The big raindrops fell fitfully.

Then above the noise of thunder came a new sound–a. weird howling that set the paddlers working with quicker strokes.

“Whow-w-w!”

A terrifying shriek deafened them.

The man nearest him dropped his paddle with a frightened whimper, and Bosambo caught it.

“Paddle, dogs!” he thundered.

They were within a dozen yards of the shore when, by the quick flashing lightning, he saw a jagged path suddenly appear in the forest on the bank before him.

It was as though giant hands were plucking at trees. They twisted and reeled like drunken men–cracked, and fell over.

“Paddle!”

Then something caught Bosambo and lifted him from the canoe. Up, up he went; then as swiftly down to the water; up again, and down. He struck out for the shore, choked and half-conscious.

His fingers caught the branches of a stricken tree, and he drew himself to land. He stumbled forward on his hands and knees, panting heavily.

Overhead the storm raged, but Bosambo did not heed it. His forty paddlers, miraculously cast ashore by the whirlwind, lay around him laughing and moaning, according to their temperaments.

But these he forgot.

For he was engaged in the composition of a hurried and apologetic prayer to M’shimba-m’shamba, the green one, the Swift Walker.

The People of the River

5. BRETHREN OF THE ORDER

NATIVE men loved Sanders of the River well enough to die for him. Some hated him well enough to kill him. These things have a trick of balancing themselves, and the story of Tambeli the Strong, and a member of that sinister organisation, the Silent Ones of Nigeria, offers an object lesson on this point.

From the Big River which empties itself into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between Dacca and Banana Point–this is a fairly vague location–run a number of smaller rivers, east, west, and northerly, more or less.

The Isisi, or “Little River,” is one of these. It runs to the conjunction of the Baranga River, and it is a moot point among geographers whether the right confluence is the true Isisi and the left confluence the Baranga, or vice versa.

Commissioner Sanders, in defiance of all cartographers, traces the Isisi to the right, because the left river runs through the land of lawless tribes, which are called in the native tongue Nushadombi, or literally, “the-Men-Who-Are-Not-All-Alike.”

Beyond the deep forest through which for twenty miles the Baranga runs, beyond and northward of the swampland where the crocodiles breed, lies a lake with a score of outlets, none of which are navigable. Here, at one time, was a village, and to this village had drifted the outcast men of a hundred tribes. Men bloodguilty, survivors of unlawful feuds, evaders of taxes, the sinful and the persecuted of every tribe and people within a hundred miles came drifting into Nushadombi.

So that in course of time what had once been a village grew to a city, and that city the hub of a nation.

They dwelt apart, a sullen, hateful people, defiant of all laws save the laws of self-preservation. Successive expeditions were sent against them. They were near the border of the German territory, and took that which pleased them, contemptuous of border line or defined sphere.

Germany sent a native army through a swamp to destroy them–that army drifted back in twos and threes, bringing stories of defeat and the unpleasant consequences thereof.

France, from the south-east dispatched an expedition with no better success.

Sanders neither sent armed forces nor peace mission.

He knew a great deal more about this strange nation than he ever put into the dispatches, the production of which, for the benefit of an Under-Secretary of Colonial Affairs, was a monthly nightmare.

The commissioner ignored the existence of the People-Who-Were-Not-All-Alike. He might have continued in this attitude of wilful ignorance but for the advent into his official orbit of one Tambeli.

Tambeli had three gods. One was a fierce god, who came into his life when the rains came and the great winds howled through the forest, lifting up and casting down trees; when vivid flashes of lightning lit the forest with incessant stabbings of white flame, and the heavens crashed and crackled. He had another god, burnt and carved from a certain hard wood which is found in the N’Gombi country, and he had yet another god, which was himself.

Tambeli was the handsomest man of all the Isisi.

He was very tall, his shoulders were broad, his arms were perfectly moulded, the muscles being gathered in cordlike pads, properly. His hair he loved to dress with clay so that it billowed on either side of his head.

Wearing the skin of a leopard, and leaning on the long elephant spear, he would stand for hours by the edge of the river, the admiration of women who came to the shallow places to fill their cooking-pots. This was as Tambeli desired, for he was a man of gallantry. More so than was to the liking of certain husbands, so it is said; and there was an evening when, as Tambeli went stalking through the village, one M’fabo, an outraged man, sprang upon him from a hiding-place, roaring hoarsely in his mad anger. But Tambeli was as lithe as a cat and as strong as the leopard whose skin he wore. He grasped M’fabo by the throat, lifted him clear of the ground, and, swinging him round and round, as a mischievous boy might swing a rat by the tail, flung him into the hut he had quitted.

Thereafter no man raised his hand openly against Tambeli, though there were some who sought to injure him by stealth. A foreigner–a Congolaise man–slipped into his hut one night with a sharpened razor.

It was the little square razor that the Congo folk wear tucked away in their hair, and his pleasure was to cut Tambeli’s throat. This Congoman was never seen again–the river was very handy, and Tambeli was very strong–but his razor was found by the river’s edge and it was stained with blood.

Tambeli was a rich man, having goats and brass rods and salt in sacks. He had six wives, who tended his gardens and cooked for him, and they were proud of their lord, and gloried in his discreditable exploits. For Tambeli was a trader, though few knew it, and it was his practice to absent himself three months in the year on business of his own.

One day the chief of the village died, and the women having decked their bodies with green leaves, danced the death dance locked arm in arm.

Tambeli, watching the reeling line making its slow progress through the village street, had a thought, and when they laid the body on the bottom of a canoe and paddled it up-river to the middle island, where the dead were buried, Tambeli was swept down-stream, four of his wives paddling till, after a long day and a night, he came to the Isisi city where the king lived. To that great man he went. And the king, who was drunk, was neither sorry nor glad to see him.

“Lord King,” said he, “I am Tambeli of Isaukasu by the little river, and I have served you many times, as you well know.”

The king blinked at him with dull eyes, and said nothing.

“We are a people without a chief,” said Tambeli; “and the men of my village desire that I shall rule them in place of C’fari, who is dead.”

The king scratched his neck thoughtfully, but said nothing for a while; then he asked: “What do you bring?”

Tambeli detailed a magnificent list, which comprehended goats, salt, and rods to a fabulous amount. He added a gift which was beyond price.

“Go back to your people–chief,” said the king, and Tambeli embraced the knees of his master, and called him his father and his mother.

That is how Tambeli came to be sitting on the stool of chieftainship when Mr. Commissioner Sanders arrived unexpectedly from the south in his tiny steamboat.

* * * *

Now, Isaukasu lay on the very border line of the Ochori country, and was a village of some importance since the back country produced rubber and gum.