This had been the plantation founded by the son of the old man and the father of the younger. Here the old man would linger, while the son of his son went on that strange mission of his to the hidden country of his birth.
There'd been ample confirmation of that earlier report concerning Prince Otto. It had been decided, all right. Preparations were about completed. Prince Otto was going to "lead" an expedition into the Devil Bush in search of "the missing link."
The expedition was purely scientific, of course; but there'd be enough guns and ammunition among the stores for a small-sized army. The prince, moreover, was not going solely on his own. Half-a-dozen other ambitious young big-game hunters were going with him—boys, or men, who'd already shot hippos and giraffes, gazelles and antelope; and tigers and lions even—all with the utmost guarantees of perfect comfort and safety.
The Rahans, Nat and his grandfather, had talked things over.
YOU couldn't stop the prince by ordinary means. Could you? He was a prince. He had practically the entire diplomatic corps of the world ready to jump through the hoop at his slightest gesture. You couldn't shoot him. Although Nat proposed this—knowing gorillas as he did and remembering what the prince had done to his friends.
Nor were the Rahans in a position to organize an expedition of their own. That would have meant right away too much publicity. And publicity was the one thing they most wished to avoid.
There was such danger of publicity that the nature of their visit—the real purpose of it—couldn't be discussed, even, once they had established themselves up the dark river on the Memory Plantation.
There was a brick house here—really a sort of bungalow, of only one story, but perched on high brick piers, with wide verandas. And here the two of them had settled down, ostensibly for a period of study and quiet recreation, with such servants as they needed, black and white, from the yacht, from the "bush."
Then quietly, in a way prearranged in such a manner that there would be no alarm, young Nat had slipped away—
Like gods also, young Prince Otto and his friends came down to Africa. They came by the fashionable way, through Kenya, over on the East Coast, where there could be incidental polo, tennis, golf and dances, before the caravan of motor-trucks could roll off with these white gods and their black attendants into the blue.
They were to make their way by easy stages up to the foothills of the Ruwenzori Range—the old Mountains of the Moon; called after the moon, because the tops of them were moon-colored, white, the fetish color, and so, somehow sacred still.
Then, along the Mountains of the Moon toward the west. Here there would be gaps in the mountain chain. And one of the last broken and separated links of the chain would be Sango Lobango, the two of which was also moon-colored—and fetish—such times as it came into view.
There'd been a lot of talk of late about "Brightest Africa" instead of "Darkest Africa."
THAT was all right for those who stuck to the motor-safari trails, the railroad and steamboat lines, the aerial mail-routes of England, Belgium, France.
But "Darkest Africa" was still a fact.
Prince Otto and his friends began to discover that the further they pushed on into the great forest belt—"north of the Congo and south of the Soudan"—and kept on westward.
This was drum country. Drums could be heard every night, and it was night soon as the sun went down. The drums were talking and were saying—what?
Prince Otto and his friends could find no one who would—or could— tell them what.
"Gri-gri" country—a country of old magic that mostly had to do with lost and wandering souls.
For more than a thousand years, this part of Africa had been the red hunting-ground of slave-and-ivory raiders. Time and again it had been reaped of its harvest of men and elephants until it had become like a haunted graveyard. To control these errant spirits, hurt and angry, some pretty strong measures had come into use.
Such things as giving the dead a chance to live again; ceremonial eating of the dead; obeah.
Obeah dealt with poison; all sorts. You could poison a man or poison his ghost; you could do this by contact or do it from afar—
THERE was a night when Prince Otto awoke in a cold sweat and wondered why. He'd had an excellent dinner of antelope steak and asparagus tips, washed down with as good a Burgundy as ever came out of France. To grace the princely table there had been other delicacies not always associated with an African safari—caviar, French pancakes, Vienna coffee, Bosnian cigarettes.
The prince lay there for a while in the dark. There was no one else in his tent. Through the double screen of mosquito netting and canvas he could make out the glow of a campfire. He could hear some of his men still talking. So it wasn't possible that a lion—for instance—had crept into camp.
Yet that was the feeling that came to him—that something was dangerous and near—something that stared at him with baleful intent.
It couldn't have been anything that he'd eaten. His digestion was perfect. He hadn't eaten too much. The cold sweat persisted. It was becoming the icy grip of panic. He switched on a light.
There seemed to be a big spider in the tent, suspended from the ridge-pole—a spider grotesquely big. It faded. It disappeared.
Obeah—which is perhaps the great—grandmother of voodoo, the serpent cult—has a Spider God.
CHAPTER VII
SPIDER DOCTOR
IT WAS strange how the memory of that spider he'd seen—or thought that he'd seen—came back to the prince the next morning the moment he left his tent and saw a strange black man seated near one of the cook-fires.
Or what had been a cook-fire. For the fire was now deserted by those who ordinarily would have been there. The cook-fire crowd were around another fire, evidently but recently started; and they were now making a pretense of getting on with their work. But it would have been manifest to anyone with half an eye that their attention was secretly—when not openly—fixed on that savage stranger near the fire they had left.
Prince Otto looked at this man.
There was something about him suggesting great age, also a sort of stiffness and a grotesqueness hard to explain.
At first glance, he seemed to be all legs and arms; although this impression dissolved on closer scrutiny. So did several of those earlier impressions. Like that impression of age, for example.
He had a fuzzy mop of hair that stood on end, but crinkly. And this was a dirty gray; only the gray seemed to be more like an effect of ashes, or of some silvery white powder, rather than the natural gray of old age.
Under this mop of hair there was a face that was rather handsome and— all things considered—remarkably brilliant and young. It was a face in which the eyes especially were noticeable. These were behold and intelligent, fixed yet elusive, like a pair of faceted black diamonds. The rest of the face, moreover, jet black, was partly covered by a sparse beard, a crinkly silver, like the hair.
The stranger was long-limbed, it was true; both as to legs and arms— long-jointed and straight and slender; so slender that the body appeared a little stooped and pot-bellied by comparison. Such clothing as the stranger wore consisted mostly of rags and wild-cat tails.
ALL of this accounted, to some extent, Prince Otto decided, for the association in his thought of this man and that nightmare spider he had seen—spidery arms and legs, beady eyes, a body, mostly paunch, and that body covered with a nondescript gray bristle.
"Who him?" the prince asked Doomy, the black interpreter.
Doomy was more or less West Coast, of Kromantin stock, who'd been but recently taken on for this part of the trip.
"Him," said Doomy, rolling his eyes; "him—him oganga."
"Witch-doctor, eh?"
The prince's translation of "oganga" was substantially correct, but Doomy's look intimated that there was something more implied. The prince stood there looking at the figure seated by the fire. Once more, compellingly, there came to him the impression of a great spider
seated there—shriveled from man-size yet huge. He brushed this impression from his mind.
"Him say," Doomy expounded, "him hear drum talk in the bush. Him come for stay."
"What for? What does he want?"
"Him savvy Devil Bush. Him savvy Sango Lobango."
"What's his name?"
Doomy, the black interpreter, caught his breath. The name came out in "what was taken you?" unmistakably a frightened whisper:
"Anansi!"
The prince looked at Doomy. "How you say?"
"Anansi!"
"All right. Anansi!" the prince laughed a little. "Me think so," he said, "you one big fool man, Doomy. You act all same you too much frighten."
All during the time of this little palaver, the man they were talking about had been sitting there by the fire and apparently paying no attention at all to what was going on around him. Someone had given him a bowl of mush, or some such food, and he was eating this with his fingers. His motions as he did this were peculiar—not fast, but with occasional clicks of speed; and bringing both hands to his mouth at once, with a dribbling, incessant movement of his fingers.
There was something repellant about the spectacle—and this also was hard to explain. The prince turned away. His own breakfast was waiting.
THERE were now only four white men in the party—the prince himself and three others. One of these was the young Count Willy Schwerinvik, who had been with Prince Otto on his gorilla-killing picnic—monocled, dapper, and himself a killer of parts; Major Hind, an old army man and Afrikander, who was really there at the behest of Prince Otto's family to keep an eye out for the safety of the younger men; and Professor Carl, who'd written books on African dialects and folklore.
The three others were already seated at the camp-table—breakfast was served in the open—when the prince came up. They arose and saluted with pleasant greetings.
But they had barely seated themselves again before the young Count Schwerinvik jumped up with a curse. He'd overturned his coffee cup.
"Why, Willy!" cried Prince Otto. "What's
"THERE was a damned spider," Willy explained, beginning a laugh. "I almost drank it. Right in my coffee cup."
"We must be in a spider district," said Major Hind. "I've been seeing them, too. We should move on. They can be worse than ants."
The prince made no reference to that thing he'd seen—or thought he'd seen—in his tent. Professor Carl was beginning to speak.
"Hah," he said, "spiders! Very interesting! The large part they take in native beliefs. They rank quite with the serpents and the leopards. I might say almost that they rank about them. In the North, we have the tradition of the Kraken, the great sea-spider; supported by what we know of some of the giant crabs still infesting certain waters. Here in the South, it is the legend of the great land-spider that persists—the spider that can become a man—or the man that can become a spider." He paused. He pronounced a name: "The Anansi!"
Prince Otto, listening, suddenly lost interest in his breakfast. He remembered that name that the interpreter, Doomy, had given the stranger at the fire. He remembered many things—the fear that Doomy had shown, the aloofness of the other blacks, the haunt he'd seen in his tent. He turned and looked away.
He saw the stranger still seated at the side of the fire. He was hunched and gray. He seemed, somehow, to be all legs and arms. You could imagine him seated at the center of a web, eating something with an incessant play of fingers.
"Ach!" he said. "Anansi! So! A spider that changes into a man; a man that changes into a spider! In Maylasia, it's the tiger. In old Rome, the dog. In France and Germany, the loup-garou, the werewolf."
He tried to laugh it off, but he couldn't.
"Africa," the professor said, "is like the ocean. Unknown! Unexplored! Who knows but some day we may still find the unicorn, as Sir Richard Burton was inclined to believe; and if not the unicorn, why not, anyway the Anansi?"
Major Hind broke in, tersely, as was his usual style.
"I've heard those Anansi stories," he said, "and I believe them."
"We have a new guide," Prince Otto spoke up. "I think we keep him. His name also is—Anansi!"
CHAPTER VIII
"BAD PLACE TOO MUCH"
FOR two days and two nights—off and on in the way of jungle travel, yet traveling steadily enough—Kwa had worked his way through the outer fastnesses of the Sango Lobango country. A maze of sharp pinnacles and deep clefts, all jungle covered; steaming from fires and waters in the depths of the earth. The earth was like a thing alive. The breath of it was moist and hot. The jungle was a smothering green blanket.
He was never alone. Buffalo and elephants, chimps and gorillas, a band of okapi; a changing cloud of lesser creatures; leopards—they ghosted in, they lingered, they ghosted away again.
Most of the creatures who'd been with him at the pool were never far away. The old-lady chimp he called Faint Whistle in his thought was with him always. She'd adopted him, or he'd adopted her.
When he went to the Far-Far Country, she said, she'd go with him if he cared to take her. If she cared to go, he said, he'd take her. Then, with some premonition of trouble in his mind, Kwa had given her careful instructions how to reach the bungalow on the dark river, at the Memory Plantation. She'd be safe with his father, if anything happened.
The chimp-mother searched his face with her sad bright eyes.
"You know?" she said.
"I know," said Kwa, "that even you jungle people are nervous in this country that we are passing through. Are there devils in the Devil Bush that even Tembo and his people are afraid of?"
"There is a devil of the old time. He was gone. The whisper comes that he returns again."
"Who?"
"The spider god. The whisper goes about that this is his country. The whisper goes round that he is jealous of your coming—that he is angry."
It was another sort of whisper that had reached Kwa already, a number of times. It had reached him in the form of so much Krumouf—trade-English—of the Coast: "Bad place too much!"
YET the animals hadn't deserted him. They were moved by some ancient dread—by a prehistoric wisdom, perhaps—for who will ever know the truth that lies back of any old dread in the way of what is called superstition?--and yet they hadn't deserted him. They had seen him battle and kill one usurper, Sobek, the crocodile. Sobek had been like one of the gods come down from Ancient Egypt. Yet he had been mortal. Now, this other.
Kwa had heard rumors enough, off and on, ever since his earliest infancy, about a spider god—or devil.
"Tonight," he told the old chimp mother, "I shall dance again."
He looked about him. There was a wild banana growing near. He cut and rolled a leaf of this into a trumpet ten feet long.
At first, when he blew into this—with a movement of his swelling throat that should have resulted in words or notes—there seemed to be no sound. No sound at all. If anything, it seemed rather that his efforts were, if anything, intensifying the silence of the world about him.
To ears finely attuned to the jungle silence there'd been a stir of movement all along—a slithering, scattering murmur of scale and foot and wing, never louder than the flow of quiet water, but always there. This stopped.
Then, in its place, there was a pulsing drone—it would have been a bellowing if it had been louder—such a bellowing now as might have been heard from cattle many miles away.
PRESENTLY, Kwa held the leaf trumpet aside and listened. Through the dead silence there came a faint stir and tremor of responsive sound— it was as soft as a breeze, and yet it seemed as big, as wide and high and penetrating. It flowed in like an echo of his own trumpet call.
"You heard my call," Kwa said that night.
It was late, for he'd waited for the moon. And he was in a small elephant park, which was like a mere well in the jungle, so the moon had to be high to shine into it.
The place was crowded; and no animal fearing another because it had become a la
w that where Kwa was, there the Ancient Truce held good. It would have been strange, for anyone not accustomed to it, to see pythons coiling and swaying from branches where birds were quietly perched; to see the big cats disregarding goats and monkeys and these in turn disregarding the cats.
Tembo, the great tusker, was there. He'd brought strange elephants with him. No lions were present. Lions couldn't live in these sunless green chasms, but some of the leopards ran almost to lion size.
"YOU heard my call," said Kwa, and as he threw back his head, one
would have said that he was addressing the moon. "Oshu is white"—Oshu
was the moon—"and I am white—and I am the little elder brother of
you all. Oshu fears no devil. I fear no devil. Hey, you, devil! Spider
devil. Anansi!--"
There was something equivalent to a gasp. There was a sort of shuddering whisper in that all but toneless and soundless universal speech:
"Anansi comes!"
Kwa saw it. All the animals were seeing it.
They saw it silhouetted at first against the white disc of the moon— the semblance of an enormous spider suspended on high in its web.
The spider seemed to descend, leisurely—a stop and an instant of speed, then a leisurely movement of descent again.
The animals were spellbound.
Tembo and some of the other elephants had raised their trunks, slowly, in a form of salute or merely as an expression of awe and solemnity. The smaller monkeys were shivering and crowding together. The leopards were shifting about. The wild pigs were off at a rush. But they'd be back again. They were always doing that. Just nerves rather than a lack of courage. The pigs were as brave for their weight as elephants or lions.
Kwa, after his own first gasp of surprise, felt himself go steady. He'd called on the moon. It was as if the moon were now giving him a bath of cold white light. Queer things the moon had looked down on since the day of her birth.
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 3
