Part 13

Northward of the railway was Mount Kenia, a lofty snow-clad volcano; and round his foothills covering a tract the size of Yorkshire or of Massachusetts lived the Kikuyu, a negro people numbering half a million, who always made a point of besieging British camps, treating our caravans to volleys of poisoned darts, and murdering every visitor who came within their borders. Boyes went into that country to buy food to supply to the railway workers (1898).

He went with an old Martini-Henry rifle, and seven carriers, over a twelve thousand foot pass of the hills, and down through bamboo forest into a populous country, where at sight of him the war cry went from hill to hill, and five hundred warriors assembled for their first look at a white man. Through his interpreter he explained that he came to trade for food. Presently he showed what his old rifle could do, and when the bullet bored a hole through a tree he told them that it had gone through the mountain beyond and out at the other side. A man with such a gun was worthy of respect, especially when his drugs worked miracles among the sick. Next day the neighbors attacked this tribe which had received a white man instead of killing him, but Boyes with his rifle turned defeat to victory, and with iodoform treated the wounded. The stuff smelt so strong that there could be no doubt of its magic.

The white man made a friend of the Chief Karuri, and through the adventures which followed they were loyal allies. Little by little he taught the tribesmen to hold themselves in check, to act together. He began to drill them in military formation, a front rank of spearmen with shields touching, a rear rank of bowmen with poisoned arrows. So when they were next attacked they captured the enemy’s chief, and here again the white man’s magic was very powerful--“Don’t waste him,” said Boyes. The captive leader was put to ransom, released, and made an ally, a goat being clubbed to death in token that the tribes were friends. Then a night raid obtained thirty rifles and plenty of ammunition, and a squad of picked men with modern arms soon formed the nucleus of the white man’s growing army. When the Masai came up against him Boyes caught them in ambush, cut their line of retreat, killed fifty, took hundreds of prisoners and proved that raiding his district was an error. He was a great man now, and crowds would assemble when he refreshed himself with a dose of fruit salts that looked like boiling water. His district was at peace, and soon made prosperous with a carrier trade supplying food to the white men.

Many attempts were made by the witch doctors against his life, but he seemed to thrive on all the native poisons. It was part of his clever policy to take his people by rail drawn by a railway engine, which they supposed to be alive, in a fever, and most frightfully thirsty. He took them down to the sea at Mombasa, even on board a ship, and on his return from all these wonders he rode a mule into the Kikuyu country--“Some sort of lion,” the natives thought. It impressed the whole nation when they heard of the white man riding a lion. He had a kettle too, with a cup and saucer to brew tea for the chiefs, and a Union Jack at the head of his marching column, and his riflemen in khaki uniform. All that was good stage management, but Boyes had other tricks beyond mere bluff. A native chief defied him and had five hundred warriors in line of battle; but Boyes, with ten followers only, marched up, clubbed him over the head, and ordered the warriors to lay down their arms on pain of massacre. The five hundred supposed themselves to be ambushed, and obeyed. It was really a great joke.

So far the adventurer had met only with little chiefs, but now at the head of a fairly strong caravan he set forth on a tour of the whole country, sending presents to the great Chiefs Karkerrie and Wagomba, and word that he wanted to trade for ivory. Karkerrie came to call and was much excited over a little clock that played tunes to order, especially when a few drops of rain seemed to follow the music. “Does it make rain?” asked Karkerrie.

“Certainly, it makes rain all right,” answered Boyes.

But it so happened that rain was very badly needed, and when Boyes failed to produce a proper downpour the folk got tired of hearing his excuses. They blamed him for the drought, refused to trade and conspired with one of his men to murder him. Boyes’ camp became a fort, surrounded by several thousands of hostile savages. One pitch-dark evening the war cry of the tribe ran from village to village and there was wailing among the women and children. The hyenas, knowing the signs of a coming feast, howled, and all through the neighborhood of the camp the warriors were shouting, “Kill the white man!”

As hour by hour went by the sounds and the silences got on the white man’s nerves. It was always very difficult to keep Kikuyu sentries awake, and as he kept on his rounds, waiting the inevitable storming of his camp at dawn, Boyes felt the suspense become intolerable. At last, hearing from one of his spies that Karkerrie was close at hand disposing his men for the assault, Boyes stole out with a couple of men, and by a miracle of luck kidnaped the hostile chief, whom he brought back into the fort a prisoner. Great was the amazement of the natives when at the gray of dawn, the very moment fixed for their attack, they heard Karkerrie shouting from the midst of the fort orders to retreat, and to disperse. A revolver screwed into his ear hole had converted the Chief Karkerrie. Within a few days more came the copious rains brought by the white chief’s clock, and he became more popular than ever.

Boyes made his next journey to visit Wakamba, biggest of all the chiefs, whose seat was on the foothills of the great snow mountain. This chief was quite friendly, and delightfully frank, describing the foolishness of Arabs, Swahili and that class of travelers who neglected to take proper precautions and deserved their fate. He was making quite a nice collection of their rifles. With his camp constantly surrounded and infested by thousands of savages, Boyes complained to Wakamba about the cold weather, said he would like to put up a warm house, and got plenty of help in building a fort. The chief thought this two-storied tower with its outlying breastworks was quite a good idea. “What a good thing,” said he, “to keep a rush of savages out.”

After long negotiations, Boyes managed to bring the whole of the leading chiefs of the nation together in friendly conference. The fact that they all hated one another like poison may explain some slight delay, for the white man’s purpose was nothing less than a solemn treaty of blood-brotherhood with them all.

The ceremony began with the cutting into small pieces of a sheep’s heart and liver, these being toasted upon a skewer, making a mutton Kabob. Olomondo, chief of the Wanderobo, a nation of hunters, then took a sharp arrow with which he cut into the flesh of each Blood-Brother just above the heart. The Kabob was then passed round, and each chief, taking a piece of meat, rubbed it in his own blood and gave it to his neighbor to be eaten. When Boyes had eaten blood of all the chiefs, and all had eaten his, the peace was sealed which made him in practise king of the Kikuyu. He was able at last to take a holiday, and spent some months out hunting among the Wanderobo.

While the Kikuyu nation as a whole fed out of the white chief’s hand, he still had the witch doctors for his enemies, and one very powerful sorcerer caused the Chinga tribes to murder three Goa Portuguese. These Eurasian traders, wearing European dress, were mistaken for white men, and their death showed the natives that it would be quite possible to kill Boyes, who was now returning toward civilization with an immense load of ivory. Boyes came along in a hurry, riding ahead of his slow caravan with only four attendants and these he presently distanced, galloping along a path between two hedges among the fields of a friendly tribe--straight into a deadly native ambush. Then the mule shied out of the path, bolted across the fields and saved his life. Of the four attendants behind, two were speared. Moreover the whole country was wild with excitement, and five thousand fighting men were marching against Boyes. He camped, fenced his position and stood to arms all night, short of ammunition, put to the last, the greatest of many tests. Once more his nerves were overstrung, the delay terrified him, the silence appalled him waiting for dawn, and death. And as usual he treated the natives to a new kind of surprise, taking his tiny force against the enemy’s camp: “They had not thought it necessary to put any sentries out.”

“Here,” says Boyes, “we found the warriors still drinking and feasting, sitting round their fires, so engrossed in their plans for my downfall that they entirely failed to notice our approach; so, stealthily creeping up till we were close behind them, we prepared to complete our surprise.... Not a sound had betrayed our advance, and they were still quite ignorant of our presence almost in the midst of them. The echoing crack of my rifle, which was to be the signal for the general attack, was immediately drowned in the roar of the other guns as my men poured in a volley that could not fail to be effective at that short range, while accompanying the leaden missiles was a cloud of arrows sent by that part of my force which was not armed with rifles. The effect of this unexpected onslaught was electrical, the savages starting up with yells of terror in a state of utter panic. Being taken so completely by surprise, they could not at first realize what had happened, and the place was for a few minutes a pandemonium of howling niggers, who rushed about in the faint light of the camp-fires, jostling each other and stumbling over the bodies of those who had fallen at the first volley, but quite unable to see who had attacked them; while, before they had recovered from the first shock of surprise, my men had reloaded, and again a shower of bullets and arrows carried death into the seething, disorganized mass. This volley completed the rout, and without waiting a moment longer the whole crowd rushed pell-mell into the bush, not a savage who could get away, remaining in the clearing, and the victory was complete.”

It had taken Boyes a year to fight his way to that kingdom which had no throne, and for another eighteen months of a thankless reign he dealt with famine, smallpox and other worries until one day there came two Englishmen, official tenderfeet, into that big wild land which Boyes had tamed. They came to take possession, but instead of bringing Boyes an appointment as commissioner for King Edward they made him prisoner in presence of his retinue of a thousand followers, and sent him to escort himself down-country charged with “dacoity,” murder, flying the Union Jack, cheeking officials, and being a commercial bounder. At Mombasa there was a comedy of imprisonment, a farce of trial, an apology from the judge, but never a word of thanks to the boyish adventurer who had tamed half a million savages until they were prepared to enter the British Peace.

XXVII

A. D. 1898

JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN

From the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart S. Grogan in the year 1900:--

“I must say I envy you, for you have done that which has been for centuries the ambition of every explorer, namely, to walk through Africa from South to North. The amusement of the whole thing is that a youth from Cambridge during his vacation should have succeeded in doing that which the ponderous explorers of the world have failed to accomplish. There is a distinct humor in the whole thing. It makes me the more certain that we shall complete the telegraph and railway, for surely I am not going to be beaten by the legs of a Cambridge undergraduate.”

It took death himself to beat Rhodes. Two years after that letter was written news went out through the army in South Africa that he was dead. We were stunned; we felt too sick to fight. For a moment the guns were hushed, and silence fell on the veldt after years of war. That silence was the herald of lasting peace for British Africa, united by stronger bonds than rail or telegraph.

* * * * *

Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge, but also of the bigger schools called War and Adventure, for he had traveled in the South Seas, climbed in the Alps, and fought in the Matabele campaigns, before he made his holiday walking tour from the Cape to Cairo. He was not the usual penniless adventurer, but, reckoned by frontier standards, a man of means, with the good manners that ease the way for any traveler. From the Cape to the Zambesi he had no need to tread old trails again, and far into the heart of Africa there were already colonies with steamers to speed the journey up to Lake Tanganyika, where his troubles really began. Through two-thirds of the journey Grogan had a partner, Mr. A. H. Sharp, but they were seldom in company, for one would explore ahead while the other handled their caravan of one hundred fifty negro carriers, or one or both went hunting, or lay at the verge of death with a dose of fever.

Their route lay along the floor of a gash in the continent, a deep abyss called the Great Rift, in which lies a chain of lakes: Nyassa, Tanganyika, Kevu, Albert Edward, and Albert, whence the Nile flows down into distant Egypt. This rift is walled and sometimes blocked by live volcanoes, fouled with swamps, gigantic forests and new lava floods, reeking with fever, and at the time of the journey was beset by tribes of hostile cannibals. This pleasant path led to Khartoum, held in those days by the Khalifa with his dervish army. The odds were about a thousand to one that these two British adventurers were marching straight to death or slavery. Their attempt was madness--that divine madness that inspires all pioneers.

Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:

“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty A. M. crept up within sixty yards.... I saw in the middle of a circle of some two hundred vultures a grand old lion, leisurely gnawing the ribs, and behind, four little jackals sitting in a row.... Behind stretched the limitless plain, streaked with mists shimmering in the growing light of the rising sun, clumps of graceful palms fenced in a sandy arena where the zebra had fallen and round his attenuated remains, and just out of reach of the swish of the monarch’s tail, the solid circle of waiting vultures, craning their bald necks, chattering and hustling one another, and the more daring quartette within the magic circle like four little images of patience, while the lion in all his might and matchless grandeur of form, leisurely chewed and scrunched the titbits, magnificently regardless of the watchful eyes of the encircling canaille.... I watched the scene for fully ten minutes, then as he showed signs of moving I took the chance afforded of a broadside shot and bowled him over with the .500 magnum. In inserting another cartridge the gun jammed, and he rose, but after looking round for the cause of the interruption, without success, started off at a gallop. With a desperate effort I closed the gun and knocked him over again. He was a fine black-maned lion and as he lay in a straight line from tip to top ten feet, four inches, a very unusual length.”

Among the volcanoes near Lake Kivo, Grogan discovered a big one that had been thrown up within the last two years, and there were vast new floods of lava, hard to cross. One day, while searching out a route for the expedition, he had just camped at a height of nine thousand feet in the forest when he found the fresh tracks of a bull elephant, and the spoor was much larger than he had ever seen. When he overtook this giant the jungle was so dense that only the ridge of his back was visible, and for some time he watched the animal picking the leaves off a tree. When fodder ran short he tore down a tree whose trunk was two feet thick, and fearing he might move on, Grogan fired. The elephant fell, but recovered and clashed away, so that there were some hours of tracking before the hunter could catch up again. And now on a flaw of wind the giant scented him.

“The noise was terrific, and it suddenly dawned upon me that so far from moving off he was coming on. I was powerless to move--a fall would have been fatal--so I waited; but the forest was so dense that I never saw him till his head was literally above me, when I fired both barrels of the .500 magnum in his face. The whole forest seemed to crumple up, and a second later I found myself ten feet above the ground, well home in a thorn bush, while my gun was lying ten yards away in the opposite direction; and I heard a roar as of thunder disappearing into the distance. A few seconds later the most daring of my boys, Zowanji, came hurrying along with that sickly green hue that a nigger’s face assumes in moments of fear, and with his assistance I descended from my spiky perch. I was drenched with blood, which fortunately proved to be not mine, but that of the elephant; my gun, which I recovered, was also covered with blood, even to the inside of the barrels. The only damage I sustained was a slightly twisted knee. I can not say whether the elephant actually struck me, or whether I was carried there by the rush of the country.”

Following up, Grogan found enormous pools of blood, and half a mile farther on heard grunts that showed that the elephant had scented him. The animal rushed about with terrifying shrieks, devastated half an acre of forest, and then moved on again. Several times the hunter caught up, but the elephant moved on at an increasing pace, until sunset put an end to Grogan’s hopes.

This part of the Rift has belts of forest, and close beside them are patches of rich populous country where black nations live in fat contentment. But for five years there had been trouble to the westward where the Congo army had chased out the Belgian officials and run the country to suit themselves. Still worse, there were certain cannibal tribes moving like a swarm of locusts through Central Africa, eating the settled nations. Lately the swarm had broken into the Rift, and as Grogan explored northward he found the forest full of corpses. Here and there lurked starving fugitives, but despite their frantic warnings he moved on until he came to a wide province of desolated farms and ruined villages. Seeing that he had but a dozen followers a mob of cannibals attacked at night; but as they rushed, six fell to the white man’s rifle, and when the rest fled he picked them off at the range of a mile, as long as he could find victims. Then he entered a house where they had been feasting. “A cloud of vultures hovering over, the spot gave me an inkling of what I was about to see; but the realization defies description; it haunts me in my dreams, at dinner it sits on my leg-of-mutton, it bubbles in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the same country.”

Grogan fled, and starved, for the mountain streams were choked with corpses, the woods were a nightmare horror, to eat and sleep were alike impossible. He warned his partner and the expedition marched by another route.

Two very queer kinds of folk he met in the forests: the pygmies and the ape-men. The pygmies are little hunters and not more than three feet tall, but sturdy and compact, immensely strong, able to travel through the pig-runs of the jungle, and brave enough to kill elephants with their tiny poisoned arrows. He found them kindly, clever little folk, though all the other explorers have disliked them.

The ape-men were tall, with hanging paunch and short legs, a small skull and huge jaws, face, body and legs covered with wiry hair. The hang of the long powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and the hunted vacant expression of the face were marked. The twenty or thirty of them Grogan met were frightened at first but afterward became very friendly, proud to show him their skill in making fire with their fire sticks.

Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size. The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro women.

At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black troops, raids from the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left the expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent back home as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful attendants, pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with a weed called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear away, and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible marshlands. He had in all only fourteen men when he came to the Dinka country, and met that queer race of swamp folk. They are very tall, some even gigantic, beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking with feet picked up high and thrust far forward--the gait of a pelican. At rest they stand on one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with its foot on the straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe made an attack on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads, screaming that they were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed to the heart, while two others went down with cracked skulls.

“I took the chief,” says Grogan, “and his right-hand man with the double barrel, then, turning round, found that my boy had bolted with my revolver. At the same moment a Dinka hurled his spear at me; I dodged it, but he rushed in and dealt me a swinging blow with his club, which I fortunately warded with my arm, receiving no more damage than a wholesome bruise. I poked my empty gun at his stomach, and he turned, receiving a second afterwards a dum-dum in the small of his back. Then they broke and ran, my army with eight guns having succeeded in firing two shots. I climbed up an ant hill that was close by, and could see them watching at about three hundred yards for our next move, which was an unexpected one, for I planted a dum-dum apparently in the stomach of one of the most obtrusive ruffians, whom I recognized by his great height. They then hurried off and bunched at about seven hundred yards, and another shot, whether fatal or not I could not see, sent them off in all directions.”

The battle was finished, and Grogan toiled on with his wounded men, famished, desperate, almost hopeless. One day in desert country he came to the camp of Captain Dunn, a British officer.

“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’

“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any sport?’

“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing here. Have a drink?’

“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war, (South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the devil I had come from.”

The battle of Omdurman had destroyed the dervish power, and opened the Nile so that Grogan went on in ease and comfort by steamer to Khartoum, to Cairo, and home. Still he heard in his sleep the night melody of the lions--“The usual cry is a sort of vast sigh, taken up by the chorus with a deep sob, sob, sob, or a curious rumbling noise. But the pukka roar is indescribable ... it seems to permeate the whole universe, thundering, rumbling, majestic: there is no music in the world so sweet.”

It is hard to part with this Irish gentleman, whose fourteen months’ traverse of the Dark Continent is the finest deed in the history of African exploration.

XXVIII

A. D. 1900

THE COWBOY PRESIDENT