Part 10

After a few moments had elapsed the stranger laughed a short, derisive laugh, and, putting out his arm, as if to brush Abdul aside, said, "You fool! At the rising of to-morrow's sun Mahkmoud shall know all." With that he moved forward as though to pass his man, when the knife flashed downwards, and with a choking, gurgling sound, followed by a deep sigh, he sank to the earth, never to rise again!

Abdul's knife had been driven home to the hilt through his heart, and the luckless goatherd's life-blood gushed out in a dark red stream, spreading over the pathway. Abdul, having made sure that there was no chance of life remaining, dragged the corpse into the bushes, and hurriedly returned to the door in the shadow of the wall. Here he imitated the cry of the night-bird--the preconcerted signal between himself and Rukhia. After a pause the door was quietly opened once more, and in the dark shadow Abdul hurriedly told her all that had happened. Before they parted it was arranged as to what should be said and done on the morrow. The blood-stained knife was hidden by the wife in Mahkmoud's sleeping apartment. Her part of the crime was that she should gain possession of her husband's knife after he had sunk into the deep sleep which usually came upon him after a night of watching, and throw it into the river.

The sun had scarcely risen above the line of the sand-hills on the eastern bank before the whole village was astir and excitedly discussing what was undoubtedly a murder. The Yushbashi (captain) of police at Assiout was in due course informed. He and his men arrived later, and after much talking and taking down of numerous notes which had little bearing on the subject he ordered the body of the murdered man to be carried to Assiout, almost half the population of the village accompanying him as well.

"The Mudir (the Egyptian governor) shall decide who is the culprit," said the officer.

The police, of course, had to find a culprit, and also procure sufficient evidence to convict him, and this they proceeded to do. As the result of their investigations the unhappy Mahkmoud was placed on his trial for the murder. He pleaded "Not guilty," but otherwise had no defence, admitting that he was absent from home from nine o'clock on the night of the murder until about half-past four the next morning. The police produced evidence that the murdered man and Mahkmoud were not on good terms, that Mahkmoud's shoes were covered with blood, and that they exactly fitted the footsteps on the path leading from the scene of the murder to the house. It was also hinted that there was an intrigue between the stranger and the wife. Finally, the prosecution produced the blood-stained knife and sheath, which had been discovered in a rat-hole in Mahkmoud's sleeping apartment. In addition, two important witnesses were called. One was Abdul, who swore that on the fatal night he was watching his crops some five hundred yards from the spot where the body was found, and heard voices in angry altercation some two hours before sunrise.

Rukhia, Mahkmoud's wife, then appeared, to everyone's astonishment, and told a graphic story of how she was awakened some little time before sunrise, and heard the voices of the stranger and her husband in a heated argument. Mahkmoud then returned, much excited and swearing fiercely. In the morning she noticed the blood-stained shoes and missed the knife from the shelf where it was usually put. Later it was found by the police who searched the house.

Mahkmoud, in spite of his protestations of innocence, was found guilty--mainly on the circumstantial evidence of his wife and Abdul. He was sentenced to death, which sentence was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for the term of his natural life.

* * * * *

It would take too long to follow this miserable but innocent convict through the weary years he spent working out his awful doom. To be able to realize what an Egyptian convict's life is like one must at least have seen the prisons and the hulk. The first five years were spent in the prison at Tourah. The very fact that this man--so strong willed and passionate by nature--was innocent drove him to the verge of frenzy, and having become known as a dangerous and violent convict he found himself confined first in a solitary cell, and then drafted to the prison at Tokar. Here he was compelled to associate with the very worst criminals in Egypt; and, breaking the rules again, he was sentenced to undergo the remainder of his imprisonment on board the hulk in Trinkitat Bay.

It is enough to say that this bay is on the Red Sea littoral, a terrible place for any living man, white or black, to have to spend his life. It was in this hulk that the writer saw Mahkmoud. Escape from this floating jail is practically impossible. It is moored some seven hundred yards from the shore, and the water teems with sharks, who do not allow much to escape their observant eyes as they continually cruise round the hulk.

Many times poor wretches doomed to this living grave have escaped from Tokar Prison. It is easy, for the prison is only built of mud and wattle, and the warders are very careless. But up to the time I shall describe later no prisoner had been known to get far away.

Nomad tribes of Somalis and Arabs (the "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" of the days of our fierce fights at El Teb and Tamai, Tokar and McNeill's Zareba) live and move all round this part of the bush, occupying the few wells there are, right up to the Erkoweit hills. The Government give the head-men of these tribes substantial rewards for each fugitive they capture and bring in, so that the convict's chance of escape is infinitesimal. They must go to these tribes for food and water, or die of hunger and thirst in the desert.

The Nile is the very life and soul of the Egyptian fellah, and the captives of the Kings of Assyria, who sat down by the waters of Babylon and wept, could not have longed more passionately for their Jewish homes than did these poor outcasts to see once more their native villages and taste "the sweet waters of the Nile."

"If I can but escape and reach those distant hills," they told themselves, "then I can easily walk over them. There may still be a few miles of desert sand to cross, but it will surely at length bring me once again to the great beloved river, our Father Nile." This remark has been made to the writer times without number when visiting the convict gangs at work in the course of his official duties. But one and all of the hapless wretches reckoned without the far-stretching, arid sands or the prowling nomads, ever on the watch for fugitives.

One hot, still, starlight night, towards the end of the seventh year of his penal servitude, whilst the sentry was snugly rolled up in his blanket, Mahkmoud slipped overboard from the hulk and swam shorewards. He had seen the sharks cruising slowly round the hulk for many a long day, but, as he said in after years when telling the story of his escape, "Better become food for sharks than endure a living death." As luck would have it, he reached the beach safely, and after wandering towards the distant hills all that day and night he was overcome with hunger and thirst and, resigning himself to his fate, lay down under the sparse shadow of a thorn-bush to die. But Providence decreed otherwise. He was found by a party of raiding Baggara horsemen, who carried him off to Adharama, the head-quarters of the celebrated Dervish Emir, Osman Digna.

For the next two years Mahkmoud was a household slave in Osman Digna's house. While he was there the Khalifa sent for his Governor of the Eastern Sudan, and Mahkmoud accompanied his master. So once more, after nine long years, he again set eyes on the River Nile.

Even now it was almost impossible to escape, for the wild Arab tribes who at this time held sway over the country from Sarras to Fashoda loathed and despised the Egyptian fellah, and no one would help him. After three more years of bondage, however, spent between the Eastern Sudan and Omdurman, Mahkmoud escaped, joined a caravan which was bringing gum and ostrich feathers to the Egyptian frontier, and at last found himself on the Egyptian Nile at Assouan.

* * * * *

By this time "the murder," as it was generally referred to, had almost been forgotten by the villagers. If it was mentioned at all it was as an historical event, generally to fix the date of some other event which had occurred before or since.

The people, too, had almost forgotten Mahkmoud's existence; he was either dead or as good as dead. Abdul, in due course, had taken Rukhia to his harem as a wife, and she was the mother of his three children. After Mahkmoud's transportation his brother, as is usually the case when a widow re-marries, had taken over the care of his nephews, together with his brother's land and property.

It was again September, and the hour before sunset, when the women of the village had gone to draw water for their households. Abdul was sitting in his house, and his three children were asleep in the adjoining room. Suddenly a shadow was thrown across the room. Abdul turned quickly, half rising as he did so, to see who it was. But in an instant strong hands gripped his throat, and a voice, to him a terrible one, hoarsely hissed into his ear, "It is I, Mahkmoud, who after many years have not forgotten you!" Then a knife flashed for one moment before his terrified eyes, and in another second Abdul lay dead upon the floor, dead as his victim had lain in the path that fateful night twelve years before!

Later Rukhia returned. The room was almost dark and, before she realized that anything out of the ordinary had occurred, unseen hands seized her from the darkness and a voice, as it were of the dead, said, "It is your husband Mahkmoud who speaks to you, you false and perjured woman. Go now to where Abdul has gone!"

* * * * *

At dawn next day Mahkmoud walked calmly into the police-station at Assiout. Here he asked to see the Yushbashi of police, and when brought before him said, very quietly, "My name is Mahkmoud. Twelve years ago I was, through the false and perjured testimony of my wife and her lover, convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Now I _am_ a murderer. Arrest me. I have spoken."

For a second time Mahkmoud was tried for his life in Assiout, found guilty on his own confession, and sentenced to death. His Highness the Khedive once again commuted his sentence to penal servitude for life.

After five years, during which Mahkmoud's character was exemplary, he received a free pardon, and returned once more to his native village, where he died, an old and broken man. There is an Arab proverb, "If once you have tasted the sweet waters of the Nile, you will return to drink of them again."

Some incidents of a lady's life in the wilds of New Guinea. Miss Ker went out to Papua--as the country is now called--attached to a mission, and describes the many strange, amusing, and exciting experiences she encountered during her seven years' sojourn among the natives, who, not so very long ago, were always fighting and much addicted to cannibalism--a practice which still prevails among the wild tribes of the unexplored interior.

I.

When, nine years ago, I first set out from Melbourne bound for British New Guinea--or Papua, as it is now officially called--I had very vague ideas about how to reach it, or what it would be like when I got there. I knew that New Guinea was a large island lying off the extreme north of Australia, and that the part I was going to was a little south of the Equator, but that was about all. However, I was told that I should catch a boat at Sydney which was sailing for Samarai, the island port of Papua, and that there I should be met by the schooner of the Anglican Mission. I might have to finish the journey in a whaleboat, I was informed, so my belongings had better be packed in small boxes. Thereupon I set off, armed with a thousand tabloids of quinine, a defence against malarial fever, which everyone in Papua contracts more or less badly as a matter of course.

Although the distance was not very great, the voyage took nearly three weeks, for we certainly did not hurry. The captain was a cautious old man, and every night, during one "reefy" part of the trip, our anchor went down at six o'clock, not to be hauled up till the same hour next morning.

Then, too, instead of making for Samarai, we rounded Cape York and visited Thursday Island, where we remained for some days. Moreover, after calling at Port Moresby, on the south coast of Papua, we deliberately went sixty miles out of our way to land some members of the Roman Catholic Mission at Yule Island, their head station.

But at last, one morning, we reached Samarai--and a very pretty little place I thought it, though it is now much altered by the addition of a number of stores and Government buildings. One of the latter, the hospital, is shown on the previous page. Four little hills rose in the centre of the tiny island, surrounded by a picturesque, though unhealthy, swamp. Gorgeous crotons blazed with crimson and gold in the tropical sunlight, and thick clusters of palms--coco, areca, and sago--swayed gently in the wind, while their stiff leaves rustled in a most misleading manner, imitating a heavy shower of rain. Papaw trees hung their graceful sprays of waxen blossom, or stood upright under their load of ripening yellow fruit.

When the schooner eventually arrived, after some little delay, she began to load up with stores, comprising food (mostly tinned), trade goods, and medicines. After this was accomplished I went on board, and the last stage of my voyage began. I had not been on a sailing vessel before, and though I tried hard to believe we were actually moving, the breeze was so light that it required a great effort. On subsequent journeys I learned to be thankful if we did not actually retreat instead of advance, for one morning I woke and heard the captain say, "We're ten miles farther back than we were last night!"

However, we drifted peacefully along the coast, with an unvarying mountain range in the background, looking as though gigantic tiger-skin rugs had been thrown over it. The natives, I was informed, had produced this effect by burning the grass when hunting boars and wallabies. Occasionally we would pass groups of coco palms, which denoted the existence of a village beneath them. Then, one morning, quite suddenly we found ourselves at our destination, and I stepped ashore to be surrounded by crowds of excited natives, to whom the advent of a white woman had not lost the charm of novelty.

The village of Wedau, where I disembarked, had been, not many years before, the scene of frequent cannibal feasts. The Wedauans had lived in a state of continual feud with the hill-folk and other tribes at a distance, and had sallied forth on various occasions to fight with them on any convenient "merewa" or battlefield. The photograph here reproduced shows a group of natives on an old "merewa," and illustrates the method by which hapless captives were carried off the field in the bad old days, to be afterwards cooked and eaten.

The victim, sometimes only stunned or wounded, was lashed by the hands and feet to a stout pole, which was borne on men's shoulders through the village. Sometimes several of these unhappy wretches were captured at a time, and the treatment they received before being mercifully killed was cruel to a degree. Samuela Aigeri, a Wedauan Christian, once related to me incidents of great barbarity which had taken place in the village in connection with the slaughter of a man taken prisoner by the villagers. The poor wretch asked in vain for water to drink, and was stoned and otherwise tormented for a considerable time before being given the _coup de grâce_. This was customary.

I soon discovered that European housekeeping in Papua is charmingly simple. Everything arrived in a tin, for the most part ready for use. Meat, milk, butter, vegetables--all stood in tins in neat rows in the storeroom. A diet of tinned stuffs grew rather monotonous at times, but we were able occasionally to vary it. Sometimes a man would arrive with a live turtle, which he would sell for two sticks of tobacco, costing threepence. The wretched turtle would be killed and cut up, but would still insist on quivering in a most realistic manner even when placed on the fire to cook. Then, too, if the season was a good one, the kitchen would be found lined with joints of wallabies, and it would be hard to know what to do with so much fresh meat.

I remember once thinking that smoked wallaby would be a change, and I asked the little cook-boy if he could get some done for me. He assented willingly, and bore a leg off to where he said there was an "ovo" or platform for smoking meat. In a few days it was returned to me and looked most appetizing. We cut a dish full of delicate slices, and were just about to set it on the dining-table, when I thought of asking the cook-boy how it had been prepared. He told me quite cheerfully that he had given it to an old leper woman, who, being ill, could not leave the house, and so was sure to keep the fire alight. It was she we had to thank for so kindly smoking our meat. Needless to say, the dish did not appear on the table that night.

Girls as well as boys learned cooking when at the mission station. One girl was considered a very good cook, so much so that on one occasion she was trusted to prepare a meal by herself, as everyone had gone for a picnic. She was told to make rissoles of what she found in the safe. The pudding, a Christmas one, was to follow.

At evening the party returned and sat down, hungry and tired, to eat. Surely, they thought, the rissoles tasted rather peculiar. However, they were eaten, and demands made for the pudding.

"But you have had the pudding," was the model cook's answer; "it was in the rissoles!"

Laundry work was sometimes carried on under great difficulties. At one station the water supply was some distance away, and was brought weekly by bullocks which dragged a heavy "slide" on which our pails stood. The bullocks were occasionally obstreperous, on which occasions the supply of water was sadly diminished. Moreover, when it was safely placed in the laundry the ducks hastened thither and bathed luxuriously in each tub, leaving behind them cloudy water plentifully besprinkled with feathers. At night our girl boarders, feeling thirsty, would ask if they might drink from the tubs and would gratefully receive permission to do so, quite undeterred by the fact that many ducks had bathed in the water, which, I should have mentioned, was so "hard" that no soap ever formed a lather. It may be imagined, therefore, what the clothes looked like when returned from the wash.

Papuan marriage customs are interesting and rather intricate. In Collingwood Bay, for instance, the bride is mourned over for some days beforehand by her girl friends, who are losing their playmate. Then she is dressed in her best, presented with many gifts, and a procession is formed to take her to her new home.

The bridegroom is never to be found on his wedding-day. It is etiquette for him to go hunting or on some expedition which will take him from the village. His relatives, however, look after his interests and hasten the lagging footsteps of the wedding procession by lavish bribes. On arriving at the house the bride and her maids of honour enter and remain for the night, while the elders return home.

In the morning the poor little bride is deserted by her girl friends and betakes herself to sweeping her new domain with a handful of coco-nut bristles for a broom, thus officially acknowledging her marriage. After cooking a great pot of food she waits for the elusive bridegroom, who tarries only till the sun sets, when he joyfully returns after his voluntary exile and, alone with his wife at last, partakes of the marriage meal.

Medicine-men are regarded with great respect by the natives. Those I have met certainly seemed energetic and hard-working. They sit close to the patient, massaging the seat of pain with much vigour, and, while they are thus rubbing, make a noise with their lips rather like that which a groom makes when rubbing down a horse. The process is a tiring one, and the medicine-man stops at intervals to drink hot water in which taro has been boiled. His object is to extract some mysterious foreign substance from the sick man's body, and if he succeeds in this he receives a fee, otherwise he gets nothing. "No cure, no pay" is apparently the Papuan sufferer's motto.

On one occasion a medicine-man was attending to a patient outside a house in the village. The natives sitting round told me he had already extracted a pebble from one invalid and another cure was about to take place. I expressed a wish to see the next stone which should be removed, and waited patiently while the medicine-man rubbed on. At last he stopped and, with clenched fist, called upon me to watch. This I did, and he slowly opened his hand and, disclosing an empty palm, cried triumphantly, "It is gone!"

The natives were much impressed, but I must say I should have preferred one glimpse of the magic cause of disease before it vanished.

The weather in Papua is divided into two seasons only--wet and dry. The former is the summer, the latter the winter, but very little difference in temperature is noticeable. During the wet season thunderstorms may be expected, and some of these are truly terrible. I have seen even a white man look alarmed as great claps of thunder, following on vivid flashes of lightning, seemed to be cleaving asunder the roof over our heads. When to these are added strong wind and sheets of driving rain, the situation becomes distinctly unpleasant.

Like all savage races the Papuans have many superstitions, which appear to vary according to the tribe. The Wedauans, for example, had a belief that most of the unseen spirits around them were actively malignant.

There was a certain kind of eel which must not be eaten, or probably a disastrous flood would follow, while if a native wanted to cut down a tree he had to beware lest there was a _kokome_ (dryad) living in it. If the _kokome_ were annoyed it might cause the offender's face to swell and his skin to prick.

One of the worst possible offences against hidden powers was breaking a "tabu." "Tabu" was placed on all sorts of things--perhaps a certain coco-nut palm, or across a path. It was usually made of two upright sticks, with a crosspiece, on which were hung coco-nut leaf and husk. This was called an "iribubu," and was safeguarded by an incantation. It took a very reckless man or woman to disregard an "iribubu," for unless the enchanter was willing to accept a bribe he would not remove the charm, and the victim, so the natives thought, must die.