Organized on military lines, with a colonel, five captains, ten lieutenants and fifty sergeants, respectively commanding five hundred, one hundred, fifty, and ten men, they formed the army of Blackland and levied war. A war devoid of honour, moreover, a war of loot, consisting only of pillaging the wrecked villages and of massacring or enslaving all their inhabitants. The Merry Fellows also acted as the police of the town; by blows (except when they used their revolvers) they controlled the slaves who performed the agricultural and other work. But above all they formed the Chiefs bodyguard and obeyed his orders blindly.

The town's third section, the most distant from the centre, formed a semicircular arc, about six hundred yards long and fifty wide. Its two extremities abutted on the first section and on the Red River, and it followed the circuit of the town, between its outer boundary, and that of the second section, where the slaves were parked.

In this third section there lived, under the general name of the Civil Body, the whites not permitted in the first. While waiting for a place to become vacant in this (which did not take very long, for the brutal customs of Blackland caused frequent deaths) they spent their time in the Civil Body, which could thus be considered as a purgatory whose paradise would be the Merry Fellows.

To subsist until then, for only the Merry Fellows were supported by the Chief and the town's communal activities, they went in for trade. Their section was thus the commercial quarter of the town, and it was there that the Merry Fellows could buy countless products, including the most luxurious. These the merchants bought from the Chief, who gained them either as plunder or else, as regards articles of European origin, by methods known only to himself and his immediate entourage.

This third section comprised 246 inhabitants, including 45 white women, who were worth no more than their male fellow citizens of the same colour.

Between the first and the third section was the second, with a surface of about 63 acres. This was the slaves' quarter, their number then being 5,778, of which 4,196 were men and 1,582 women. It was there, almost without exception, that they dwelt. There were their huts. There they spent their wretched lives.

Each morning the four doors in its wall opened, and, driven by Merry Fellows armed with bludgeons and guns, those of the Negroes who were not busied with the town's upkeep went, by brigades, to the agricultural work. In the evening the miserable herd returned in the same manner, and the heavy doors closed until the next day. There was no exit to the outer world. On one side the Merry Fellows, on the other the Civil Body. On all sides being equally bloodthirsty and equally fierce.

Many of these wretches died, either from the privations they suffered, or under the blows of their guardians too often transformed into murderers. This was a trifling misfortune. Another raid would soon fill the gaps, and other martyrs would replace those freed by death.

But these districts on the right bank did not form the whole of Blackland. On the left bank of the Red River the ground rose abruptly to form a hill about fifty yards high. Here the outer wall extended, marking out a rectangle twelve hundred yards along the riverside and three hundred yards from its banks. This second town, scarcely smaller than the first, for it covered about seventy acres, was itself divided into two equal parts by a high transverse wall. 

One of these halves, on the north-east slope of the hill, had been converted into the Fortress Garden, a public park communicating at its northern end, by means of the Garden Bridge, with the sections occupied by the Merry Fellows and the Civil Body. The other half, placed on the summit, contained the vital organs of the city.

In the northern corner, beside the public garden, rose a huge quadrangular construction, surrounded by flanking walls; its north-west face towered over the Red River from a height of about ninety feet. Usually called the Palace, this was the home of Harry Killer and nine of his companions, promoted to the rank of Counsellors. Strange Counsellors, the habitual accomplices in their Chief s crimes. Strange Counsellors, whose chief function was the immediate execution of the orders of a master who was inaccessible and almost always invisible, and from whose sentences there was no appeal.

Another bridge, barred by a solid grille during the night, the Castle Bridge, connected the seat of government with the right bank.

To the Palace were annexed two barracks. One was assigned to a dozen slaves who acted as servants, and also to fifty Negroes, chosen from those who seemed to have the fiercest natural instincts, and who formed the Black Guard. In the other lived forty whites selected on the same principle; to these was confided the use of the flying machines spoken of in Blackland as heliplanes.

A wonderful invention of a brain of genius, these heliplanes  were powerful machines, able to travel without refuelling up to three thousand miles at an average speed of two hundred and fifty miles an hour. To these heliplanes the pirates of Blackland owed the gift of ubiquity which they seemed to possess, enabling them to vanish as soon as a crime was committed. On these heliplanes the despotic power of Harry Killer chiefly rested.

It was indeed by terror that he governed the unknown empire of which Blackland was the capital, by terror that he had established and maintained his authority. Nevertheless the autocrat had not failed to foresee a revolt of his subjects, black or white.