Sanders by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure Fiction
Publisher: epubBooks Classics
Published: 2014-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

VI: The Man Who Hated Sheffield

Beyond the Forest of Happy Dreams, which is a pestilential marsh, beautiful to see but deadly to traverse, lie the hunting grounds of the Isisi people; and beyond that again, the outhers of the N'gombi, a tribe which is sometimes called the Lesser N'gombi and sometimes the N'gombi Isisi, which means very much the same thing.

Here, in the depths of the primeval forest, unexploited by any save the hunters and the folk who collect rubber, lived, out of contact with their neighbours, and terribly jealous of interference, a certain sub–tribe who were called the Bald Men of I'fubi. They made no wars, stole neither goats nor women, lived without salt, and existed without any offence to any.

Once a year came Sanders, toiling through the forest, on his annual visit to these wayward children of his; but when he sat in palaver, to hear the accumulated grievances of the year, there was nothing to be told except that some luckless man of the Isisi or the Greater N'gombi had trespassed on their reserves or had killed their monkeys. Of private quarrels he never heard; he asked few questions and suspected much.

A rumour had reached him of a man of the tribe who had beaten his wife with great cruelty, and had defied his chief; but when Sanders came after, and expected to hear charges against the rebel, none was laid. And when, most discreetly, he asked what had happened to the man, they told him airily that he had died of the sickness mongo, and pointed out his shallow grave, where the torn shreds of his linen fluttered feebly and the broken cooking–pots of his house were scattered around. Also they showed him the place where his hut had been, and now all that Sanders could see was a drunken roof, half hidden by the elephant grass, and very wisely he did not pursue his inquiry any further. The "sickness mongo" might mean anything from beri–beri to the bright, curved executioner's knife which hung everlastingly at the entrance of the old chief's hut.

These Bald Men—and it is a curious fact that the heads even of the youth of the tribe shone like polished ebony—gave no trouble; carried no spears to the killing of their neighbours; paid their taxes regularly; were clean and industrious; and if they practised secret rites and concocted strange medicants, such as had never been heard of by any other people of the river, there was no blood–letting, so far as was known, and they served a most useful purpose, in that they stood, in their jealousy, as guardians of the Pans which stretched behind the forest, an unnatural plain, innocent of bush or tree for forty square miles. It was a legend amongst all the Europeans of the coast that the Pans were rich in alluvial gold. Certainly Government never sought to test the truth of this, putting in the balance, against such a discovery, the certainty of an influx of most undesirable people, who follow every discovery of gold.

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