Bones of the River

by Edgar Wallace

  “Well, it’s like this, you see, the Isisis are not exactly the same as the Akasavas.… No, I don’t think they have any special customs, y’know – no, they don’t eat babies, alive, at least…well, why don’t you ask Bones?”

  Nothing would give Bones greater happiness, he informed his superior.

  “Naturally, dear old duffer, I’ve studied the jolly old indigenous native more carefully, and–”

  “You can lie better, that is all,” said Hamilton with asperity. “She wants horrific stories about these innocent people, and you can invent ’em.”

  “Steady the bluffs, dear old Ham,” murmured Bones. “Steady the bluffs!”

  “Buffs, you idiot.”

  “There’s only an ‘l’ of a difference,” said Bones, exploding with merriment. “That’s rather good, old Ham? Made it up on the spur of the moment, dear old thing – just come out naturally. I must tell dear old honourable miss that!”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” warned Hamilton awfully. “Tell her about human sacrifices.”

  “‘L’ of a difference – that’s good enough for Punch,” murmured Bones, “really awfully good. You said ‘Steady the bluffs,’ and I said…”

  Hamilton left him soaking in the sunshine of his own approval.

  The next morning Muriel Witherspan heard of the Wazoos. There was no such tribe on the river, but he had to fasten his stories to some people or other, and she listened open-mouthed.

  “Mr Tibbetts was telling me how the Wazoos commit suicide by burying themselves head downward,” she said at lunch. And again: “The Wazoos, Mr Tibbetts says, live in trees in summer to keep away from the mosquitoes.”

  Sanders blinked, but agreed.

  To the unfortunate Wazoos, Bones affixed the creations of his fancy. On their behalf he invented a kingdom (he drew it on the firm sand of the beach), and a dynasty beginning with Wog-Wog the First and ending with Boo-Bah the Ninth.

  “You’ve done it, Bones,” said Hamilton one morning, meeting his subordinate on the parade ground. “That lady wants to go to Wazooland, and Sanders had to prevent her forcibly from wiring to her lordly parent for permission. It only shows what mischief a ready liar can make.”

  “I like that!” said Bones indignantly.

  “Of course you do – Sanders is taking her up to the Ochori, and is breaking to her gently the fact that the Wazoos ain’t!”

  “Why, you treacherous old officer hound!” protested Bones. “Didn’t you tell me–”

  “Stand to attention when you speak to your superior officer,” said Hamilton sternly.

  “Deuced unfair, sir,” murmured Bones. “Deuced unsporting, dear old Judas!”

  It was Sanders who took her to the Upper River on the Zaire, but the chagrin of Bones at being deprived of the privilege of escorting the beautiful visitor was relieved when, the day after the departure of the chief, a pigeon post came to headquarters. Taking the little paper from the pigeon’s leg, Hamilton saw that it was from Sanders and marked “Urgent.”

  “Send Bones instantly to Lujamalababa by Wiggle. Arrest and bring to headquarters Saka the witch doctor.”

  “I suppose you’d better hop,” said Hamilton thoughtfully. “That blighter has been seeing things again.”

  * * *

  In the Akasava country, beyond Lujamalababa, on the farther side of the Great Lake, lived Saka, the sorcerer, who was the son of a sorcerer and the great-grandson of two others. This magic man had power of life and death. He could touch the dead upon their breasts, and they would straightaway open their eyes and speak. And he could look upon a man or woman, and they would disappear and never be seen again. So it was said.

  Once, a petty chief and his tribe, who was a very rich man, went away to the Frenchi country to trade skins and ivory, and because he did not trust his relations – as who does? – he left with Saka all his movable wealth, and Saka buried it in his presence beneath the floor of his hut, uttering certain incantations which would produce fatal boils upon the neck of whosoever disturbed the ground; and the small chief went away, satisfied that his riches were safe.

  In seven moons he came back and went to the hut of Saka, and they dug up the ground, but no treasure was there.

  “O ko,” said Saka, in cheerful dismay, “this is because of my magic! For I must have looked too hard at the pretty wonders of yours, M’guru, and they have gone into nothing.”

  M’guru, who was a trading man and therefore sceptical by nature and training, carried his woes to Sanders, and the Commissioner summoned Saka before him.

  “Man,” he said, “they tell me you are a great magician, and that whatsoever you look upon disappears. I also am a magician, and lo! I stretch out my hand, and where is the free man who walks without shackles on his legs? He has vanished to my Village of Irons, where bad men labour everlastingly for the Government, and even great chiefs are no higher than fishermen. Now go, Saka, and look well with your wonderful eyes for the treasure of M’guru. And because you are a magician, I think you will find it.”

  Saka went away, and came back in three days’ time with the story of his discovery.

  “Lord, by the magic of my eyes I have seen all these wonderful treasures of M’guru. They are buried at three trees by the water, and I have dug them up and given them to M’guru.”

  “That is good,” said Sanders. “Saka, I am a man of few words and many duties. Do not let me come again to this or that palaver, or there will be unhappiness in your hut.”

  He whiffled his cane suggestively, and Saka, who was an imaginative man, winced. Thereafter, he did much to establish his fame with his people, though all his experiments were not uniformly welcomed. He looked upon the young wife of M’guru, his enemy, and she too disappeared, and M’guru shrewdly suspected that she was not buried near the three trees by the water. He sent for the sorcerer by virtue of his authority.

  “Saka, by your magic you shall bring me back my young wife, or I shall bind you for Sanders.”

  “M’guru,” said Saka, surprised, “I did not know that you had a wife; but by my wonderful powers I will find her and bring her to your hut, and you will give me two teeth[5] because of my talk with the pretty devils who sit around my bed every night and tell me stories.”

  It happened that Sanders was in the neighbourhood, and the palaver which followed was brief and, to Saka, painful. Thereafter, the sorcerer’s eyes ceased to function.

  Now, Saka was a sour man of middle age; and, like all witch doctors, intensely vain. The punishment, no less than the loss of his prestige, embittered him; and, being of an inventive turn of mind, he discovered a method of regaining the authority which, whilst it did not profit him greatly, caused intense annoyance to those whom he chose to regard as his enemies. Men and women who came secretly in his hut at night to seek his intervention in their affairs, heard of a new and more potent devil than any that had come to the Lake country. His name was M’lo; he was of microscopic size, and worked his mischief from some familiar article of clothing where he had lodged himself.

  “You have fire in your teeth,” he said to one supplicant, whose swollen jaw and agonised expression were eloquent of his suffering. “My magic tells me that M’lo is working powerfully against you.” He closed his eyes in an ecstasy of divination. “He lives in the blue cloth of E’gera, the wife of M’guru. This you must burn. If you betray me to M’lo, and he knows I have told you, he will kill you?”

  The following morning, the beautiful blue cloth which encircled the figure of E’gera, principal and favourite wife of M’guru, vanished, and became a heap of black and smouldering fibre in the recesses of the forest.

  To a man whose wife had given him cause for uneasiness (to put the matter mildly) he revealed the presence of M’lo in the growing corn of an enemy’s garden, and in the morning no corn stood where the seeker after his hateful oppressor had searched.

  He discovered M’lo malignly surveying the village from a fire beyond M’guru’s hut, and in the morn
ing it was quenched. And nobody betrayed him because of their fear of the parasitical demon. Nobody save a spy of Sanders, whose business was to know and tell.

  He had an interview with Saka, posing as a man who had lost a dog, and Saka told him of M’lo and how the devil might be exorcised by putting fire to M’guru’s hut. This he told because the spy was of another village.

  Then on a day came Lieutenant Tibbetts with four soldiers, and they carried away Saka the sorcerer to a place where M’lo had no influence.

  * * *

  In the blue dusk which immediately precedes the darkness of night a white steamer picked her way through the pestiferous shoals that infest the river opposite the village of Lugala, and all the people of the village came down to the beach, hopeful that something would occur to afford a subject for gossip during the remaining hours of the night, they being great story-tellers and immensely credulous. Heavy rains had fallen; the shallow bed had silted up; new sandbanks had appeared where deep channels had run before; and the prospect of sensation was not unjustified.

  Unconscious of the possibility which heavy rains and shifting sands may bring, the navigator of the steamer came at full speed, a fierce light of resolve in his eye, and the greater half of a banana occupying the cavity of his mouth. In the bow of the Wiggle a Kano boy plied a long stick, thrusting it into the water and relating his discoveries in a whining monotone.

  “A fathom and half a fathom,” he droned, and then: “A fathom.”

  The Wiggle thudded into something soft and, partly yielding, swung broadside to the stream, and stopped.

  “Woof…umph…hgg!”

  Bones’ natural expression of horror and amazement was somewhat distorted by the banana. He swallowed hastily and nearly choked, and then: “O ten and ten fools!” he snapped, glaring down at the perfectly innocent sounding boy. “Did you not say a fathom and a fathom and a half, and here is my fine ship upon the banks!”

  “Lord, there is not a fathom and a fathom and a half here,” said the sounding boy calmly. “When I spoke we were in such water. Now we are on the sand. It is the will of God.”

  Bones uttered an impatient tut and looked round. The night had come instantly. From the shore he saw the flicker of fires burning before the villagers’ huts, but knew there was no man of the Isisi who would come out to the rescue of the ship, since that implied standing waist-high in a river infested by crocodiles, in order to lift the Wiggle to deep water.

  He was safe enough until the morning, for the pressure of the current would keep the Wiggle fast to the bank. But between safety and comfort was a wide margin. The floor of his sleeping cabin canted over to an angle of thirty degrees. It was impossible either to sit or lie in comfort. Bones ordered out the boat, and had himself rowed to the shore.

  That he was expected, he knew before the watch fires began to blaze on the beach. There was a crowd of 500 people waiting to receive him – Lugala had a population of 506 people, but six were too old or ill to journey to the beach. Borobo, the chief, offered him salt and apologies.

  “Lord, there are many crocodiles in the river in these days of the year. Yesterday they took a woman from the village of Gobini whilst she was washing her baby on the shore.”

  “Chief, have no fear. I come with peace in my heart,” said Bones magnificently, and stalked up the village street to the guest-house, which was ready for him, the chief having sent secret word that his rare dogs, which were usually kennelled here, should be ejected.

  Lieut. Tibbetts’ own cook came ashore and prepared him his evening meal, which Bones ate before an audience of 503, three of the infirm and aged being carried out from their huts to witness the amazing spectacle of a man sticking a silver spear in his mouth at irregular intervals.

  (“It is said,” whispered one awe-stricken gossip to another, “that Tibbetti cannot use his fingers because they were bitten by a snake when he was young.”)

  When, later in the evening, tidings came to Bones that the Wiggle had assumed an even more alarming angle, he ordered all men ashore, and Saka was placed under guard in a hut at the end of the village.

  Now, Saka’s fame was not limited to his own country. He enjoyed, in the regions beyond the frontier of Lujamalababa (or Lugala as it was sometimes called), a reputation which was the envy of many local medicine men, who very properly depreciated his powers. For that is the way of the world, black or white, that small men enhance their reputations by depreciating their betters. And from Bones, the centre of interest, as the night wore on, became, not the hut in which he was lodged and sleeping, noisily, but the larger hut where the philosopher of a foreign people spoke wisdom and initiated the village of Lugala into the mysteries and eccentricities of M’lo, the invisible.

  And nobody was more interested than the Houssa sentry who was placed over him, for he was of the Kano people, who believe that his family was under the especial care of a red and green snake, the red half of which was male and the blue half female, and he never went to bed at night without placing a bowl of water near his head, that this especial demon should not grow thirsty.

  “Bring to me,” boasted Saka, “those who are dead, and I will make them alive, through the wonder of M’lo, who is so small that his village is beneath the foot of an ant! And none can see him save only Saka, who has eyes more wonderful than crocodiles and brighter than leopards. And this little devil of mine is in this village. He sits on the leaf of a tree to make your head ache, O man-with-the-wire-about-your-head; and he sits on the top of a cooking-pot and whispers evil words into the ears of your wives as they boil the fish. But most terrible is he when he dwells in the clothes of white men.”

  “My daughter has pains in her stomach, Saka,” said a man, edging forward. “Also, my garden grows no corn; and monkeys have eaten my wonderful long yellow fruit.”

  “It is M’lo who has done this,” said the other complacently, and screwed up his eyes. “I see him! He is in the white man’s clothes. Now, tomorrow morning Tibbetti will go down to the river and wash himself all over, in the manner of these people. Take, then, all of his clothing, also the little silk shirt with hollow legs that he wears in his sleep – these you will find by the shore; and put wood under them and burn them, and I will send M’lo to another village.”

  “But, Saka, if you do this,” said a troubled patient, “he will whip us, being a cruel man. Also, Sandi is within a day’s march, and he will come with his soldiers and chastise us, as he did in the days of the war, when he hanged my own father.”

  “Who shall chastise you most?” demanded Saka, oracularly. “This Sandi, who is only a man, or M’lo, who is a god and a devil and a ju-ju and a ghost, all in one? Who shall save your village from burning, and your young maidens from serious trouble, and your wives from fickleness? Only M’lo, who is so small that he may cook his dinner in the eye of a mosquito, and that terrible bird shall not feel!”

  “Lord,” said an aged man, shaking his head in fear, “we were a happy people till you came, for we knew nothing of M’lo, having our own devils, as our fathers had.”

  “To know is to suffer,” said Saka, truly and cryptically. “If you will not do these things for me, then you must pass, as many villages have passed. For what did I see on the other bank of the river but a village that was not? And the elephant grass is growing amidst the roof trees, and the graves of the dead – where are they?”

  Ten miles up the river was a village in which beri-beri had appeared, wiping out such of the population as would not flee before the scourge.

  “Who broke down the walls and rotted the roofs? – M’lo,” chanted Saka. “And now he has come here, and I fear you will all die…”

  Bones gave an order that he was to be called early. He had hailed with joy the excuse for breaking the journey, for he was most anxious to meet the Hon. Muriel Witherspan on terms that were complimentary to himself, and the Zaire was due that day, the chief told him – and he knew, for the lokali had been beating the news through the night. Bones, t
he subordinate of headquarters, was not the Bones in command of an important and special mission. It was only fair that she should know this. She might even find an inspiration in this new view of him.

  He imagined the picture of the year at the Royal Academy: a stern, handsome young officer, his sword girt to his waist, his sun helmet pushed back to show the almost Grecian nose and the perfect chin of a born commander. He was standing in the white African sunlight, his hands resting lightly on the barrel of a Hotchkiss gun; in the background, an infuriated mob of indigenous natives, whose bloody spears and blood-curdling yells failed to shake the courage of this cynically smiling young man. (Bones had practised the cynical smile for days.) And the picture would be called, simply: “An Empire Builder,” or “The Iron Hand and the Velvet Glove,” or something similarly appropriate.

  He had neither the time nor the necessary apparatus to do his hair as he would like it to be done, but that was a pleasure in store; Abiboo had brought him the intelligence that the Wiggle was free from the sand shoal, and was riding at anchor in the clear waters beyond.

  “Take the men on board,” said Bones briskly. “We will not sail for an hour or two. I must overhaul the machinery, Abiboo.”

  Abiboo went and collected his prisoner and men, shipped them on board and sat down to wait. Bones shaved with the greatest care with a safety razor, and, slipping a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, he shuffled down to a secluded cove in the river for his morning bath.

  The idea of being depicted in the Academy was an enthralling one. The fact that Miss Muriel Witherspan did not exhibit in the Academy, or anywhere else that made superlative merit a test for exhibition, did not occur to Bones. He saw himself walking before the picture of the year, viewing it with a quiet, quizzical, self-deprecatory smile, and stroll away, followed by turning heads which whispered “That is he! Tibbetts, the Empire Builder.”

  He was so absorbed with this picture that he stood for some time breast-high in the water, staring solemnly at the Wiggle in midstream.