiming that such is unnatural and evil.

And then afterward, when all were sated, we did divide the spoils. From the captives the Jaqqas selected certain boys and girls on whom the first hair had begun to sprout in the loins, and adopted them forthwith into their tribe. These were twelve or fifteen in number, who looked to be dazed, and not knowing what was happening to them. On the boys slave-collars were placed, as is done to all Jaqqa youths until they have slain some foe in battle. The other Benguelas were given to us for slaves, as our fee for taking the Jaqqas across the river. These we loaded on our ship, knowing that we had accomplished the making of our fortune: for we had many strong and healthy souls, that we could sell in São Paulo de Loanda for twelve thousand reis the head, and they had cost us nothing, not even a handful of beads.

Then we made ready to depart. At the last, the high Jaqqas came to us, Calandola and Kinguri and some others, and they walked about on shore looking toward our ship, thinking, I suppose, that it was a miracle. And the Imbe-Jaqqa again touched my hair.

I began to have an idea now of why those Jaqqas who had found us in the desert had spared us that time, and conveyed us toward Masanganu. It was for the sake of my hair; for they had never seen its like, and thought me to be god-like in some way. For Calandola showed such fascination with it as made me feel uneasy, fearing that he would not let me set sail with my fellows, in which Pinto Dourado would most likely gladly acquiesce, or that he would let me go, but ask me to leave my hair behind, or some such thing. But the Imbe-Jaqqa was content only to touch it some few times. And then we went out toward the frigate.

And as we journeyed northward I could not cleanse the Jaqqas from my mind.

I was altogether captivated by them. Certainly they were cannibal monsters, and dreadful; and yet they seemed in a strange way not to be truly evil, any more than a storm that sweeps across the land in a rage of destruction can be said to be evil. For they had no malice in them. They were mere appetites on legs. To slay and eat one’s own kind is, in sooth, a great wrong, as any child might argue. But were the Jaqqas any worse than the swarming slippery Portugals who had taken over the coast, and did press an entire race into slavery, and cheated one another and plotted all sorts of dire treacheries, all the while going piously each day to the Mass? In this land of Africa everyone was a monster of some sort or another, I did decide. And I think I preferred the ferocious Jaqqas, who made no pretense of piety, to the hypocrite folk who claimed to be civilized, but were raw savage just beneath the outer costume.

The Imbe-Jaqqa haunted me in another way. I know that there are upon this globe certain great men: Drake is one, and Ralegh, and Elizabeth must be deemed a great man, too, for a man’s role is what she did adopt, and splendidly. And also Julius Caesar and Alexander and such— leaders, dominators. I have a very small bit of that thing about me myself, that they have had: for I am no king or duke, but I have observed that in any group of men, they do turn to me before long for leadership in a natural way, though I do not seek it. Had I ever sought it, or had I the kind of noble birth that confers those powers without the seeking, I might indeed have been something extraordinary and done high deeds, and I say that in no braggartly way, but in quiet simple assessment. Yet I have only a small bit of that thing. I would not have been an emperor. But this Calandola, I thought at once, had in him the stuff of majesty: like the great Genghis of the Tartars, like the Hunnish chief Attila who despoiled Europe in the long ago, like the Assyrian Sennacherib of dire repute, he could capture the souls of men, and make them follow wherever he willed. In that first encounter he had begun to capture mine, which I barely understood. For there was much that was loathsome and repellent about him, and yet he attracted. Do you comprehend? Can you? It was the pull of the coccodrillo, the pull of darkness, of the hidden chilling Satanic river that flows through the depths of the soul and sweeps all conscience and faith before it. I saw Imbe Calandola in my dreams, like a titan filling half the sky. His touch was upon me. He rang like a great gong in my skull, tolling, tolling, giving me no peace. And I did not understand what power he held over me, nor how I was meant to yield to it. But he filled half the sky; he did ring in my skull like a gong.

7

The Jaqqas settled themselves in this country of Benguela and took the spoil of it. And we had great trade with them, five months, and gained greatly by them. First we carried our cargo of slaves to São Paulo de Loanda and sold them, the governor and other officials taking their heavy share, but still leaving profit enough so that we were all rich men. I was showered with milreis, enough money to buy me a grand farm in England, if I were in England. We stayed a little while in the city, and with my new riches I purchased good cloaks for Matamba, and other pretties. I spoke with her of the things that had befallen me, and said that I had seen Imbe Calandola. At the which she moved away from me and began to whimper, as if she feared some contagion of evil might pass from the great Jaqqa to her through me; but I calmed her and she asked me many questions, and told me that the long-legged Kinguri was brother to Calandola, and a famous man in his own right, which I had not known.

We undertook a second voyage to Benguela, bringing certain hatchets and knives and other common things that the Jaqqas needed, and brought away more slaves: for it was easy for the Jaqqas to round up the villagers to give to us at a gentle price. So I grew richer, I that had been a miserable prisoner and a banished man not too long before.

There was a counting-house in São Paulo de Loanda now, operated by a Spaniard with connections in the House of Fugger that is such great bankers across Europe, and I placed my money there, to increase it. This was a noble room of white walls and black wood panels, and a great staircase of some fine black wood rising to the upper room where the secret businesses of banking did proceed. The Spaniard was all courtesy and sleekness, and moved about like a little puppy, fawning on me, with many an eager, “Si, Senor Battell” as though I were some oiled and waxed grandee with a long Espaniardo mustachio, and gave me a receipt for my milreis on splendid vellum, inscribed most heroically in curlicues and flourishes, the way one might inscribe a passport into Paradise.

And I knew that I had crossed another unseen line in the progress of my soul into new territory, for now I was a slave-dealer and no hiding the truth of that: and what else does one call a man who buys men and women from cannibals, and sells them among the Portugals? I who rarely had more than a pound or two to my name now did hold great store of milreis at my account with Fugger of Augsburg, that is, I was a man now of substance and wealth, all of it gained by dealing in souls and trafficking with man-eaters. The which was God’s small jest upon me for living an honorable life.

We did a third voyage also in those five months to the Jaqqas in the south and fetched yet more slaves. But coming the fourth time, we found them not. I knew enough of the Jaqqa way by that time to be aware that Imbe Calandola was not content to keep himself in one place for long; and he and his followers had grown weary of the Benguela country, for they had used up all their wine, and in those parts there are no palm-trees for making wine, though other foodstuffs are abundant. So they had marched toward the province of Bambala, to a great lord that is called Calicansamba, whose country is five days up into the land.

Being loath to return without trade, we determined to go up into the land after them. So we went fifty of us on shore, Captain Diogo Pinto Dourado and his boatswain among the party, and left our ship riding in the Bay of Benguela to stay for us. And marching two days up into the country, where all was green and the land was tawny and the air was filled with little glimmering midges with eyes like sapphires and beaks of fire, we entered to the domain of a great lord which is called Mofarigosat. And coming to his first town, we found it all burned to the ground and despoiled, with bloodied mangled bodies strewn here and there in a terrible way that was familiar to me from another sad slaughter long ago.

“The Jaqqas have been here and are gone,” said Pinto Dourado.

He sent for a Negro slave which we had bought of the Jaqqas, and who lived with us, and ordered him to carry a message to the Lord Mofarigosat. This slave did tell Mofarigosat that we were white men allied to the Jaqqas, and seeking to meet with them our friends, and so we desired entry and free passage through his territory.

Two days went past and we thought our envoy might have been slain, which would have been a great insult and required us to make war. But then the slave returned, and with him was a dignitary of the court of Mofarigosat, a broad-bodied black with a great crimson sash of office across his breast, who bowed low before us as though we were demon-princes out of Hell, and said most humbly, “My master bids me tell you that you are welcome here.”

Mofarigosat himself was less humble. This chieftain, who received us a day later in his capital village, did stand tall before us, and his eyes did flash, and there was no smile on his lips, as he bade us make our home with him. “A thousand welcomes,” he said, yet his voice was cold and he did but pretend a welcome to us: I could tell, and it took little shrewdness to see it, that he was merely admitting us for fear of Imbe Calandola, with whom he wanted no disagreement.

Mofarigosat was a man of nearly sixty years, white-haired and white-bearded but with great strength and vigor. His body was lean and strong and warlike, and bore no scrap of fatty surplus upon it. He dressed only in a blue loin-cloth and in a necklace of small golden plates. The gold surprised us, that metal not being an object of much desire among these African folk. Coming before us in his council-chamber, Mofarigosat did walk from one to another of us, inspecting us close, our skins, our guns, our armor, for no white man had ever been in this part before. At last he said, in the Kikongo tongue but with a more fluid accent of the south, “Do you serve the great Imbe-Jaqqa, or is he vassal to you?”

Pinto Dourado looked to me to make reply, and after a moment, hastily constructing an answer, I said, “We are equal allies, that do trade with one another for the universal benefit of both.”

“Ah,” said Mofarigosat. “Equal allies.”

“Go to, you should have told him the Jaqqa is our servant!” Pinto Dourado said sharply to me.

“I think it would have been a hard lie to make,” I said. “They know the Jaqqa too well here.”

Mofarigosat ordered feasting for us, and professed no enmity for Calandola, even that he had burned and spoiled one of his outlying villages. That small event the chieftain appeared to regard merely as the Imbe-Jaqqa’s due. As he passed through this territory, it was only to be expected, a natural thing, that Calandola would pause to make his dinner somewhere, and if he dined on some of the subjects of Mofarigosat, well, then so be it. I understood now how this lord had been able to rule so long here and reach such a great age unmolested: for he, too, knew the art of bending to the breeze, lest he be snapped and swept away in storms.

Yet plainly was he no petty chief, but rather a lord most powerful, and no coward neither, but a shrewd and valiant man. Mofarigosat his town was large and well-appointed, with many dwellings and great wooden palaces covered with deep thatch, and a palisado of sharp-edged stakes set all about it, that would be difficult to breach. He had a great many warriors, strong and able, equipped with lances and large bows, that he took care to keep on display for our benefit.

I think that if Imbe Calandola had chosen to attack this lord Mofarigosat, he would have had a heavy task in the defeating of him. In the end the Jaqqa very likely would have triumphed, for I think Calandola did believe so strongly in his own invincibility that he could convince all others of that, even his foes. Yet it would have cost him sorely. So at this time Calandola had chosen not to expend his energies in a hard war with Mofarigosat, but to go on instead in a wide circle around his city and into the deeper forest, which be the true home of Jaqqas.

And seeing the size of Mofarigosat’s army and the tough mettle of Mofarigosat himself, I began to feel some unease about our own safety in this place, we being but fifty men and they being many hundreds. I know that the Spaniards did conquer the entire nations of Mexico and Peru with armies hardly greater than our little band, but those folk were Indians and not Negroes, and perhaps were more readily cowed by muskets and white skins, Indians being a frailer people, and timid. I had not noticed the troops of Kafuche Kambara greatly cowed by those things that time they fell upon the Portugals in the desert. And I did not think those of Mofarigosat would greatly be, neither.

At the first it was all feasting and celebration. The palm-wine flowed like water, and Mofarigosat caused his best cattle to be led forth and butchered for our delight, and we ate and drank until we were stupored by it.

To his credit, Pinto Dourado became suspicious early of this soft treatment, thinking it might be the prelude to a massacring, when we were all thoroughly besotted. So he gave the order that at all times five out of our fifty were to take no drink at all, and that all of us were to keep our muskets close within reach during the banqueting.

The kindness of Mofarigosat toward us did not cease for some days. Each day as the orange sun fell swiftly toward the distant blue shield of the sea we gathered and we did revel with Mofarigosat and his people, and often the lord himself presided over the festivities. There was dancing in which the men and women were divided into two facing rows, and did stamp their feet in place, and rush toward one another to counterfeit the act of copulation, with thrustings of hips and the like. Yet this dance was far less licentious than the similar one that the Jaqqa women had performed, since those Jaqqas had rubbed their slippery bodies together in high hot passion, and these did only mime the act in a very chaste way, with open space between them. Still, it was not like the dances one sees and does in England or in Portugal, and it did stir some lusts in us.

To satisfy these, we were given women: not of Mofarigosat’s own nation, to be sure, but slave-wenches of some other tribe. All the women of this country do sharpen their teeth for beauty’s sake, but these carried the style to its utmost, with pointed teeth like needles, that scarce hold much beauty for me. Also were they deeply ornamented on their skins not just with the usual carvings and cicatrices, but with colored patterns that are pressed into the skin with sharp blades. This was done on the forehead, the breasts, the shoulders, and the buttocks, and made the girls look piebald and strange. I saw this skin-coloring being done to a small girl, that was made to lie on the ground whilst the image of a flower was carved into her belly by an artist of that kind. They say that if the child endures these incisions without crying out, she will be good for childbearing; but if she cannot endure them, she will never marry, and is likely to be sold for slavery. Thus men who are looking for brides here seek first to see if the women are perfectly ornamented on their bellies.

Well, and in the dark one does not notice such decorations, nor is one much offended by teeth that come to a point. So we took our pleasure willingly with these gifts of Mofarigosat. To me it was a particular secret sport to hold mine tight in my arms and pretend that she be Matamba, for there was something indeed Matamba-like about the feel of her flesh and the placing of her ornamental scars and the sweet deep odor of her body. Yet was she not even distantly Matamba’s equal in the arts of the bedchamber, which made me long to be in São Paulo de Loanda once again, and in Matamba’s embrace.

But when we spoke with Mofarigosat about taking our leave of him, and peradventure having from him a guide to lead us onward to the city of Calicansamba, he only laughed and clapped us lustily on the shoulders and cried, “Nay, stay with us! Share our meat! Why rush off so hasty?”

The which did make us even more suspicious of him. I spoke with Pinto Dourado and told him what I believed the real reason for Mofarigosat’s rich hospitality to be, that was, that he feared having us join forces with Calandola’s Jaqqas, and was delaying us here with pleasures until Calandola should be safely out of his country. In this Pinto Dourado concurred.

Then the feasting ended and we said to Mofarigosat, “Now we shall take our leave of you. Will you have the kindness to provide us with a guide to the inland?”

“In time, in time,” said Mofarigosat, looking thoughtful and stroking his white beard. “But first I ask a small service of you, that will give you hardly any effort.”

At that I felt dismay, for I had had a good education thus far in my life in what it meant to be asked to perform just one small service before you were free to go your own way. But we inquired of him what he would have of us, to which he replied that there was a city nearby that was enemy to him and rebelled against him, and he did crave our assistance in reducing that city to subjection.

“Surely,” I said, “the armies of Mofarigosat are capable of dealing with any enemy!”

“That they are,” smoothly he replied, “but it will be so much more swift, so much less bloody, if the white men and their guns show their force against these folk.”

We parleyed some long while, and gradually the shape of things did become clear. Which was that Mofarigosat thought himself a mighty man having us with him, and intended to use us to terrify all his foes. He would not let us go out of his land till we had gone to the wars with him, and that was the substance of it. Of course we could refuse him and fight our way free, but beyond doubt some of us would perish in that, and quite possibly we would fail entirely. For the armies of Mofarigosat were on constant patrol around us, hundreds and hundreds of warriors, and though he respected our guns greatly, he did not fear them in any abject way, nor us. In the face of his firmness we chose the easiest course, which was to yield to him at least this once, and do him his service.

So we were forced to go with him to a town along a small fork of the River Kuvu, which was well defended but which I think Mofarigosat himself could well have conquered without our aid. He took up his position around it and called out that they must surrender, or they would be slain by white-skinned demons. To this came a volley of arrows by way of reply. Whereupon Mofarigosat turned to us and that sly old man smiled and gestured and did say to us, “Destroy them.”

And we levelled our muskets at the warriors of the rebellious town and slew many of them in the first onslaught. The others fled at once, and we marched into the town and destroyed the enemies of Mofarigosat. In doing this, three of us were slightly wounded by arrows, but all the town that had opposed him was taken. We stood to one side while Mofarigosat and his troops now plundered the town and helped themselves to its wealth. I do not know the name of this place, in whose sorry downfall I took part.

When we had done this we resolved to make our leavetaking of Mofarigosat without further delay. So again the chief Portugal officers and I went to the lord, and said we would leave, I being the speaker and making my words plain and firm.

Mofarigosat replied, “I will not prevent you leaving.”

“Aye,” said I, “then we shall depart this hour.”

“But I must have a pledge from you first.”

Pinto Dourado, who had come to speak this language almost as well as I and sat listening close beside, gave me a troubled look, and I shared his distress.

I said, “What pledge do you ask?”

“That you return to my land within two months, and bring with you a hundred men to help me in my wars, and to trade with me. For we would ally ourselves with you Portugals.”

“Did you understand his words?” I asked the captain.

“Aye.”

“And what shall I tell him?”

“That he is an old mildewed fool,” Pinto Dourado growled. Then he said, “Nay, keep that to yourself. But how can I answer him? They have nothing here that holds value to us in trade. And we have no need to fight his wars for him.” With a shrug Pinto Dourado said, “Tell him we agree. We will come in two months, and give him all that he wishes.”

“But—”

“Tell him, Englishman!”

So did I turn to Mofarigosat and say, as I was instructed, “It is agreed. You shall have a hundred men with weapons that shoot flame, and we will trade with you.”

“Most excellent,” Mofarigosat responded. “And will you give me a pawn to assure me of your good faith?”

“A pawn?” I said. “What pawn?”

“Leave one of your number with me for hostage, so that I know you will come again.”

Pinto Dourado at this did spit, and scowl, and look away. I told the chieftain that we could not consent to such a thing, but he would not have it other, and in the end we withdrew to confer among ourselves. The Portugals all seemed greatly desirous of getting away from this place as quick as possible, even if it meant leaving a man behind. “It is only two months,” said Fernão Coelho. “And we will give that man a full share of all our profits in our trading!”

“If it seems so small a time to you,” answered him one of our master gunners, “then you be the one who stays, boatswain!”

“Ah, nay, friend,” said Coelho. “We will draw lots for it.”

“Lots! Lots! Aye!” cried many of the Portugals. “It is the only fair way!”

But some of them would not agree to it, saying that even if it were only the one chance out of fifty that they be left here, they would not hazard it. And no one could make them join in the lot-drawing; and therefore the others would not draw lots, either, for only a fool would reach for a straw when half his fellows refused to share the risk. I thought Pinto Dourado would order them all to go into the lottery, to make an end of it and get us out of here before Mofarigosat devised some new labor for us. But the slippery Portugal had an easier idea.

He turned to me and said, “We will leave you as our pawn, Englishman.”

I think that if I live to be eight hundred year, yet will I never grow accustomed to the casual treachery that is practiced between men on this world. For sure that Pinto Dourado’s words did come upon me by surprise, and take me in the gut the way a kick by a booted foot would have done.

“Aye!” cried all the Portugals lustily, and why should they not? “Leave the Englishmen here! Leave the heretic!”

In a moment I recovered from my amaze and looked about at them, saying, “Are ye all such Judases, that you would elect me to this fate without a second thought?”

“It is only for two months,” said Coelho mildly.

“Indeed. And if it befalls that you never return, what will become of me?”

“We would not be such traitors as to forget you,” Pinto Dourado said, and in his oily face I saw only contempt. “But if one of us must stay, why, I tell you that it must be you, for you are a foreigner and a Lutheran, and a slave under prison sentence, but we are all free Portugals who cannot be handed off in this way. I would have much to answer for at São Paulo de Loanda, if I left any other of my men here than you. Do you understand?”

“I understand that I am betrayed,” I answered him. “God’s wounds, will you cast me off?”

“It must be.”

“Swear, then, by your cross or something else holy, that you will return for me!”

“Ah, it would be unlawful to swear such oath,” said Pinto Dourado, “you being heretical. We may not pledge upon the Lord’s word to such as you.”

“Never have I heard that argued before.”

“You have heard it now, Englishman. Go you now to Mofarigosat, and tell him that you are our chosen pawn, and that we pledge to come back and aid him, and claim you, so he must keep you in safety. For we would not have you harmed, since that you are one of our company.”

8

With those words Diogo Pinto Dourado did dismiss me, and once again I found myself abandoned, and the victim of perfidy.

For I knew I would not be redeemed out of this place, Pinto Dourado having observed that there was nothing here that Portugals desired. Yet said to him most quietly in parting that I had done no wrong that merited me this fate, and so therefore I did hope he would not forget me, even if he had refused to swear it. And also I said, quietly and in such a way as might sink deep into his soul, that I knew the Lord God Almighty would exact a terrible revenge, upon the last day of the world, against those who broke faith with their fellow men.

Then the whoreson Portugals did hurry out of the city of Mofarigosat, not even troubling to get themselves the guide they had desired, so impatient were they of leaving. For this cunning Mofarigosat had frighted them in a way that Imbe Calandola himself had not done. To them, I think, Calandola was so hugely monstrous that they could not begin to understand him; but this lean and stringy old Mofarigosat was truly of their own kind, subtle and merciless and capable of any sort of betrayal, the only differences between him and them being that he was a pagan and his skin was a few shades darker. So they meant to flee him, before he made them all captives.

And I alone remained behind, thinking I might spend the rest of my life in Mofarigosat his town, and that that might be no very long span.

At least for the first the blacks did treat me kindly. I had a little cottage for myself, out of poles and brush, and they brought me palm-wine and meat whenever I clapped my hands, and each night when I retired there were three or four women waiting by my door, young naked hard-breasted slave-wenches with thick lips and filed teeth hiding behind those lips, from amongst whom I could take my pick. This was captivity, aye, but it was not the most woeful of durance.

By day I was free to wander about in the town, which was a place of close moist heat and of shining heavy foliage pressing close, and I could observe the customs of the tribe as I wished. And many strange things did I see among these folk.

They were idolaters, like all these blacks except the ones that live in the cities that are under the thumb of the Jesuits. For their gods the heathen Africans do choose divers snakes, and adders, and beasts, and birds, and herbs, and trees, and they make figures out of all these things graven in wood and in stone. Neither do they only content themselves with worshipping the said creatures when they are quick and alive, but also the very skins of them when they were dead, being stuffed with straw. I have heard that there are nations that carry a devotion to dragons with wings, which they nourish and feed in their own private houses, giving unto them for their food, the best and most costly viands that they had. Others keep serpents of horrible figures; some worship the greatest goats they could get; some, lions, and other most monstrous creatures: yea, the more uncouth and deformed the beasts are, the more they are honored.

I find it not easy to comprehend the holding in veneration of unclean fowls and night-birds, as bats, owls, and screech-owls, and the like, and to proclaim such things to be the incarnation of God Almighty: but yet I think I begin to understand their reasoning, which is, that God Almighty enters into all created things, even the most loathly, and to worship Him in His darker forms is nevertheless to worship Him. But this is hard for a Christian mind to encompass.

In the city of Mofarigosat, which was entirely pagan, the Gospel of Jesus never having yet come this far into the land, they did have holy houses for their mokissos, or idols, which the Portugals do call feitissos or fetishes. On their holy days, one of which befell very soon after my abandonment in that place, the people clothed themselves all in white, and were themselves smeared with white earth in token of purity. I saw them kill cocks and goats to offer to their mokissos, but as soon as it was killed, they tore the animal in pieces with their hands, and the owner had the smallest share of it, his friends and acquaintances falling on and every one seizing a piece. This they broiled and ate very greedily. They cleaned the guts into small bits, and, squeezing out the dung with their fingers, boiled them with other entrails, a little salt and the pepper known to the Portugals as malagueta, and ate it without washing off the blood, regarding it as most delicious food, and holy also.

They did solemnize their holy day in a wide open place, in the midst of which they erected a sort of table, or altar, about four feet square, supported by four pillars of clay, adorned with green boughs and leaves of reeds. This altar was set up at the foot of some tree, which is consecrated to their deities, and on it they did lay Guinea wheat, millet, and rice-ears, palm-wine, water, flesh, fish, beynonas, and other fruit, for the entertainment of their idols. I think they were persuaded that their gods do eat those things, though they daily saw them devoured by birds of prey.

A priest seated in a wooden chair before the altar made a discourse of many minutes, with some vehemence, in a secret language I did not understand. I suppose it is like the way Latin is preached by Popish priests before folk who understand only Spanish or German or such. The assembly were very attentive. The priest did sprinkle the faces of the congregation with liquor from a pot, and then they all began to sing and dance about the tree and altar, and play on their musical instruments, until the priest stood up and sprinkled the altar with the consecrated liquor. After which they all cried, Lou, Lou, which I took to mean “Amen,” and they all went home.

I confess I was of two minds about these ceremonies, whether they were as evil as the worship of the golden calf against which Moses did inveigh, or whether they were only another form of honor to the true God of Heaven. For surely there is only one God, who made Papists and Protestants and pagans alike, and He does not refuse homage from any of His creatures, no matter how they choose to frame their phrases of devotion. I know this is blasphemy, for which I could be burned alive in any country of Europe, including, I am sure, my own. Yet do I say it freely here, since I am old and do not fear burning half so much as I fear hiding the truth of what I have felt and believed.

I saw the mokisso named Nkondi, like a man the size of a child, that protects against thieves. Mavena, a dog with slavering fangs, guards against seducers. Ntadi, a dwarfish monster with a human face, speaks in dreams to warn of danger. And there were others that brought fertility or prosperity or success in warfare or safety against sorcerers. The harvest and rainfall were in the command of Mbumba, a snake that was also a rainbow, and do not beg me to explain how a snake and a rainbow may be one.

Yet all these spirits were each a part of Nzambi Ampungu, which is the same as saying God Almighty, the supreme power. They do not worship Nzambi Ampungu directly, saying, he is too remote from human affairs, he is invisible and inaccessible, and cannot be rendered in the form of an idol to be worshipped. So they give their devotion in their hearts to Nzambi Ampungu, but say their special prayers and make their offerings to Ntadi or Nkondi or Mavena and such. Meseems that this is not immensely different from the Papist way of having one high god reigning far above, but making your prayers to Saint Mary or Saint Anthony or such, who do the real work of bringing favors to man. And perhaps that is why these pagans did take so easily to the Catholic faith that the Jesuits did bring unto them; but I think the Jesuits would not be greatly pleased, if they knew that their saints are only deemed new mokissos by the Africans.

I learned whatever I did about the faith of these people from a certain man-witch of Mofarigosat’s tribe, whose name was Mboma. In the language of these parts mboma is the black python serpent, and boma is the word that means “fear,” so this man-witch Mboma was of great power, and his name meant something like Lord of Fear. But he was not at all black: rather was he of the ndundu kind, what the Portugals call albino, with skin so fair it was fairer than an English maid’s, skin more the color of paper than the color of skin, and hair of a fair kind also, though not anything like mine, being more white than golden, and eyes that were pink where a Negro’s would be brown and mine are blue. This witch Mboma was a small man, very frail, who carried a sun-shade made of palm-fiber to protect himself against the scorching of the sun. And the people did seem frightened of him, and kept their distance. I recalled when I was at Loango in the beginning of my African life I did see one of these ndundus who seemed most fearsome, a veritable Hell-demon, and I was much disconcerted by his glares and threats; but this Mboma, for all his awesome name, did not frighten me at all. He came to me and touched me on the arm and along the beard and beckoned to me to stoop to let him touch my hair, which was beyond his reach. And he said to me, “Mokisso, mokisso” which I think was his way of telling me, “You are protected by the gods,” or maybe, “You are a holy man,” I am not sure which.

I went about the city with this man and he did show me the shrines of the mokissos and let me observe their ceremonies, and told me some few things of the meaning of what I was seeing. He treated me thus out of respect for my white skin and my golden hair, which had throughout my time in Africa unfailingly brought me such special attentions.

This ndundu, who was a nganga or priest or man-witch as I say, came to me each day and tugged at my arm and took me about to some new festival. One such was the circumcision rite; for all these blackamoors do practice circumcision except the Christian ones of the coastal territories, that have forsworn it. They do this thing not for holy reasons, I think, as it is done among the Jews and Mussulmen, but to show virility: a woman would not regard as fit for marriage any man who had his foreskin. Indeed foreskins are most strange to them, and often in my coupling with native women of the pagan tribes they would play with mine, rolling it back and forth like a toy, until I had perforce to remind them what business we were supposed to be performing with one another.

I did not take much joy in witnessing circumcisions. This was done upon boys of twelve years of age, who were smeared with white earth and did dance together a long while, looking most joyous and exalted, though I would think they should rather have looked frightened. Then they went into a dark house where they remained certain days with very hard diet; and when they came forth they were rubbed with a red earth, and animals were sacrificed, and the boys did dance about some more. The ndundu then spoke prayers, and the circumciser came forth, who was the blacksmith of the village, holding an iron sickle. The boys sat with their legs apart, and assistant circumcisers came up behind them and held them, and one by one the circumciser came to the novices, holding in his right hand the sickle, which was heated red-hot. With his left hand he did take each boy’s yard and pull at the foreskin and quite suddenly cut it off, which made me turn my head away each time it was done. And each time I also felt a fiery impact on my own member, that made me flinch, as if by sympathy with the initiated boy.

God’s wounds, what things we do to ourselves in the name of sanctity and piety!

The bleeding boys were given some potion to drink, and then older boys led them away to wash their wound, and there were other rites that I was not permitted to witness, which peradventure was no serious deprivation for me. The foreskins lastly were heaped up and taken off to the burial ground of the city and given interment with a high solemn rite. For my witch-friend did tell me that unless they were properly disposed of, they might become zumbis, that is, walking spirits, and return to bedevil the village.

I confess that I looked aside and did smother a laugh at those words, to think of ghosts in the form of foreskins. But later I thought it was not so foolish, to think a spirit might reconstruct itself out of a small part of a body, especially one that is removed with such a show of holy pomp. For if there are spirits at all, of which I am far from sure, why not have them emerge out of any merest scrap of humanity, and march zumbi thenceforth through all eternity?

The ndundu Mbomba did tell me something else on this subject of circumcision, that woke deep horror in me.

He said, “We cut only the boys. But I know that in the eastern lands, they do cut the girls as well.”

I thought I did mishear him, and asked him to repeat, but he said it all again carefully in the same words.

To which I replied, “God’s eyes, but what is there to cut on a girl?”

The white-skinned witch, by way of answer, did beckon to a girl of twelve or fourteen years who was passing by, and made her come to us, which she did in terrible palsy of terror at being summoned by such men as we. He took from her the little girdle of cloth that she wore, and bared her loins and parted her legs and the nether lips, only just mantled by the new hair, and showed me the pink hidden bud that is a woman’s most secret place of pleasure.

“This is what they cut,” he said.

“God’s death! God’s eyes! God’s wounds!”

“It is not done in this land. But there are tribes that say it is unclean for women to have such things on them, or that it is the site of sorcery, or that it makes a woman unchaste if it is not cut off. They do use a kind of stinging nettle to make the organ swell so that it is large enough to be cut, except those tribes that use the cautery, where—”

“Enough,” I said, and shuddered. “I will not hear more.”

It was the only time, in my gathering of the lore of these foreign peoples amongst whom I was thrown, that ever I did order a halt to a narrative. I suppose I should have had the information from him, which perhaps no other man of Europe has ever heard; but I wanted it not. For all I could think of was the poor mutilated women, deprived of their pleasure-zone, and I gave thanks to my own God that He had not inflicted upon us any such custom, that seems to me far more barbarous than cannibalism itself. The life of a woman is sufficiently hard as it is, I think, without her having to give up that thing, too.

But the people of Mofarigosat were licentious by nature and did not practice such damage upon their women. For which I was grateful on those nights when I consoled myself for my fear and loneliness by taking those women to my couch. Their lovemaking was done in the style I was already familiar with, entailing much tickling and no kissing on the mouth or private parts, and in positions other than the familiar one of England. They greased their bodies with a grease not much to my joy, but it was not intolerable, and I took my will of them often enough, thinking a time might be drawing near when the vengeance of Mofarigosat might send me from this world, and wanting such comfort as I might have before then.

I learned some of the strange ways these women have of keeping from being taken with child. They believe that if they open three cuts in their thighs, and rub into them some of the blood of their monthly bleeding, they will be rendered sterile; but all they need do, to have their fertility again, is reopen the cuts and wash them in running water. Some also think that if semen be used in the place of the monthly blood, that will have the same effect. Others tie knots in a piece of string to guard against pregnancy, or put hen’s eggs in their cunts after coupling, or catch a certain type of large white ant and insinuate it into the same place. As for arousing male desire, should that be necessary, they have a witchcraft of which I was told, that uses a he-goat’s yard, the ballocks of a cock, and a root called ngname, that has the shape of the male member. Also do they make potions of salamanders and roaches, the hair of the genital zone, leaves dipped in semen, and the like things.

Another way I occupied myself during my captivity in the city of Mofarigosat was to observe their system of justice, which makes use of the trial by poison. Indeed this dreadful and deadly kind of trial is general throughout the region, but never had I seen or heard of it before, though in faith I was due for some heavy encounters with it afterward.

The way this is done is that when any man is suspected of any offense he is carried before Mofarigosat, or one of his ministers, who questions him on his guilt. And if it be upon matters that he denies, and cannot be proved but by oath, then the suspected person is given over to the nganga-priest whose special skill it is to administer the ordeal by poison. One of the ways this is carried out is with a root which they call imbunda, about the bigness of one’s thumb, half a foot long, like a white carrot. This root is very strong and as bitter as gall, by my own knowledge from tasting it, and one root will serve to try one hundred.

The virtue of this root is, that if they put too much of it into water, the person that drinks it cannot void urine, and so it strikes up into the brain as though he were drunk, and he falls down, as though he were dead. Whereupon the people all cry out, “Ndoki, ndoki” that is, “Sorcerer, sorcerer,” and they knock him on the head and drag him away to hurl him over a cliff. But those who can make urine are found not guilty and set free.

In the like way they have another drug, nkasa, which comes from a certain red tree that is so noxious that the birds cannot endure even its shadow. When it is given to those who must take it, the nganga says, “If you are guilty of disturbing the peace or are a traitor, if you have committed such and such a crime, if you have stolen such and such a thing, if you have robbed and killed such and such a man, or if you have cast some spell or other, die from this nkasa. If you are innocent, vomit it forth and be free of all evil.” The guilty man will discharge red urine profusely and run a few paces and fall down and die, and his body is denied holy burial. But those who are innocent puke up the drug, and their urine is unaffected, and they live.

I learned in my later life in Africa many other forms of trial by ordeal, such as the trial by hot iron and the trial by boiling water and the trial by snail-shells, or sea-shells. But I will tell of all these in their proper place.

I observed much else in my weeks in the city of Mofarigosat. One thing I witnessed was the making of the raised scars that are thought to be such a thing of beauty, by cutting the skin and inserting cinders underneath to inflame it, or by pressing certain plants into the incisions. They told me that certain scars had special meaning upon women, such as those along the thighs that are taken to say, “Squeeze me,” and a circular scar on the buttock that has the meaning, “This is where a man holds me.” But I learned only a little of these mysteries.

And also I saw the shame that comes upon the women when it is their bleeding time of the month, for they are thought unholy and dangerous then. Men have a deep fear of that blood and will on no account go anywhere near it, nor are the cattle of the tribe permitted to approach a woman who is in her menstruous time. They have a special house where those women go on the first two days, and there are no wells near it, nor plantations, nor pastures. Yet the blood of them is a powerful magic that they use in various rites, of which I know nothing.

Since I had naught to do but watch these things, I watched and absorbed a great deal. And I marveled much that each nation of Africa has its whole host of special customs, its myriad of tribal witchcrafts and spells and mokissos and philosophies, so many that it would take a thousand chroniclers a thousand lifetimes to record it all, and I think it be of high interest. Yet what will happen, if the Portugals have their way and turn all this land into Christian territory? And make everyone here wear Portugal clothes and talk the Portugal tongue and go to the Mass and forswear all their native habit? You might reply that this would be only for the good, to abolish the foul pagan way, and to some degree I would agree with that, since I see no merit in the trial by poison or the cutting of women’s parts or the like. Yet when such things have disappeared wholly from the face of the earth, and everything is but the same everywhere, whether we be in London or Muscovy or Turkey or Angola, have we not lost a great deal of richness out of the world?

On all this did I ponder, while I waited for Diogo Pinto Dourado and his men to return and redeem me from my being pawned to Mofarigosat. And the days went by, which I counted by making little marks on the wood of a soft tree outside my cottage, and the tally mounted to twenty and forty and fifty and then to sixty, which was the expiration of the agreed-upon period. I was not so innocent that I expected the Portugals to return to me, but yet I was not so soured upon mankind that I would deny out of hand the possibility that they would.

And so I went on hoping and tallying and hoping and tallying. Mofarigosat, too, was keeping a tally; and as we came to the end of the second month there was a discernible change in their treatment of me, for I had no more women and no more wine and far more humble food. And the time ran out.

I will give Mofarigosat credit for this much, that he did allow four additional days of grace. But at the sixty-fourth day that was all the grace I could have, and some of the chief men of his court came to me at my cottage, and one said, “Your people have not kept their promise, and now will we cut off your head.”

It seemed to me sure that I had misheard him. But I had not, for they took me straightaway to a place in the great plaza of the town where they punished their thieves and adulterers. Here there was a chopping-block, and to one side they did have the most grisly place that could be imagined, where many chopped-off hands and arms and legs were piled, and a goodly number of chopped-off heads, and old bones to be seen beneath this, and flies of a large size with gleaming green bodies buzzing around over everything. This charnel mound did speak to me of frequent and terrible punishments administered by the officers of Mofarigosat upon his people, and I understood the obedience of the citizens to him.

I looked toward that pile of human fragments and in my mind’s eye I did see the golden-haired head of Andy Battell sitting high above all that sundered and withering black flesh, with the sun coming down from straight overhead and striking against my hair and beard with a wondrous radiance. And it was a vision not very much to my liking.

Yet did it seem certain I would end my life in this place within this hour. For though it was only an early time of the morning, with the mists and fogs of night still settling about the ground, a great throng did come forth and take up a place around the edges of this plaza. And the high nobility of the town had the closest place, nigh the chopping-block. I had me in mind that it must look much this way in London, at the Tower, when some great person of the realm is being parted from his head, and he stands alone by the block, and the Lord Chief Justice is there, and the Bishop of this place and that, and the Duke of this and the Earl of that, all at close range, where they can hear the sound of the axe and see the blood go flying.

And then there did come forth to me a colossal blackamoor, who must have had an elephanto for his grandsire, for he was an immensity of flesh and bone and muscle, a wall of a man; and he carried in one hand, the way you might carry a pike or a pigsticker, a sword of most ferocious size, five feet long or even greater. This blackamoor was naked except for a necklace of small bones at his collar and a chain of long lion-teeth at his waist, and his skin was oiled to a very high gloss. This was the executioner and you could see that he did relish his work, for he was smiling and singing under his breath and swinging his vast sword back and forth through the air to test the strength of his right arm.

I looked about me and said, “Ah, you would not kill me on this the holy day of my faith!”

I was minded to invent for them a fable: that this was a day of days, upon which no man was to be given to death, for his soul would be deprived of heaven if he perished that day, unless he performed certain rites that only a priest could do for him. But all this clever imagining of my fevered and frighted mind was futile, in that they paid no attention to what I said, but laid hold on me and in a trice stripped from me all my clothes, and I stood naked before that multitude.

Now, it is an awful thing to die by the headman’s blade, but it is five times more awful to do it naked before hundreds of onlookers. Heigh-ho, and the onlookers themselves were just as naked, or the next thing to it; but they at least had their privities decently covered, and, besides, they were not the ones who were dying that day.

And there I stood with my yard and buttocks and everything exposed to the gaze of the curious, which robs a man of all dignity at the moment when he most needs his dignity, since he is about to lose all else. It is barbarism. King Henry, when he sent his queen Anne Boleyn to lose her head, did not also command that she be laid bare so that the gapers could behold her royal breasts and loins. Nor did he expose the equally royal belly and rump of Katherine Howard, his later queen, to the crowd when she went to the block. Or imagine Sir Thomas More naked on the scaffold, or Somerset, or Northumberland, or Norfolk! Nay, it is too much, to be revealed at the last before the mockers; but these savages took no account of it. I was sore afraid I would beshit myself in fear, or rouse their laughter with my urine, or, worse, have my yard stand tall at the last, as is said sometimes to happen to the dying, and there be no way to conceal any of these weaknesses of the flesh. I think I was more afraid of those shames than of dying itself.

Naked, then, and alone, and unshriven, did I march forward between two armed men to the chopping-place.

I looked about me.

“I beg you mercy,” I said, “for I am a stranger in this land, and I was but left here as a pawn by my enemies, who hoped to see me brought to this pass. But I have done you no injury, as you all do know.”

This brought me no response. Certain ngangas began an evil-sounding chanting and a making of music.

I said, having trouble finding my voice now, for my throat was dry as the sands of Egypt and my tongue was swollen with dismay, “Only give me five more days, and my companions will return, bringing you all you desire. But if you slay me, they will fall upon you and exact a terrible vengeance.”

This waked only laughter in them, as well it might, since it was the direct opposite in sense from my previous plea.

And after that I said, knowing the time did grow desperate, “Let me pray, and make my peace with my Maker, before you smite me.”

They indicated I might do that. But I could not find the words of prayer within my soul. I was not ready to die, and I had no summing-up yet to make to the Lord of my life and deeds, for I felt myself interrupted in mid-course. To death I had been no stranger, God wot, since coming to this land; but now that he was so close, now that I could view the very blade that would sever my neck and the very heap on which my head would be thrown, I could not speak the language of grace. So I stood still, in a praying guise, getting down on my knees, and in my head there was only a buzzing and a droning as of idle insects on the wind.

Seeing that it was useless, I rose again and stood slack, thinking that there was no delaying it further. Mofarigosat himself was arriving now, borne toward the executing-place on a high litter much ornamented with peacock feathers and the tails of leaopards. No doubt they had been waiting only for him, and would proceed with despatch to the grand event.

But then came another figure, on foot, much out of breath, making his way through the crowd with little sharp outcries that caused them all to move aside swiftly before him. This was the white-skinned red-eyed ndundu witch Mboma, my friend and tutor. He was flushed and wearied, as though he had run a long way, he who was so frail and feeble of body. They were already jostling me toward the chopping-block, which was a mere crude heavy log much nicked and sliced, and stained with old blood.

“Wait!” cried Mboma. “Let him be!”

The executioners paid no heed, but pushed me forward and bent me down, and the headsman grasped his weapon.

“I say wait!” cried the albino again, and added some words in the holy language, unknown to me.

Already was the great sword rising.

Mofarigosat leaned forward on his wickerwork throne. “What is this?” he said.

“Take not his life!” said Mboma.

The headsman looked toward Mofarigosat, as if to say, Let us ignore this interruption, O my lord, and continue with our morning’s work. But Mofarigosat gestured, the smallest mere movement of his left hand, and in that trifling flick of his fingers did reprieve my life.

To Mboma he said again, “What is this?”

The man-witch approached his master Mofarigosat and answered, in his high reedy voice that scarce carried five yards, “He may not be slain, for his Portugals are coming, with many warriors and guns to aid us in our wars.”

Mofarigosat said scowling, “Is this sure?”

“I have seen the truth of it in the rising smoke of my fire,” declared the ndundu. “In six days will they be here.”

There was muttering and grumbling among the chief lords, who had come to see me shortened that day, and would not have me set free. Mofarigosat and his witch carried on a brief colloquy that I could not hear, and then the chieftain gestured once again to the headsman, more broadly, signalling that I was saved.

I fell again to my knees. This time prayer did come to me, a flood of thanksgiving gratitude, and the dazzling light of the Almighty’s mercy did shine upon my soul.

The giant headsman went slinking away disappointed, and the crowd, murmuring much, dispersed. With trembling hands I collected my clothes and covered my nakedness.

To Mboma I said, “I owe you my life.”

To this he shrugged. “The message was in the images made in the smoke.”

“Aye,” said I. “But you could have misread it, or chosen to ignore it. And you did not.” Then I laughed wildly, as one does when one is called unexpectedly back from certain doom, and said, “Friend Mboma, this is as near as I will ever come to a lordship, I think. For in my land only the high lords do lose their heads by the block, and all lesser men must die by the hanging or the burning, which is far worse, being slower. And this morning I thought sure I would die a nobleman’s death. But I think I would sooner live a deckhand’s life, and go on living, than perish grandly like an earl. Eh?” And I saluted him and took me back to my cottage, on legs that were so numb and shaking that it was like walking on two wooden stilts.

9

The oracle of the man-witch’s fire had spared me that morning. But I had less faith in that oracle than did these savages, and I resolved me to escape from Mofarigosat’s town without further ado. Perhaps Pinto Dourado would indeed return for me six days hence, and yet I felt sure he would not: whereupon quite likely the headsman at last would have his way with me, Mboma or no Mboma.

So I spent that day in seclusion, thinking over the events of the morning and gradually casting aside my fright, which for some hours after my reprieve had still reverberated in my bones. It is no small thing to walk to the place of the chopping-block and stare at the edge of the blade, and the dread it inspires is not shrugged off in a moment. Moreover still I did think it might all be suddenly reversed, the blacks coming for me an hour hence, saying Mboma now claimed to be mistaken in his reading of the smoke message, and they would smite off my head. From time to time did I wriggle my neck to make certain it was still whole; and I imagined that blade descending and felt a peculiar choking in my Adam’s apple, and it was some days before I was able to put that preoccupation behind me.

When night came and the fullest depth of darkness arrived, no moon being in the sky, I did arise and leaving my cottage I made my way quietly toward the edge of the town. I had with me my musket and shot and powder that Pinto Dourado had provided me with, for the blacks had not thought to take it from me, and a leathern flask of palm-wine, but nothing else.

The town was quiet. But as I went by one group of houses a dog sprang up and nipped and yipped at my heels, which aroused a watchman, a tall black warrior who came forward as if to block my way. I dared not take the time to parley, so I commended his soul to God and put my knife into his throat, and kept going.

Only one other man did I see as I left the town. But this was Mofarigosat, who was walking the boundaries on some dark inquiry of his soul. He did not spy me. He went head downward and hands locked behind his back, deep in thought, and I prayed that he would not glance my way, for then I should have to take his life also, and I did not greatly wish to do that. With all the stealth at my command did I glide behind a tree and wait there, peeping out from moment to moment as that chieftain proceeded to pace up and down, murmuring to himself. Once I thought he was coming in my way, but then he turned, still deep in contemplation. What a noble figure he was, that rigorous old man, spending his sleepless hours in communion with his pagan gods! If God had cast his soul into a Christian body he would have been some prince for sure, or an archbishop.

Like a ghost he floated away from me, his black body becoming invisible in the night and only his white hair in view; then he was gone and I darted into the jungle.

Once more was I free.

But I was the only white man within fifty leagues, doubtless, and I had no slightest hope of finding my way alone through these wastelands and wildernesses to São Paulo de Loanda. Nor did I have much yearning to return to that place, except that there I would find the sweetness of my Matamba once again. But otherwise I had no hunger to see those Portugals: for a traitorous lot they all were, and I was done with their kind.

I intended now to go to the camp of the Jaqqas. Aye: the Jaqqas.

How far was I traveled, now, from that innocent young man who first had set to sea! That boy had held all kinds of fanciful notions of honor, and proper behavior, and rights and wrongs; and he had parted one by one from all those holdings, in his long education under the African stars. Now was he setting forth toward the most dreaded cannibal tribe of this land to give himself over freely to their service, and raising no questions of honor over it. For I did hope in God that in their diabolical marauding the Jaqqas would travel so far to the westward that we should see the sea again; and so I might escape to England by some ship, and holy grace. Only that thing mattered: quitting this accursed land, and homeward sailing. I would pillage, I would kill, I would if need be forswear myself thrice over, all for the sake of getting myself shipped out of this hellish Africa, where I had never desired to go, and where I had been detained against my will for close upon a dozen years now.

All that night I marched through the terrible darkness. I heard sounds I could not name and smelled smells of animals I could not see. Sometimes there was a loathsome snuffling sound, as of a great snout pressed close against the ground, and sometimes there was a craven sickly whining, followed by a growl and then a scream of pain from some other creature. I knew that skull-faced Death did pad along beside me on silent paws, and that he could have me at any instant did he choose. But he did not choose. I put great distance between myself and Mofarigosat before I would allow myself repose; then did I sink down on a moist mossy hummock and take some sleep, which came over me as if I had been drugged.

Two things at once awakened me. One was the coming of morning, sunlight very pale penetrating the green canopy of vines over my head; and the second was the creeping across my body of certain small round insects, bright red with black speckles, that did bite me most abundantly in every exposed place. Each bite was like the prick of a hot needle. I looked at them in amaze and saw the small creatures thrusting their sharp tubes into me, and sucking forth my substance; and with a howl I swept them away, but the tubes often remained in me most painful, and I had to pick them out with great diligence. Within moments each bite grew inflamed, and red swellings rose all over me, so that I looked like one who had taken a pox. But that was the worst that befell me from those vermin; and afterward an African told me that I might have died of it if they had stung me more copiously, for among the blacks the juice of these insects causes a dissolution of the flesh and bones, so that a man becomes a mere bag of vile liquid within his own skin some hours after being bitten. I do not know if this is so: it did not happen to me.

I breakfasted upon some glossy yellow fruits that looked to be safe, and proved sweet and tender. Then I found the River Kuvu, which was here shallow and brackish, with a few sickly-looking coccodrillos dozing on its bank, and I made my journey inland by following its course. The jungle was so deep overhead that I was hard put to see the direction of the sun, but in an opening I spied the mountains of the eastern land ahead of me, and thereafter I kept close by the river, knowing it would take me in the direction that the Jaqqas had gone.

By afternoon I met two Negroes, not of Mofarigosat’s nation, that gaped in wonder at me, for in this place there was never any white man seen before me. These two were sore affrighted and stood like statues in their tracks, but I put them at ease and asked if they had seen the Jaqqas, and they said, “Yes, they are in the town of the lord Cashil,” and showed me the way. Then they gave me some meat they were eating, which was a roasted monkey, and I gave them five beads that I found in my pocket, and we went our separate ways.

The meat did afford me strength, and I pressed onward through very close heat that made my body stream with sweat, until I came to footpaths that were well trampled, and I knew the town of Cashil must not be far beyond. Outside it I found a tree with a great hollow, where bees were flying, and boys came and drove the bees off with smoking torches, and helped themselves to the honey. And they gave me some without asking me what I was or from whence I came, but their hands were shaking, and I am sure they thought me to be a mokisso visiting out of the spirit-world. The honey was passing sweet, far finer than any of England.

Then did I enter Cashil’s town, where all the people, great and small, came to marvel at my whiteness of skin and at my hair, the like of which was a great mystery to them. Here among the Negroes of the place were some of the Imbe-Jaqqa’s lieutenants, who were abiding peacefully in Cashil, for the Jaqqas do not always destroy the lands they enter. I was right glad to see them.

This town of the lord Cashil was very great, and is so overgrown with ollicondi trees, cedars, and palms, that the streets were darkened with them. The streets of this town were paled with palm-canes, very orderly. Their houses were round like a hive, and, within, hanged with fine mats curiously wrought. In the middle of the town there was an image, which was somewhat in the shape of a man, but strange, with tusks and great staring eyes, and stood twelve feet high; and at the foot of the image there was a circle of elephanto teeth, pitched into the ground. Fastened to these teeth were great store of dead men’s skulls, which were killed in the wars, and offered to this image. I saw them pour palm oil at his feet for an offering, and pour their blood at his feet also. This image is called Quesango, and the people have great belief in him, and swear by him; and do believe when they are sick that Quesango is offended with them. In many places of the town were little mokisso images, and over them great store of elephanto teeth piled. On the southeast end of the town was a most fanciful mokisso in scarlet and gold paint that had more than three tons of elephanto teeth piled over him, that would be worth a princely ransom if taken to be carved into ivory pieces.

In this dark and cool place the Jaqqa lieutenants came to me, for they knew me as the golden-haired man from that other time by the shore. They spoke with me, using both their own language and the Kikongo tongue, so that I learned deeper into the Jaqqa sort of speech. When they asked of me why I was here, I said that I had been left by my own people and had been captive of Mofarigosat, and now was faring into the dark wilderness to find the Imbe-Jaqqa and give myself into his care. To which they replied that the Imbe-Jaqqa was in the town of Calicansamba, which lay two days’ journey further into the country.

“And will you take me to him?” I asked.

“That we will,” said the Jaqqas, and grinned their gappy grins at me, and slapped my shoulders as though I were some old comrade of theirs, that they were greatly joyed in seeing again.

But first there was feasting at Cashil and much drinking of the palm-wine: for the lord of the place, seeing me favored by the Jaqqas, was most earnest to show his favor to me, too. That is, they stand in such fear of the man-eaters that they will spoil themselves of half their goods, to make a brave show of hospitality for them, and oftimes afterward the Jaqqas will despoil them of the other half anyway.

I saw here what I had never seen before, how the palm-wine is procured. These palm-trees in which it is harbored are six or seven fathoms high, and have no leaves but in the top. There is a way the natives have of climbing the trees swift as monkeys, by wrapping a cloth about the stem and pulling on it with their hands while pushing against the wood with their bare feet, and when they get to the top of the tree they do cut a hole, and press a bottle into the place that is cut, and draw the wine into the bottle. This is a fluid of a somewhat milky look, that they set aside a few days for greater richness, and then it becomes sweet and powerful, so that it makes the head spin from the drinking of it. This wine they drink cold, and it moves one to urine very much: so that in those countries where it is favored, there is not a man that is troubled with gravel or stone in the bladder. Thus are they spared one of the most evil of torments. The wine will make them drunk, that drink too much of it; but indeed it is of a very good nutriment. After a time it turns sour, and becomes very vinegar, fit to serve for salads.

The Jaqqas love the palm-wine more than any other beverage, and drink a great muchness of it. But their way of producing it is altogether different from that of the village folk. For the Jaqqas, being a tribe of wanderers, keep no long-time plantations of the wine-palm trees. Instead do they go into a land where groves of palms abound, and cut the palm-trees down by the root. The tree must lie ten days before it will give wine. And then the Jaqqas do make a square hole in the top and heart of the tree, and take out of the hole every morning a quart, and at night a quart. So that every felled tree giveth two quarts of wine a day for the space of six and twenty days, and then it drieth up. When they settle themselves in any country, they cut down as many palms as will serve them wine for a month: and then as many more, so that in a little time they spoil the country.

I saw this done in the town of the lord Cashil. The Jaqqas went into the plantation, which was already well destroyed, and cut themselves down five of the finest trees for their future delectation. Some of the men of Cashil stood by as this was being done, and they looked sorely sad to see this, but they dared not speak out, lest they provoke the Jaqqas and bring about the general destruction of their town.

The Jaqqas stay no longer in a place than it will afford them maintenance. And then in harvest-time they arise, and settle themselves in the fruitfullest place they can find; and do reap their enemy’s corn, and take their cattle. For they will not sow, nor plant, nor bring up any cattle, other than they take by making of war.

So I remained in this town some days. Which I did not like, for it is a place close by the country of Mofarigosat, and I feared he might be sending messengers in search of me, since that I had killed one of his watchmen and escaped his custody. But I could not hurry the Jaqqas to take me to Imbe Calandola. It is plain that only a fool will hurry a Jaqqa. For even a friendly one, and the ones in the town of the lord Cashil were friendly in the extreme, will turn savage and snarling if he is offended, and he will growl and strike out with his hand or his knife. I have seen this. They are a fearsome folk, and will kill for a trifle. So I abided in the town of Cashil and showed no impatience. And sure enough, five men of the country of Mofarigosat did come to the place, and ask if any white-skinned demon with golden hair had come this way.

“Nay,” said the men of Cashil, “we saw no such,” while all the while I did remain out of sight.

“We know he is here, and we want him, for he has given offense to our master.”

“He is not here,” said the men of Cashil. But there was less firmness in their voices, and in my place of hiding I felt the sweat rolling down my skin.

The men of Mofarigosat did say, “He has slain a prince of our city, and he has broken his pledge to our master. We have put to death a false ndundu who lied so that the white man’s life would be spared. And now we must slay the white man also, so that the zumbi of our ndundu does not come to us and harm us.”

At this talk of zumbis and ndundus the men of Cashil showed great fear, and conferred among themselves, and I think were making themselves ready to sell me to Mofarigosat. But the Jaqqas of the town, hearing what was taking place, did go to the emissaries and say loudly, “Begone, fools, or we will slit off your skins and tie them around pigs, and send you back to your master in the guise of the beasts that you are.”

“We demand—” said one of the men of Mofarigosat, and then he said no more, for the Jaqqas slew him that instant, and the others turned and fled. I was summoned from my hiding place so that the Jaqqas might tell me all that had befallen. Very cool and easy did they seem about the murder they had done.

“And will not Mofarigosat make war upon us now?” I asked.

“Nay,” replied the Jaqqas, “for he fears the Imbe-Jaqqa, and does not want you that much. But we will leave this place tomorrow, and take you to the Imbe-Jaqqa.”

That night the Jaqqas boiled the man of Mofarigosat in a great metal tub that they had with them, and threw in spices and savories of many kinds, to make a soup in which morsels of flesh did float. The people of Cashil watched this festival from afar, looking most gloomy over it, for man-eating was not to their liking, and this was going on in the center of their own town. When the meat was ready the Jaqqas did carouse with great gulpings of the palm-wine, and called to me, saying, “Ho, white one, dine with us, it is tender flesh!”

I said a nay to that, claiming an illness of the stomach that would not let me eat meat just then. The which gave them no offense, and they took their bellies’ fill of their awful delicacy without me. And afterward they lay about the plaza very satisfied, sleeping that light Jaqqa sleep which is almost no sleep at all.

In the morning they brought me onward to the camp of Imbe Calandola at the town of Calicansamba.

This way passed through a grove of giant ollicondi trees, the biggest I had yet seen, that darkened the air with the spread of their leaves. This tree is one of the marvels of Angola, very tall and exceeding great, some of them as big around as twelve men can fathom, all bloated and distended of trunk, and of limb. Some of them are hollow, and from the liberal skies receive such plenty of water at the time of the rainy season, that they are hospitable entertainers of thousands in the hard thirsty months that follow. I have seen whole villages of three or four thousand souls remain at one of these trees for four and twenty hours, receiving watery provision from it, and yet not empty it. I think some one tree can hold forty tuns of water. Also do they have in them great store of honey, for this is the favored tree of the bees here, and as I have said the blacks do drive the bees off by smoke, rewarding the laborious creatures with robbery, exile, death, and stealing their produce. To get the honey the Negroes climb up with pegs of hardwood, which the softer wood of the ollicondi easily receives.

When we passed through this forest of mysterious tree-monsters, which are like unto whales that have taken root in the ground—albeit whales with gnarled arms and myriad little leaves—we entered into the town of Calicansamba.

The great Jaqqa had made his camp here for some months, and all the place was greatly despoiled by his triumphing, drinking, dancing, and banqueting. The native folk of Calicansamba did stand about like sad ghosts, helpless to resist the Jaqqas and forced to give them all that they desired: the Jaqqas being like a plague of locusts that had come this way to help themselves to cattle, corn, wine, and oil, not to mention the flesh of human beings. The town was full of them. I think there were more Jaqqas here than villagers, the difference between them being readily apparent, for the Jaqqas had their skins ornamented differently, and did practice the knocking out of front teeth, and wore scarce any clothing, but mainly just beads and shells. And also the Jaqqas did comport themselves with terrible pride, like grand swaggering masters, even the humblest of them who still wore the slave-collar of boyhood about his neck. Whereas the Calicansamba people had been utterly defeated without striking a blow, and their manhood was altogether humbled, and they went with drooping shoulders and dim eyes, the look of conquered folk.

The town of Calicansamba was very like the one of Cashil, except that nearly all its palm-wine trees were cut down, save only one grove at the eastern end of the place. It too had a great idol in the center of the town and many elephanto tusks thrust into the earth in front of it. And here also was an altar of human skulls, very grisly indeed, and making me think how close I had come to leaving my own skull for Mofarigosat’s pleasure.

But also in the great square of Calicansamba were certain things that I had not seen in Cashil, for they were things of the Jaqqas. Lined up all in a row were three gigantic metal tubs, which I knew to be their cooking-pots. To one side of these was a great vat made of woven fiber very tightly drawn, and smeared on the inner side with a sort of dark wax. It contained some several hogsheads’ full of a thick purple fluid, and when I asked what that was, the Jaqqas who were my guides did dip their hands merrily in it and anoint themselves with streaming runlets of it, and laugh, and say, “It is blood, that we save for our feasts.”

I did not ask, nor did I need to be told, what sort of blood that blood might be.

And on the other side of the three tubs was another such wickerwork basket, the contents of which were even more repelling, for it was a kind of soft pale blubbery stuff that did make my stomach heave and churn to behold it, a great store of fat that had been carved from thighs and breasts and bellies and buttocks, and I turned away, gagging, holding my gut in distress.

“It is the Imbe-Jaqqa’s own supply,” they told me, “but we have so much in this town that he shares it freely.”

Aye! Such was his generosity, this grand Calandola, that he did let others of his nation besmear himself with the fat of fallen foes that made his own skin so glossy, and they deemed it a rare privilege.

And these were my hosts. And these were the beings to whom I had fled for safety, because I had found my own Christian kind to be too traitorous toward me. Aye, in such a way do we choose our friends and allies, in this bleak and sorrowful world, as we make our path through the pitfalls and turmoil of life toward the joyous reward that lieth at the end.

10

Never had most of these Jaqqas seen a white man before, and the amazement that I caused among them was tenfold greater than I had ever previously created. They circled round and round me with their eyes wide and their mouths agape, and they pointed, and muttered, and jostled each other and said things, and came close, and rubbed my skin and my hair, and made strange soft cries deep in their throats, like the sound of no other man nor beast on this earth. So many of them came to view me upon my arrival in Calicansamba, that I thought I might be crushed in the frenzy. They snuffled and snorted and pressed in, murmuring, “Skin is white, hair is gold…. Skin is white, hair is gold…. Skin is WHITE, hair is GOLD…. O Calandola! O Sumba-Jaqqa! O Kalunga! Skin is white! Hair is gold!” And many more such outcries, and a howling like that of tormented spirits, and a dancing on the round part of their heels, with their arms thrust upward stiffly as though they were joined on wires to the sky.

This frightened me greatly. But I stood my ground, smiling at them and nodding and bowing slightly, and accepting their curiosity for all the world like the Pope of Rome accepting the homage of a tremendous multitude of Papists, or like a king greeting subjects crazed with awe. But my hand was close upon my musket, and I resolved to fire off some loud shots into the air if the crowding of them seemed to grow more perilous to me.

They were all of them oiled with loathsome greases, whether the fat of animals or of men I could not tell, and they were painted and bejewelled, and their mouths, that did gape so wide at me, were missing all of them two top teeth and the two bottom, that is such a mark of beauty among them. I felt myself at the center of a great whirlpool of strangeness, that might be sweeping me downward and downward to the far circles of Hell. It was as if in all my time in Africa I had been pulled through jungles and deserts and swamps and rivers toward this place and this time and these people, the wild man-eaters whose prince the Imbe-Jaqqa was surely of the substance and being of the Lord of Darkness. And now here I was, my weird destiny fulfilled.

As this dance proceeded there came a sudden sharp outcry from the rim of the circle, and it widened and fell apart entirely, admitting a Jaqqa of great height and poise. I recognized him after a moment to be Kinguri, the brother to Calandola. He embraced me as though I had been his brother also, and bade me be welcome at their camp. When he spoke everyone else fell silent, so that there was a great hush, against which we could make out every sound of the forest that lay close beside the town.

Kinguri said, “What is your purpose, white one?”

“To live among you.”

“Ah, and will you be a Jaqqa?”

“I will no longer be a Portugal,” said I. “For they have given me only pain, and loaded many treasons upon me, and now I make them my enemy.”

“Then our enemy is your enemy also, which makes us kin,” Kinguri said. “For we do purpose to bring deep grief upon the Portugals your enemy, and we will place you beside ourselves when we undertake that thing. How are you called?”

“Andrew Battell is my name.”

“Andubatil,” said Kinguri.

I thought to correct him. But then I smiled, and told myself nay, for that I was beginning a new chapter of my life in this sultry forest, or indeed a new life altogether, and I could readily take on a new name here in the same bargain.

“Aye,” I did answer most ringingly. “Andubatil am I!”

“Come to the Imbe-Jaqqa,” he said.

Thereupon was I conveyed to the dwelling-place of the Jaqqas in a far part of the town. For they had built a habitation of their own alongside the settled place of Calicansamba, opening into it, so that they could go freely from the Jaqqa town to the village-folks’ town. It is the custom of the Jaqqas, wheresoever they pitch their camp, although they stay but one night in a place, to build a strong fort around their resting-place, with such wood or trees as the place yieldeth. So when they arrive at a place, the one part of them cuts down trees and boughs, and the other part carries them, and builds a round circle with twelve gates. Each of these gates is in the charge of one of the captains of the Jaqqas, being twelve in number, and all of them pledged forever to loyalty to their prince and general Imbe Calandola. In the middle of the fort they place Calandola’s house, which is severely entrenched about, and fortified by a triple hedge of thorns.

So was it done here. I think it would have been a valiant army indeed that could have thrust itself to the inner sanctuary of the Imbe-Jaqqa.

At the lone entrance to Calandola’s place there were warriors in double rows, well armed and very frightful of size and strength. Though these were eager to look upon me and touch me, they held their positions as I went past them. To the innermost place I came, where great sharpened stakes were thrust into the ground, that had points at both ends, and embedded in the tops of each stake were lopped-off arms and legs, withering and shriveling and parching in the heat, with whitened bones showing upon their nether sides. And each of these was of an enemy, and displayed here like a banner of triumph. And beyond this stark palisado was Imbe Calandola, in the midst of all his household people, his lieutenants and his man-witches and his wives, to the number of twenty or thirty, for I do think all those women were his wives.

Even though this was the second time I had laid eyes on him, I felt the same shivering surprise and astound that I had felt the first, so overwhelming was his presence.

He was dressed as before, in a strip of palm-cloth about the middle, though this was bright yellow now, and not scarlet; and he had the shells knotted in his hair and the copper pieces thrust through his ears and nose and the beads about his waist, and the painted ornaments on his shining skin. He sat in a kind of saddle half as high as a man, that rose on three legs of some very fine jet-black wood that looked almost like stone. In his hand he held a cup brimming with palm-wine, the which cup had been fashioned most artfully from the top part of a human skull.

When I entered, the Imbe-Jaqqa nodded very calmly to me and plunged his face into the bowl, taking so deep a draught of the wine that I thought he would drain it all at a gulp. When he lifted his head he was dripping with it, and it ran down his cheeks and jowls, like the slaver that runneth down the face of a wolf when it has bitten deep.

Kinguri said, “This is Andubatil.”

“Andubatil, welcome.” The voice of Calandola was like the growling of a bear. “Drink, Andubatil!”

To me he handed the cup, which still held some half its wine. I took it as he had, with the weight of it against both my hands and the smoothness of bone to feel, and I put my lips to it. The beverage was even more sweet than other palm-wine I had tasted, as if honey had been put into it. But it was not honey, as I understood after a moment. For the wine had a red tinge of hue, and I realized what substance it was that had been mixed in it to give that color. And I did shiver, though I strived hard to hide it. Aye! The muzzle of a wolf, lifted bloodied to bay the moon!

Kinguri said, “Does the wine please you?”

“That it does.”

“It is the royal wine, that only the Imbe-Jaqqa may drink. You have a great honor upon you.”

“I am grateful,” said I to Kinguri, who repeated my words to Calandola. At that time I knew just a scattering of Jaqqa words and Calandola did not deign to speak Kikongo, nor did he comprehend Portuguese.

Calandola smiled his frightful smile, all coccodrillo-teeth of a great sharpness and evil length, except where the four were missing and made holes black as jet. He stared me as he had stared me before, deep as a blade into my soul.

“Drink, Andubatil,” said he again.

I did not hesitate.

Let them mix blood with my wine, I would drink all the same, and drink me deep, and feel flattered by the great honor. Ah, I thought, I have done the Papists one better! For they drink wine and pretend it is blood, while I drink blood encumbered in my wine and pretend it is mere wine! Yet something in my gut did recoil at it, or perhaps it was in my mind and not my gut, and on the second draught I felt myself on the verge of retching, which would have been a deadly insult. God be thanked, I did find means to control that movement, and put the nausea wholly away from me, and smiled, and drank again, lightly but with great show of willingness and pleasure, and handed the wine-skull back to Calandola.

He clapped one great hand against the heavy muscle of his arm, which was his way of showing approval.

Then he said, “What is your nation, Andubatil?”

“English, O Lord Imbe-Jaqqa.”

“Angleez?”

“Aye, Imbe-Jaqqa.”

Kinguri said, “What nation is that?”

“Of an island,” I replied, “far away in the western sea.” I waited to see if the Imbe-Jaqqa’s brother had understood that, which seemed to be the case, and I went on, “Where the people are as fair-haired as I am, and do stand tall and square, and go to sea and travel far, with the finest of courage. And where our ruler is a great prince who is also a woman, and a virgin, and the finest master that Heaven ever did send our people.”

It was a long speech and in my joy at talking of England I let it all come rolling out at once, and I thought for sure Kinguri had become lost in it. But he had not, Kinguri being a man of extraordinary sharpness of sense. He repeated all that I had said to Imbe Calandola, who leaned forward, listening with great intentness, and twice taking great noisy draughts of his wine. I could follow most of Kinguri’s words, and I saw that when he arrived at the part about our prince being a woman, the Imbe-Jaqqa did sit up straight with his eyes bright and wide, and when Kinguri said that she was a virgin, Calandola did slap his leg with amaze, and made a loud snorting sound like that of a river-hippopotamus.

There followed a lengthy colloquy between Calandola and his brother, scarce a word of which I could comprehend, so fast did the Imbe-Jaqqa tumble forth his words. But he did also a pantomiming with his hands, thrusting one finger back and forth between two of the other hand in the unmistakable manner of a male member being thrust into a woman’s hole, and I knew they must be discussing the virginity of Her Majesty.

Then Kinguri turned to me and said, “My brother asks, is this Queen of yours a woman?”

“Aye, that is what all queens are.”

“And she rules by proper right in your land?”

“That she does, for her father was Great Harry our king, the eighth of that name. And she is Queen and her sister was Queen before her, and also her brother, who did die a young man.”

“And your Queen-woman, she has never known what it is to lie with a man?”

I smiled. “That is the report that is widely given out, and we call her the Virgin Queen, and it would be a blasphemy to argue against its truth. Besides, I think it is so.”

Kinguri, shaking his head, did say, “And the people of your land easily accept her, and she has always reigned in peace with her subjects?”

“Aye.”

“And if a man came to her, and said, Queen, I would fain lie with you, open yourself to me, what then?”

“Why, she would strike his insolent head from him, if he spoke with her like that!” I then added, “There are those who assert that in her youth the Lord High Admiral Seymour did trifle lewdly with her, and that later she was had by the Earl of Leicester, and still later by Sir Walter Ralegh also. But I do believe these are but scandals and slanders, and that she is a true maiden to this day, and I would wager my head on it.”

“A virgin queen,” said Kinguri in wonderment, and Imbe Calandola did say the same words, wondering also. But neither of them would give me the lie, for I suppose they thought that a land where men had white skins and long golden hair could well also have women for its princes, and virgin ones at that.

Calandola said, “I will send you to England, Andubatil, and you will tell your Queen to come here to me. Will you do that? You tell her, Imbe Calandola offers her this.”

And he did move his yellow garment aside, to reveal a black yard that was as thick as the trunk of an elephanto, though not quite so lengthy, and two great heavy ballocks like dark round apples. At the sight of this formidable virile equipment several of his wives did clap their hands and laugh in delight or approval, and Calandola seized those women amiably by the flesh of their hinder parts, and hugged them against himself, and looked vastly amused by this jape.

I said, when his roaring laughter had subsided some, “By all that is holy, Lord Jaqqa, you have but to send me to England, and I will deliver her your message, that I vow!”

“And will she come?” asked Calandola, when that Kinguri had explained the meaning of my words to him.

“That I cannot say, for she is a prince, and I cannot command her, nor can any man. But I will ask her: that I do pledge.”

“Good. Good. How far does England be from here?”

“Many days’ journey, Lord Jaqqa.”

“Farther than the land of Kongo?”

“Ten times as far,” I said. “Twenty times, perhaps.”

Calandola said to several of his man-witches, “We will go to England some day, and drink of its wines. Eh? Eh? And spurt our fiery seed into the belly of its Queen.” And he did laugh and slap his arm, and called for more wine, his cup being empty. One of his wives supplied him, and he took his fill, putting back his head and letting the bloody sweet stuff roll down his chin. His last draught he did hold in his mouth for a time, and then spew it forth upon the earth around him in a wide spitting spray. Which seemed merely vile, but was, I learned later, a holy deed, a consecration of the soil by the Jaqqa way.

When he was done with that he signalled to me in a sweeping fashion, waving his hand back and forth, but I did not catch his meaning.

Kinguri said, “Take your clothes off from your body.”

“Shall I?”

“The Imbe-Jaqqa wonders if you be white all over.”

“Aye, that I am,” I said, making no move to disrobe.

“He would see it,” said Kinguri.

“And would he?”

“Come, no more delay. He would see it!”

There was no refusing, I saw, and so I removed my clothes, which were half in tatters anyway, and stood naked before this crowd of Jaqqa warriors and witches and princes and the Imbe-Jaqqa and his many wives. Well, and my body is a good and a healthy one, and I have no shame of it; and to be naked here was less distressing than the other time in Mofarigosat’s town, where I was expecting the headsman’s mortal blow and did not welcome being shamed besides. All the same, it is no trifle to be revealed in front of strangers, even savages, and it was with discomfort that I exposed my private places. It was all the worse for me that Calandola had so lately laid bare his giant member and swollen ballocks: for compared by those I would seem most insufficiently male, though no woman has ever found me so.

Calandola rose and came to me and did put his finger to my flesh here and there, pressing into it at belly and thigh to watch the way the color of it changed at his pressure. That seemed a marvel to him, and he did press at his own flesh in the same places to observe it. Then he tugged at the hair on my chest, he being perfectly smooth and sleek there, and he turned me about, I suppose to see if I were white on the other side, too, and he turned me back again. He had me open my mouth, where I had all the teeth God meant me to own, and he did touch those four front teeth that Jaqqas do knock from their heads. When he gripped my teeth I feared he meant to pull those teeth from me right there, with a twist of his mighty fingers, and the thought gave me a sickly tremor from my gut to my ballocks. But I showed no outer sign of my apprehensions. And great was my relief when at last he took his hands from my mouth.

Then the Imbe-Jaqqa moved his close inspection of me downward a distance, and did take my yard in his hand, as coolly as though he were lifting a cup or a piece of fruit, and remarked on it to his brother. I knew not what he said. But being so idly handled of the membrum virile and so intimately discussed brought a blaze of hot color to my face: and that bright reddening so amazed Calandola that he let go my member and touched my cheek, to see, I suppose, how I had managed that trick of changing colors.

Kinguri said, “The Imbe-Jaqqa wonders if all the men of England have yards like yours, Andubatil.”

A little angrily I replied, “I think that they do, though in sooth I do not spend much time examining them. I venture that some are larger and some are smaller, but mine is quite the usual kind.”

“We do not mean the size,” said Kinguri, “but the shape.”

I did not at first comprehend the sense of his words. So he gestured, and the men of the court did push aside their loin-cloths and blithely bare their members, and lo! every man of them was circumcised.

“Aye,” I said. “I understand now. We are not like you in that way, nor are any white men, except only the Jews. We have a few Jews living in our land, though they are supposed to be banned. But the rest of us do not cut our foreskins off.”

“Why is that?” asked Calandola, when he had heard my answer.

“Why,” I said, “it is not our way to do so. Under the Christian law that we obey, we leave that part untouched.”

“But then you are not men!” said Calandola.

“It does not seem that way to us.”

“A man must have that part removed. For it is a female part, and all that is female in him must be cut away, when he enters into a man’s estate.”

I did not propose to dispute this point with the Imbe-Jaqqa, it being a new philosophy to me, and difficult.

“The Bakongo people of the coast,” I said, “leave themselves uncircumcised, now that they are Christian.”

“And their men are mere women,” said Calandola. “Is it not obvious?” Deeply did he frown. “Your prince is a woman who will not admit a man to lie between her legs, and your men will not remove the female piece from their members. So there can be no children born among you.”

“I assure you that that is not the case.”

“But if your Queen—” He broke off, mystified.

“She is the only chaste woman of our realm,” I said, which was not precisely the proper meaning I meant, but it sufficed. “And as for the men, we are quite able to perform our deeds of manhood as we are, which is as we came into the world, which is as God our Maker did intend.”

I thought the Imbe-Jaqqa was angered at that. Perhaps he took God to be his direct rival, and cared not to hear His name. But his anger, if such it was, quickly passed, and he pointed again at my uncircumcised yard and said, “In this land you should be as we are. We will make you now as we are.”

Which struck me deep with a fear that softened my bones. For I mistook the import of his words, being still mostly unfamiliar with the subtleties of the Jaqqa tongue, and thought that he was commanding me to undergo a circumcision on the spot. Whereas he was merely making a friendly offer, or perhaps it was a jest: I am not sure. He did beckon to one of his witches, who drew from a sheath a lengthy knife of commendable sharpness. I shrank back from him and put my hands over my private parts, which had shriveled to the size of a child’s in my terror. Covering myself in that way brought a hearty laugh from the women.

I said miserably, “By your leave, great Lord Jaqqa—”

“Come, Andubatil, we will not cut it all off! Only that one part!” he said, laughing.

“I may not, O Imbe-Jaqqa.”

“And why is that?”

“It is forbidden among my nation to undergo such a surgery, for that would make me a Jew, which was a slayer of our God.”

“Your god is dead?” asked Kinguri quickly, with show of deep interest and surprise.

“Aye, He was killed, but then He rose again—”

“How say you?”

Glad of the diversion of the talk away from the condition of my foreskin, I responded, half babbling my words, “When He came down to earth in human guise to save us, He was taken by enemies and nailed upon a cross, and a spear thrust deep into His side also, and so He perished, who was the Son of God and the Redeemer, but then as was prophesied He arose from the dead—”

“The son of god? But you said it was the god that died!”

“The Son is equal unto God,” I answered, “for He is one Person of the Holy Trinity, which be God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” Kinguri’s eyes showed me his mystification, and upon my soul I could not have given him much true enlightenment of these matters had he pressed me concerning them. But I hurried on, saying, “On the third day afterward of His crucifixion He did arise from the dead, and go to sit on the right hand of the Father—”

“And who was his mother?” Kinguri demanded.

“He was born of a virgin, Mary by name—”

“The Queen of your land, then, is the mother of your god?”

“A different virgin,” said I, “a long time ago, and not in the same country from which I come.”

“But a virgin also, was she? What color was her skin?”

“Why, like mine.”

“No darker?”

“We do not hold it to be the case that she was dark.”

“And the god, he is white also?”

“We do not think of Him as having a color, or a size, or any of the attributes of mortal flesh.”

“But he can die? Is that not an attribute of mortal flesh?”

“It was His son that died,” said I, beginning to think it might have been easier to submit to circumcision than to have to explain these complex and cloudy matters to the cannibal prince.

“Ah,” said Kinguri. “And why did he let himself be killed, if he was a god and the son of a god?”

“To redeem us from the sin that came upon us in the original paradise, when our first father and our first mother did wantonly eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and thereby brought wickedness and death into the world, that had been created free of it.”

Looking most pensive and perplexed, Kinguri held up a hand to shut off my flow of doctrine. “Let me understand these things. Your god, who was his own son by a virgin mother, did come to the world to save you from death, which had come upon you when—”

At that Calandola did break roughly in, demanding, “What are all these words?”

Kinguri turned to him, and again the two engaged in lengthy talk, this time on the mysteries of the Christian faith as I had begun to expound them. How much sense they could make of it all, I know not; but the essence of the thing is that they grew so interested in these fine holy niceties that the question of my circumcision slipped away from the Imbe-Jaqqa’s mind for a time, and the man-witch did put away his blade, and when Calandola returned his attention to me he had lost interest in my foreskin. Which is just as well for me, I having little need of that part of my body but yet no wish at all to see it severed from me by a pagan savage, and I being somewhat past the age when any such surgery is agreeable.

The Imbe-Jaqqa now proceeded to question me on how I had come to this part of the country, he having last seen me on the coast with the Portugals. I explained how I had been pawned to Mofarigosat and falsely abandoned there by Pinto Dourado, and told of my narrow escape from the block, and of my flight into the forest. This interested Calandola greatly.

During this conversing I grew much wearied of standing with my privities exposed, so I begged permission to put on my clothes once again; but Calandola, saying, “Those are no fit garments,” ordered Jaqqa raiment to be brought for me. Several women came forth, and drew from a wooden chest a handsome piece of green palm-cloth that they wrapped about my loins, and then Kinguri took from his own waist a string of bright beads, and one of the witches gave me a collar of shells polished very smooth. I felt at first in this stuff that I was costumed for the masquerado, playing the part of a wild jungle-man, but it was with amazing ease that within the hour I came to feel comfort in such garb, as though I had worn it all my life. My worn and frayed old clothes they took from me and I never saw those things again.

“A feast!” Calandola now did cry. “Make ready a feast, for the English Andubatil!”

These words, which I understood full clear, did strike me with horror deeper than any other. For they brought me face to face with something I had attempted not to consider, since first I had resolved to give myself over to these man-eaters, and that was their choice of favored meat. Oft do we put out of our minds that which we have no stomach to contemplate; and in this case was it most literally the truth that I had no stomach for it. But the moment was coming when needs I must deal with it. I had taken refuge among the Jaqqas; they had clothed me as one of their own; they were mounting a grand feast in my honor.

Could I then refuse their hospitality?

Politely had I declined circumcision, by the claim that it was a matter of religious belief not to give myself over to it. Well, and I had kept my foreskin, though at the time I still was not sure I would be excused from the surgery altogether. But how, at a feast, could I turn away the meat they would proffer me? More religious qualms? Would they accept that answer, or would Calandola’s lively spirit, that had been so amused by my whiteness of skin and the virginity of my Queen, suddenly turn against me, so that in wrath he condemned me to the stew-pot? Perilous indeed it was to throw myself upon the mercies of these cannibals: for they were devils, in good sooth, and I was minded of that old saw, that he who sups with the Devil must have a long spoon.

“A feast!” they all cried. “A feast!”

Whereupon the Jaqqas rushed as though caught by a whirlwind out of the house of the Imbe-Jaqqa, though each, as he took his leave, did spin about and make a sign of respect to their terrible master. Calandola and Kinguri and the wives and witches were the last to leave, and they took me with them. Across all the town of the Jaqqas did we walk, and into the town of Calicansamba, and to the open square where the three gigantic metal tubs were seated. Now was the feast prepared before our eyes, to the accompaniment of much beating on drums, and hellish playing of trumpets and fifes, and awful screeching on other instruments the like of which I had not seen before, that were something like the viols of Europe, but with only a single string.

Fires were lit, and the kettle-water was heated. And into the kettles went these things:

The flesh of a cow, that was butchered before us with a single stroke of a sword against its neck, and then fast work done with a flaying knife.

The flesh of a goat, slain the same way.

The flesh of a yellow dog, that howled most piteously until the knife took its throat.

A cock. A pigeon.

And into each pot, also, the body of a prisoner that they summoned out from a pen and slew before my eyes. These were three heavy-muscled warriors of some interior tribe, that spoke out curses in a language I did not know, and raged, and pounded his fists together. As much avail them to rail at the Angel of Death! Each of these three was killed with a wound that preserved the blood within his body, and fell away from life with a long sighing gurgle of despair, and then the blood was carefully drained off by artisans whose science this was, and shunted into the storage vessel where that fluid was kept. Jaqqa carvers next did work upon these new corpses to make them ready for the cooking, and when they were well carved to fit the vessels, in they went, alongside the other meats.

To the bubbling cook-pots also were added fruits and vegetables of the region, heaps and mounds of them, the bean called nkasa and the hot pepper and the onions, and cucurbits, and I know not what else: for I must tell you that my brain was so numbed by seeing those protesting men slain and chopped and put to boil that I failed to observe some of the latter details of the cooking.

And all the while did the drums resound, the trumpets shriek.

And what did I think, what did I feel?

Why, I tell you on my oath, I felt nothing. Nothing did I feel. For there comes a time, I tell you, when the mind is so overladen by strangeness and shock that it merely sees without reflecting and that was what I did now, standing beside the lord of the cannibals and his brothers and the priests of the tribe. And I said nothing, I thought nothing, I only watched. This was what the voyage of my life had brought me to, that I had drifted as though by sea-wrack to this place at this time, among these harsh folk, and they were readying their evening meal. And God in His wisdom had caused me to be here, wherefore I was not to ask questions of Him.

I did pray, though, that when it came to the serving out of the meat, they would give me to partake of the cow, or of the goat, or even of the dog, and of no other kind of flesh.

Now the palm-wine did flow freely, the Imbe-Jaqqa drinking in his gluttonous way from his special skull-cup, and having his wine mixed with blood the half to the half, and all the others of us taking our fill from a seemingly limitless supply that came in vessels of wood. My head did sway and my face came to be flushed and moist. There was dancing, most lewd and lascivious in its nature, by the younger men and some of the women, and the drums grew even louder, so that they pounded against the temples of my skull like hammers.

Calandola now rose and stepped from his garment. Several of his wives reached into the vat where the human fat was stored, and gathered the same and rubbed it on his naked body to renew his gloss, covering every inch of him, his belly and his thighs and his huge privities and all else. After which, new ornaments were drawn upon him with colored stones, and he clothed himself once more in his beads and shells and fine waist-cloth. Some of the wives did also swab themselves with the glistening fat, but no others. There was loud singing, and forty or fifty women did come and stand about the Imbe-Jaqqa, holding in each hand the tail of that wild horse called the zevvera, which they switched back and forth. The handles of these switches, so it was said, contain a potent medicine, that protected the Imbe-Jaqqa from all harm.

And after a long while of these barbarous festivities, the cry went up that the meat was cooked, and the eating could thereupon commence.

Kinguri said to me, “It is first-feast for you, and so we make great holiday tonight, Andubatil!”

“I am grateful for this high honor.”

“It is the law that the Imbe-Jaqqa must eat before all others. But you are to be second.”

For this, too, I did give most courteous thanks.

Then did a man-witch of the royal court, covered from head to toe with chalked markings that made him look himself like a capering zevvera, go to the centermost of the three cauldrons, and take from it with his bare hands out of the boiling water a joint of meat, and hold it high, and show it to the Jaqqas. Who set up at once the most hideous howling and wailing, as is their way of showing approval, though it sounds like the shrieks of Pandemonium itself.

And there was no mistaking this haunch, that it was neither cow nor goat nor dog, and I knew whereof that meat had come.

The witch did carry the steaming meat forth to Calandola, and held it out to the Imbe-Jaqqa to be inspected. Calandola made a sound of assent, and took a deep slavering draught of his bloodied palm-wine, and seized the haunch after that with both his hands, and put his jaws to it and ripped away a great piece.

“Ayayya! Ayayya! Ayayya!” cried the Jaqqas, capering ever more wildly.

And then did the Imbe-Jaqqa turn to me, with the great slab of meat in his hands.

O! The world did spin about me, so that I was the very center and vortex of it, and thought I would be whirled apart! O! And there was a storm in my brain, and a throbbing of my soul, and I felt my breast would burst!

O! and I prayed that the earth might open and swallow me, that I should not have to partake of this that was offered me!

Yet was I not engulfed, nor did I fall down faint, nor was there any hiding place. And I grew calm and told myself, as I had told myself often enough before, that all this was meant for some high purpose beyond my understanding.

“Take and eat,” said Calandola.

“Lord,” I said, saying it aloud and in English, “I am Andrew Battell Thy servant, and I have fallen into a strange fate, which no doubt Thou had good reason for sending upon me. I will do Thy bidding in all things and I look to Thee to preserve me and to keep my body from peril and my soul from corruption. Amen.” This was mine own prayer, that I had invented myself long ago among the Portugals of São Paulo de Loanda. That prayer had stood me in such good stead thus far, and in uttering it now I felt a great ease of the soul. I took the meat from Calandola, who smiled upon me as benignly as though this were my baptism.

I stared at the thing I held in my hand, that warm and most tender piece of meat, as though never had I seen meat before, of any sort whatsoever.

I will eat of it, I told myself. And if I gag and retch and puke it forth, and give offense to the Imbe-Jaqqa, why, let him slay me and cast me next into the pot, and it will not matter to me, it will not matter to me, it will not matter.

I put my teeth to the forbidden flesh and took a hesitating bite, and closed mine eyes a moment, and swallowed it down.

I did not gag, I did not retch. That was the greatest amazement I have ever known. The meat was succulent and well seasoned, and had a flavor of it not unlike a fine degree of pork, from a pig well nourished. I felt it pass my tongue and make the juices of my mouth flow forth, and I swallowed it down, and all of this was strangely easy for me. It is only meat, I thought. And meat of a passing good taste, which the Lord hath created and put upon the earth.

“Andubatil!” cried Imbe Calandola in loud delight and approval. “Eat, Andubatil!”

I had accepted of their hospitality, and now I knew I was free to hand back the haunch, and ask for some other meat more closely kin to my usual choice. And yet, and yet, and yet: I had not eaten meat of any kind but for those pitiful few scraps of monkey, and so easy was the first bite, and so surprising to my palate, that I thought to myself, If I am to go to Hell for this, the one mouthful will have damned me, so there is no reason not to have another.

God grant me forgiveness, said I within, and took for myself a second serving of the meat.

“Andubatil!” cried Calandola again. “Andubatil Jaqqa!”

And the cry went up on all sides, and became general, as they beheld me eating of their feast, that no other stranger had ever shared with them, and that made me now one of their number: “Andubatil Jaqqa! Andubatil Jaqqa!”