The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  “None of thy twisted Moslem hypocrisies! None of thy theological playings with words and thoughts! I am speaking—and well thou knowest that I do—of heathen devils—negro—oh—fetishes—” the voice dropped flatly—“juju—”

  He was silent. So was the other. The mad, amazing stillness of Africa was all about them, like a sodden blanket, like a red mist, like a knife that cut through to their very hearts. Presently a rattan window screen flapped loose and whispered sardonically, startling them, and the tropical heat brushed in and touched them with a stabbing touch as salt as tears, and it seemed that Africa—the whole earth—had suddenly shrunk to a mote of stardust crazily whirling in the moon’s immense, white dazzle.

  A night hawk was sounding his grim, melancholy cry from an isolated tree in the back yard. A signal drum sobbed in the distance, broke off in mid air. Far off, a hyena laughed in its obscene, staccato dirge.

  “Dost thou believe in—them?” repeated d’Albani, through clenched teeth.

  “Yes—and no!”

  The other laughed.

  “The which means yes?” came his comment, “and—”

  “Well?”

  “Hast thou ever heard of Mohammed Bello, the Emir of the Fulahs?”

  “He has been dead these two hundred years or so.”

  Again d’Albani laughed, disagreeably.

  “Has he?” he asked.

  “Go on—go on!”

  And, after a moment’s hesitation, Navarro d’Albani bent his head and spoke in whispers, at length, tensely, hectically, while the Arab listened, asking an occasional, pertinent question, and finally demanding in a hushed, slightly awed voice:

  “Thou—thou hast it here—with thee—the—the thing?”

  “Yes.”

  D’Albani’s hand disappeared beneath the Galla blanket and came out holding a small, round, compact bundle wrapped tightly in layers of discolored silk and exhaling a pungent aroma of myrrh and spikenard.

  “Give it to me,” said Mahmoud Ali Daud.

  “But—” the other looked up, and an expression came into his eyes of relief and, too, of fear—“but thee—I told thee and—Thou dost believe?”

  “I do,” came the low reply.

  “Then—why—”

  The Arab took the little round bundle from between d’Albani’s fingers and fastened it carefully into a fold of his waistband.

  “I shall do it,” he said. “I shall bear its burden of good things and of evil—because of our old friendship and—” he smiled—“a little, too, because of my greed for profitable trade. As to thee—” he drew a purse from his shawl and passed it across the table—“there are about fifty guineas in here. Enough to see thee to London and thence to Stamboul; once there, thou wilt go to my friend Hussain Mabrouk, the jewel merchant, in the quarter of Eyyoub, near the Mosque of El-Hajji Othman, and thou wilt mention my name, and he will give thee an honest price for the diamonds—”

  “But—the medicine men of the Warangas—they will know—in a few days—and—”

  “I or my partner shall be there before they know. And as to thee—have no fear. One of the ships we have chartered sails from here tomorrow morning on the early tide. Thus thou art safe if even—though I doubt it—the medicine men should find out about thy disappearance and the disappearance of—ah—the thing before I or Donachie should be able to get there. The captain will keep his mouth shut and, doubtless, for a few guineas, will let thee have a suit of European clothes. Come.”

  A minute later another diamond sped the Portuguese hotel-keeper into immediate action. Turning to the hut where his houseboys slept, with curses and cuffs he recruited a dozen strong young men. Silently but rapidly, they went to the water’s edge and launched a boat. Eight bells had just sounded when it was propelled up to the side of the turbiner Dalziell Castle. Navarro d’Albani, followed by the Arab, came up by the pilot’s ladder and—

  “Right-o!” said the russet-bearded Liverpool skipper. “I’ll keep my bloomin’ trap shut. Clothes? Another right-o. I got my Sunday-go-to-meeting kickin’ about my locker somewhere. It’s yours for four quid. A bargain? Good. Goin’, goin’, gone!”

  An hour later, with the young sun of the tropics shredding the night mists into ragged scarves and skeins and a staccato breeze flickering out of the west like the wind of a gaily flirted fan, Mahmoud Ali Daud entered his partner’s room, shook him awake, and rolled the little bundle d’Albani had given him on the bed.

  “Here, heart of my heart,” he said, “is the key to the Waranga country. Here is the ‘Open Sesame’ to its locked treasure-house of gold and ivory and diamonds.”

  CHAPTER V.

  THE JUJU OF THE WARANGAS.

  “Er—oh—what?” Donachie sat up and rubbed his heavy eyelids.

  Then, seeing the package, he unwrapped it and, at once, dropped it back with a grunt of disgust and nausea. For, blotchy brown against the white of the bed linen, stared at him out of empty, grinning sockets, the head of a man, mummified and shriveled to one-fifth its original size by the secret method known only to certain African tribes and to the Malay pirates of the Straits, though, in former centuries, it was also known to the South American Indians.

  “God!” Donachie shivered. His lips and jaw worked as if he had swallowed a loathsome drug.

  But his disgust did not last for long. He had lived in Africa for too many years; had been, if not exactly marred, yet tainted by its scabbed, cruel hand; had felt, too closely, the bunched, brutal enormity of this acrid land of lies and darkness and bloody superstitions. So, smiling grimly, he touched the shriveled head with second finger and thumb.

  “What’s the little gentleman’s name?” he inquired. “And what’s he supposed to be good for?”

  “His name,” replied the Arab, gravely, almost reverentially, “was Mohammed Bello. Dead he has been these two hundred years. But still his great Arab soul—may it rest in the sweet shadow of Paradise—rules the hinterland where, once, as Emir of the Fulahs, he ruled when he was alive, when he was a man of craft and pluck and strength upon the blue hills and in the green, steaming jungles.”

  “And now he is rather considerably dead,” commented the other, his dour Scots soul rubbed the wrong way by his friend’s Arab mellifluence. “Now there isn’t even enough pickin’s on his head to satisfy a gorged carrion-hawk.”

  “Indeed!” Mahmoud Ali Daud inclined his head. “But—I repeat—his great soul still rules the land of the Warangas, the outlying province of that huge Fulah Empire of which he was Emir during his lifetime. Still the Warangas look up to him. His shriveled head is the fetish, the all-powerful juju of the outer kraals. And he who possesses this head—” He made an eloquent gesture.

  And, in answer to his friend’s questions, he repeated the conversation he had had with Navarro d’Albani, winding up with:

  “He did not tell me how—by bullying or bribing the medicine men, or by playing hand in hand with them and killing off the more dangerous of them later on, after they had served their turn—he possessed himself of the juju-head. But he did, somehow! And you know—Double-Dee knows—all the independent traders know—the Chartered Company knows—how he succeeded—”

  “You mean that—really—it was this juju which helped him to—”

  “Of course. There was nothing else. He was a white man, in the heart of the jungle, alone. Then—and this is another tale—a tale of his youth and of a woman and of the love which passeth understanding—”

  “A tale which you might spare me!”

  “A tale which I have no intention of telling you—he decided to return to his own land. He took along a fortune. In diamonds. As to the chiefs and the medicine men—”

  “He told them some cock-and-bull story, I guess?”

  “Yes. That he had to go away, by himself, into the deep jungle, to commune with the spirit of Mohammed Bello, for all I know. For you know what these savage blacks are like—half children and half monkeys. And superstitious—may Allah protect me
against the craftiness of the idolaters!”

  “It’d be fairer to ask Allah to protect the idolaters against the wiles of the Moslems,” Donachie interrupted dryly.

  But Mahmoud Ali Daud continued, unheeding:

  “They depended on him, the possessor of the juju-head. They believed that the spirit of the dead Emir had entered his soul. He himself, the better to keep out the other traders, had spread the legend that possession of the head meant mastery and dominion; that the head must never leave the Waranga country, otherwise a bitter blight would descend upon the land, killing the cattle, drying up the rivers, causing the fields to die and the women to become sterile. And the Warangas believed the legend thoroughly. Perhaps too thoroughly.”

  “Too thoroughly?”

  “Yes. For, at the last, obeying some perverse streak in his nature, perhaps resolved that, even after his return to his own land, no white man should enter the Waranga country or, if a white man did succeed, that the road should be made as hard and thorny as possible for him, he decided to take along the juju-head. He did. He left. And—” the Arab made a great, sweeping gesture—“three days later, after he had crossed the border, fear came to him in the watches of the night, squatting on his soul like a black devil of misfortune. Fear of the unseen! Superstitious fear! Fear that—perhaps—the legend had become true to the clouting—that really the spirit of the dead Emir protected the Warangas. And, too, actual, physical fear. For, he thought, the medicine men and the chiefs would begin to worry about his protracted absence, they might enter the juju lodge and find that the head had been stolen. And then—”

  “Well, what then?”

  “You know these Warangas. They never forget, never forgive. Let Navarro d’Albani hide where he please—they will find—and kill—and—”

  “Yes—”

  “It will be our work, brother mine, to go to the Waranga country and put the head back in its secret place in the jungle lodge before the medicine men find out. And then—with the help of Allah—will come the shining apex of Double-Dee! And as for the Chartered Company—wah—they shall chew the bitter kernel of disappointment and envy, and they shall not like the taste of it!”

  * * * *

  The shining apex of Double-Dee!

  Mastery of the hinterland trade! Dominion of the Waranga country! The Chartered Company humbled in the dust! A shimmering, rainbow dream—but it had materialized!

  For, the next morning, without servants or bearers or guides lest their secret mission become known and be gossiped about from kraal to kraal with the droning and the thumping of the drums, James Donachie and Mahmoud Ali Daud had set out from the coast and gone up-country; and never, to their dying day, did either of them forget the bitter, long wilderness pull: the steady, heartbreaking trek through the miasmic hinterland of the colony, a blistering two days through a yellow-and-purple wedge of desert with the sun poised high like a coppery-red balloon, and on into a density of virgin forest where the blackish green of the giant trees and the huge, bloated creepers refreshed them after the pitiless open spaces and the blanched sands; the plunge across the border, using unbeaten paths so that nobody might know or suspect and bring word to the ever-watchful spies of the Chartered Company, into the deep jungles of the interior; the trail for many days that was nothing but a few fugitive tracks in the undergrowth where every second step squished down to thick, smelly water; occasionally a clearing where the sun struck like the fires of purgatory and where flashing white and green things rustled out of their way—day after day, night after night—nearly two weeks of travel through a dense forest.

  But they had succeeded. They had found the jungle temple, squatting by the side of a far, nameless river like a great toadstool. The medicine men had not yet become worried over Navarro d’Albani’s protracted absence, and so the two partners—the Scotchman disapproving of the action with every cell and fiber of his rigid Presbyterian soul, and the Arab clicking his rosary beads and mumbling ceaseless prayers of forgiveness to Allah—had put the juju-head back where it belonged, its sightless eyes once more, sardonically, surveying the grisly collections of voodoo charms that the worshipers had spread below it on the ground.

  Then, through the forcefully recruited services of a couple of bush dwarfs, they had sent for the chiefs and the medicine men. They had met them in full, solemn conclave. And it was here that the Arab had been in his element—“the crackingest bit o’ bluff ever pulled in Africa,” Donachie used to call it afterward.

  For, with all his sweeping Semite eloquence, with all his remarkable knowledge of savage psychology, embroidering the legend which d’Albani had started, adding to it, toying with it, weaving new superstitions into the old, and shamelessly twisting to heathen purpose certain quotations from his favorite esoteric tome, Al-Bayzawi’s “’Ilm al-Tajsir” or Exegesis of the Koran, he had convinced them that Navarro d’Albani, alias Darwaysh Ukkhab, had left his “beloved Warangas” in the keeping of Double-Dee, that to Double-Dee had descended the keeping of the juju-head—they had it, proof supreme, since even in the wilderness possession is nine points of the law—that into the soul of Double-Dee had now entered the dead Emir’s worth and spirit.

  Trade, then!

  Trade, systematic, constructive, thorough, perfectly dovetailed in every step from steamer’s wharf to overland porter, from loom to jobber, from jobber to factory agent, from factory agent to the chief’s obese wife bullying her plum-colored, ocher-painted, plumed warrior-husband into the purchase of twenty yards of American cloth blending an unlikely sunset of purple and sulfur-yellow and pink and glaucous green.

  Gold dust and rubber, tusks and hides and orchilla roots; and—flitting back across the overland trail, with a thousand per cent profit on the investment and, perhaps, occasionally, when beyond the white man’s coast law, salted down with the swish and pain of the sjambok—beads and knives and trinkets.

  Trade!

  Trade that had made the independent merchants gasp with impotent envy and—after Double-Dee, the Waranga country fully organized, had appointed Hendrick Van Plaaten, the expatriate Vaal Boer, as their chief agent there and, in a way, given the sanctity of the juju-head which was their spiritual and financial trade-mark, their semi-divine viceroy—that had finally caused the Chartered Company to make certain overtures to them, at last cabling them to come to Brussels for a business conference.

  CHAPTER VI.

  WEDDED TO FATE.

  At the time, Donachie had been down with fever, and so it was his partner who had gone to Europe, and there had been that memorable interview—the second apex of Double-Dee’s career—with Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

  The Chartered Company suing for peace! The Chartered Company asking for terms! The Chartered Company begging to be allowed to share the rich plums of the Waranga country.

  At first, of course, the baron had been slightly sarcastic, rather patronizing. He had attempted to cheapen the price by cheapening the quality of the ware. Then, seeing the sardonic, mocking look in the Arab’s hooded eyes, seeing, furthermore, the handful of uncut diamonds, Waranga diamonds, which the other had drawn from his pocket with studied carelessness, he had become friendly and somewhat confidential; then he had cajoled; at last wheedled and implored.

  And, always, Mahmoud Ali Daud’s stony reply that—yes—Double-Dee was willing to sell, would turn over their assets and good-will, including their mysterious hold on the Waranga country—for fifty-one per cent of the stock, common as well as preferred, of the Chartered Company. Control, in other words. Mastery.

  “No, no!” the baron, had exclaimed, fluttering his white, beringed hands. “Forty per cent!”

  “Fifty-one!”

  “Forty-two!”

  “Fifty-one!”

  “Forty-three!”

  “Fifty-one!”

  Up to forty-nine the baron had raised the price, to find himself confronted by the same stone wall, the same wearisome, maddening repetition:

  “Fifty-one!”

&n
bsp; There the matter had rested, the baron, at the very last, so far forgetting his usual good breeding as to make a threat against Double-Dee; and, flushed with triumph, Mahmoud Ali had returned to the west coast, to be greeted there by bitter news; news that Double-Dee, suddenly, overnight, finding themselves in a fight for their very existence, had tried to keep secret from everybody except their most confidential agents, Gonzelez, and Kinsella, and DuPlessis, and Shareef Ansar, formerly the Arab’s pipe-wallah, a half-breed Zanzibaree, who had recently been raised to the position of sub-agent, because of his loyal services and his great knowledge of the hinterland.

  There had been no reason to suspect that the secret had not been kept. Otherwise there would have been a change in the slightly servile manners of the independent traders to the two partners when they met on the street, at the Grand Hotel over a cup of coffee and a game of matador-dominoes, or at the Double-Dee go down to bargain over discounts, an obligatory glass of gin conveniently at their elbows. There would have been desertions from the ranks of their blacks, and their credit in London, Manchester, and Liverpool would have tumbled.

  No, thought the Arab; their secret had been well guarded, and yet, here, today, a few months later, was Baron Adrian de Roubaix, and he was not the same man who had spoken to him, in Brussels, with hectic, imploring accents. Arrogant he was now, and haughty, and—he had made certain sneering, slurring allusions.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” he had said, “and dead men cannot trade.”

  And he had added that the very office boys in Brussels were whispering about what was happening up-country.

  The last was doubtless a lie. For—slim consolation—the manners of the independent traders were unchangedly suave, and, only two days earlier, the London & Union Bank had cabled their assent to a three-months, unsecured loan of thirty thousand pounds sterling at bank rate. But there was no denying the fact that the baron knew what had befallen Double-Dee in the Waranga country. There was no sidestepping the fact that the baron, who, a sharp businessman, was also a pleasure-loving man about town, had made a hurried trip to the west coast, in the hottest season of the year, aboard the Chartered Company yacht. He had said that it was “special business” which had brought him here.