The Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  “Yes!—” to quote the words of M’pwa, a great Waranga chief, whom they interviewed—“pumped” would be the more correct expression—one night over tobacco and palm wine. “There is no doubt of Double-Dee’s kindness and justice and fairness to all our people. Father and mother they have been to us and the morning dews and the ripening sun and the soft, soft rain of the wet season—”

  He slurred, paused, sobbed, looked away from the two strangers, stirred the fire with the naked, callous sole of his foot till it blazed bright and hard and clear. He shivered a little and glanced rapidly over his shoulder, and, at once, the Arab winked significantly at the Englishman and whispered:

  “Here comes the beginning of the end of the mystery whose slippery tail we have been chasing these many days!”

  And it came, with a few words, short, broken, hacked, pronounced with a voice that was low, and yet pregnant with an unexpected, rather bitter strength:

  “And—yet—”

  Again the chief slurred and paused, again shivered, again glanced over his shoulders into the dark corners of the hut where the flickering flames were painting shadows among the black shadows, then grinning out with yellow eyes like mischievous hobgoblins.

  “And yet—what?” softly echoed Mahmoud Ali Daud.

  M’pwa shrugged his massive shoulders. He looked away from the compelling Arab eyes, felt drawn toward them as a bird is said to be fascinated by a snake’s flat, filmy eyes, sobbed with all a savage’s congenital melancholia, then, suddenly, as if to get through with an unpleasant task that had to be performed, made up his mind and spoke.

  “I will tell you—” he said. “Perhaps you two can help and advise—you two—being holy men—”

  “Very holy!” interrupted Sir Charles Lane-Fox, with never a smile.

  “In league,” commented Mahmoud Ali Daud, not to be outdone, jealous of his eloquence as only an Arab can be, “with the forces of good—but also with Musboot, the Devil, the Great Devil, the Father of Lies and Confusion, the Lord of Black-Black Darkness! Thus—” and the feline purr of his voice was marred by a threat—“tell us truthfully, O chief!”

  “I will. Peace was in the land and plenty and satisfaction. And then—word came—”

  “From where?” sharply cut in the Arab.

  M’pwa made a vague, hopeless gesture.

  “Out of the nowhere,” he replied—“out of the bush—the swamps—the forests—the jungles—”

  “Word by the sob of the drum, belike? By the gossip of the kraals—”

  “Word from all over—” again the vague, hopeless gesture, and a flash of white, frightened eyeballs—“word from all over, all at once. Wherever men talked in council hut and women gossiped over the cooking fires and umlinos brewed medicine, the word came—was there—grew and stretched and bloated—like a snake of fire, burning, burning—”

  “Like a snake of fire, burning, burning,” he repeated, and the Arab remembered that this was a Waranga synonym for the supernatural, while the Englishman became a little impatient.

  “Are you an old woman,” he asked, “belike a barren spinster, fit only to wipe the children’s noses and clean the household pots, that you babble babblings like the east wind, the wind without sense? ‘Word came,’ you say, ‘came!’ You say that word was all over, all at once. But—whence and why and whither? Give us straight talk, chief!”

  The Waranga rose, crossed the hut, and pulled aside the crimson, woolen blanket that covered the entrance. With a great deal of dignity, he pointed out into the night where, suddenly, the amazing stillness of the tropics was broken by the sounds of jungle and forest: the sardonic hooting of some great, dog-faced ape, the growl of a feeding lioness peaking from a rumbling, guttural bass to a shrill, incongruous treble, the mocking chirp and whistle of innumerable monkeys, the vicious, staccato barking of a fetid, spotted hyena sniffling for the reek of carrion, the crash of a warthog breaking uncouthly through the undergrowth, the frightened flutter of soft-winged birds before the murderous pounce of the hawk.

  “Ask—them!” he said. “I do not know!”

  He spoke with a sort of tense simplicity, enormously tragic in a way, throbbing with all the ever-present drama, the nameless fear and melancholia of the tropics, and the others realized that he was giving them the truth.

  “No!” he repeated. “I do not know. I only know that word came, that word was here and there and all over—at once—wherever people foregathered! There was no escaping the word! There was no shutting one’s ear or one’s soul to its meaning! It was whispered everywhere—aye!—everywhere—”

  And he went on to say that this word, which was all over, all at once, brushing out of the nowhere, the jungle, the forest, the pasture, and the sky, had spoken strange things; strange things—though this was not the way he put it—that, challenging, menacing, incomprehensible to the savage mind, had frightened the Warangas the more through the very pageantry of their obscure and ominous possibilities, the presentiment of a nameless doom that, once the theory was partly established in their minds, seemed to lurk ill-concealed behind every detail of what was going on in the hinterland—

  Things that caused Sir Charles Lane-Fox to look up sharply, and Mahmoud Ali Daud, as was his superstitious wont, to snap his fingers rapidly and to touch the string of blue lapis beads about his neck.

  For, it appeared, the word which was “all over, all at once,” had declared and was declaring everywhere that the spirit of Mohammed Bello, the dead Fulah Emir whose shriveled head was the fetish of the land, was dissatisfied with its psychic abiding-place in Double-Dee; that it was seeking for a new home, in somebody else’s body; that, in fact, it was transmigrating, ready—said the Englishman in a whisper to the Arab—to reincarnate itself very much like the soul of the Gautama Buddha or the Sakhyamuna Buddha which never dies, but chronically seeks and finds a new flesh envelope in which to work the many miracles.

  “But—” Mahmoud Ali Daud turned to the Waranga—“why—tell me—why? The Warangas are in the keeping of the sacred juju head, aren’t they?”

  “Assuredly!” The answer came with a thump of utter sincerity.

  “And—” was the next question—“the Warangas are not complaining of Double-Dee?”

  “What reason is there for complaint? Father and mother are Double-Dee to the people of the kraals! Never an unjust action, never a bad deed! Merciful they are—and—”

  “Exactly! So I was told before. Therefore—why should the spirit of Mohammed Bello be dissatisfied with Double-Dee? It is unreasonable, unjust, and—”

  “Yes, yes! But that, too, has been explained by the word that is everywhere, all at once! For—” the Waranga was trying hard to put strange, unaccustomed ideas into the uncomplex native dialect which had no words even for the germs of these ideas—“you have heard of—” he paused, puzzled, wrinkled his forehead in strong endeavor, went on hesitatingly—“former lives? Former lives of—oh—same people—in other bodies—often, often, years ago, as many times as them are rays in the noon sun?”

  “What do you mean, M’pwa?” asked the Arab a little angrily, to be immediately interrupted by the Englishman’s soft:

  “Go on, M’pwa. I understand!”

  “Former lives! Other bodies! Ahn’kwa!” he clicked. “Ahn’kwa!” Again the puzzled, childlike expression on his face in rather ludicrous contrast with the ocher-and-white tribal smear across his flat nose and the waving plumes fastened by some mysterious methods in his short, kinky poll; again the vague, helpless gesturing.

  His toes stirred the nearly extinct fire, kicking up a gray dust of warm ashes.

  Another sobbing pause—and:

  “Sayeth the word that is everywhere, all at once, that there is reward for merits of former lives—rewards in this life—ah—”

  Yet another pause—the Arab’s impatient grunt—the Englishman’s whisper: “Ssstt! Hold your horses!” and the Waranga continued, struggling on wearily in his endeavor or to give expression to unfamil
iar thoughts, almost physical pain in the set, distressed look of his eyes:

  “Punishment for sins committed in former lives—punishment in this life! A—ah—a cycle that never ends—like a snake swallowing its tail—a—” He slurred, stopped, moved his sinewy arms up and down, woodenly, clumsily.

  “Perhaps,” gently suggested Sir Charles—“a wheel of lives—a great wheel of good deeds and bad, M’pwa?”

  “Yes, yes, yes!”

  There was relief in the negro’s accents; too, surprise, and boundless respect and admiration.

  “You are indeed a most holy man,” he continued, “learned and wise. Nothing is hidden from the mirror of your eyes. A wheel of lives—in an eternal accounting and reckoning of good and bad deeds! Thus—even thus—sayeth the word that is everywhere, everywhere, all at once! Punishment for sins in former lives—committed in former lives by Double-Dee! Now, for these, in this life, the bitter price—”

  And, while M’pwa droned on, with frequent sighs and pauses and vaguely helpless gestures, telling how the “word that was everywhere” accounted for it all, how the mysterious murders of Double-Dee’s agents and the mutilations of their corpses dovetailed to make the “word” reasonable, how, finally, the Warangas, though they loved and respected Double-Dee, were becoming afraid that they, too, might have to share their fate and, therefore, eagerly awaiting another “word” that had been promised them and that would explain how the spirit of the great juju head had left Double-Dee’s body to enter somebody else’s; while the Arab listened impatiently, and with occasional, deep-throated ejaculations of “Bismillah!” and “Aywah!” and “Allah kureem!” and “Insh’allah!”—Sir Charles Lane-Fox was perfecting a certain theory.

  He put it into words, an hour later, when he and Mahmoud Ali Daud were once more on the trek, on the last lap toward the jungle lodge. The moon squinted down sardonically, hostilely, with a red, bleary eye. The forest was about them like a living thing, possessed by the masterful consciousness of its strength, reaching up from below the two men’s feet with a somber, tangled mass of undergrowth—seething like evil thoughts, like a nest full of venomous snakes—closing in on them like an implacable foe in a serried mob of immense trees that towered above in a great spread of twisted boughs and extravagant, fantastic creepers—

  “Hateful, severe, pitiless!” murmured the Arab as he brushed aside a spiky liana. He felt lonely and small and crushed.

  The Englishman laughed a mirthless laugh.

  “Not exactly the proper background, it seems to me, for a successful preaching of the Buddhist sages’ esoteric thoughts!” he drawled.

  The Arab stopped in his tracks—they had come to a sudden clearing where the moon mirrored in a ragged expanse of black slime, caused by recent rainfalls, with, far in the silent west, the afterglow of an incongruously tender sunset.

  “Meaning—what, brother-in-the-craft?” he asked, cool, alert, once more the hard-headed, materialistic Semite, the man of affairs who made his imagination subservient to his common sense.

  CHAPTER X.

  THE EMISSARY.

  Sir Charles-Fox smiled. “You Moslems,” he began, with that maddeningly academic precision of his which the other knew of old, “are rather a utilitarian lot—even in matters of religion. You are practical, hard-bitten, four-square—”

  Mahmoud Ali Daud made an impatient gesture and spoke an impatient word.

  But the Englishman continued serenely that—quite so!—all Moslems were alike, brothers under their skin.

  “It makes no difference,” he said, “if you are soldiers or sailors or priests or explorers or merchants or what-not. You are, every blessed one of you, missionaries, congenital proselytizers. And, as I said, you attend to your converting in a practical, hard-bitten way. You preach a simple, easily digested creed to these Africans. You give them no difficult theological nuts to crack, no extraordinary miracles and all that thaumaturgical bosh to believe in. All you ask them to do, so as to become fitly prepared for Islam, is to stop child murder, to cease worshiping idols, and to regulate divorce in a decent manner.”

  “I give salaams for the compliment,” replied the Arab ironically, “But—” He lifted his eyebrows questioningly.

  “We Christians,” went on the other, in an even voice, “are also a fairly practical lot. Our missionaries, just like yours, preach a something that can be digested by these savages. Perhaps—unlike you—we are a trifle too spiritual, too ethical. Still—Christianity can be and has been successfully preached in Africa. Like Islam, it does not attempt to interfere too crassly with the negroes’ basic, tribal ethics and their inherited ideas of right and wrong, and—”

  “Bismillah-lah-lah!” came Mahmoud Ali Daud’s deep-throated interruption. He threw up both his hands. “I admire your wisdom! I dote on your learning! I acknowledge you sage among the many sages. But—”

  “But,” said the Englishman, unruffled, “speaking about yet a third creed—the creed of the Lord Gautama Buddha—”

  “Who is speaking of it?”

  “I am, my impatient friend! I said that this—” he pointed into the great jungly silence that closed about the clearing like a remorseless wall—“that this is hardly a logical or promising background for the esoteric teachings of the Buddha—”

  “Of course not! Who is preaching Buddhism here?”

  “Who? Why—the man, or men—or shall we say the Chartered Company—who are trying to instill in the minds of the Warangas the theory of Buddhist incarnation and transmigration of souls, of sins committed in former lives to be punished in this life, of the wheel of things—the pitiless, eternal wheel to which all human lives are tied! The theory which even now is undermining the great firm of Double-Dee, which explains why your agents were murdered, which ultimately will cause the juju head of Mohammed Bello to seek a new abiding-place—ah—perhaps in the pompous, well-fed body of Baron Adrien de Roubaix.

  “Why,” he went on, a little more excited, “it’s clear, isn’t it? All that we heard tonight—and which the Waranga chief had such a deuce of a time expressing in his clumsy dialect—why, man, it’s Buddhism—pure, unadulterated—and preached for a purpose. Don’t you see, Mahmoud?”

  “I do. But—”

  “But?”

  “Baron de Roubaix is a good Catholic!” exclaimed the Arab. “And—the Chartered Company people—there are Protestants among them, and Moslems—and Greek Orthodox—and Jews. Even—may Allah curse them most especially—atheists! But—Buddhists—impossible! Buddhists—in Africa—working for the Chartered Company? As well look for fish on top of a mountain, or drag for the moon reflected in the water!”

  “No faith except Buddhism believes in the theory of transmigration, of metempsychosis,” insisted the Englishman, “in the wheel of things! The man at the back of all your trouble, the man who, by underground intrigues, by spreading whispers and rumors wherever he went, perhaps by a wholesale bribing of the medicine men, has sent forth the word—how did that Waranga chief put it?—yes!—the ‘word that is everywhere, all at once,’ he—”

  “He was a clever man! But not a Buddhist! No!” The Arab shook his stubborn head. “A Buddhist—why—that means a Chinaman, or a Japanese, or possibly a Siamese. And I know all the employees of the Chartered Company. There is not a single yellow man among them—”

  “Mahmoud!” smiled the Englishman. “At times I am disappointed in you. Chinaman—you say? Jap? Yellow man?”

  “What else?”

  “Rot! Why—he might be a white man, a Scot or Englishman or American, for all I know—”

  “How—then—”

  “The Chartered have recruited their people from all the four corners of the Earth, from all the seven seas, haven’t they?”

  “Yes. The Chartered people are freelances!”

  “Exactly. Freelances. Buccaneers. Wanderers upon the face of the Earth. Surely there may be among their number one who has lived in the Far East a long time—in China, let us say—one who has b
ecome familiar with the Buddha’s transcendental wisdom—”

  And then the Arab’s sharp interruption:

  “There is—by Allah! There is! Witherspoon! ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon they call him at the coast!”

  “Oh—the old chap with the white goatee who curses so picturesquely—has been with the Chartered Company about three years—came up from the south after some incredible adventures of sorts?”

  “The same,” said the Arab. “He used to be—how do you say in English?—a Yankee skipper—used to be in the China trade—then in the service of the Chinese government—”

  “How do you know?” asked Sir Charles.

  “From his own lips,” replied Mahmoud Ali Daud. “Down at De Sousa’s place, he has told me many a story of the Far East. Too—” and his thin, sensitive lips curled in a lopsided smile—“it appears that there are other tales. African tales. True tales, belike, about ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon himself. Tales he did not tell me—”

  “Of course not!” said Sir Charles. “I know. Bitter, reckless, bloodstained tales. Tales of crime and rapine and murder—the dregs of a white man’s passions under southern stars—oh,” he sighed, “tales hard to prove, and—”

  He was silent.

  At heart he was a simple man who, deep within himself, put the ordinary decencies of life above Magna Charta, above the demands and duties and tangled interests of ever-growing empire. Yet, in the past, there had been many instances when, for reasons of the latter, he had been forced to scotch the former, when the pride and whip of national, racial ambition had compelled him to be deaf to what, with slightly saturnine pathos, he called his “private conscience away from Downing Street’s shadow.”

  Thus it had been with the Chartered Company, with their agents—with men like ‘Gloucester’ Witherspoon.

  They had committed, were committing, every crime on the rather comprehensive African calendar—nor were these crimes always impossible to prove. But there was the pulling of international wires hither and thither. There was the dread of international misunderstandings and complications. There was the power of foreign chancelleries—and reigning houses—and stock exchanges.