grass clung to the expensive material. From this Mohammed deduced that Sebastian had either fallen, or in sickness had lain down to rest.
'Manali,' Mohamed cried in concern. 'Are you well?'
'Never better never in all my life,' Sebastian assured him.
'You have been lying down, 'Mohammed accused.
'Son of a gun,' Sebastian borrowed from the vocabulary of Flynn O'Flynn. 'Son of a gun, you can say that again and then repeat id' and he clapped Mohammed between the shoulder blades with such well- intentioned violence that it almost floored him. Since then, Sebastian had not spoken again, but every few minutes he would smile and shake his head in wonder. Mohammed was truly worried.
They crossed the Rovurna in hired canoes and camped that night on the far bank. Twice during the night Mohammed awoke, slipped out of his blanket, and crept across to Sebastian to check his condition. Each time Sebastian was sleeping easily and the silver moonlight showed just a suggestion of a smile on his lips.
In the middle of the next morning, Mohammed halted the column in thick cover and came back from the head to confer with Sebastian. 'The village of M'tapa lies just beyond,' he pointed ahead. 'You can see the smoke from the fires.'
There was a greyish smear of it above the trees, and faintly a dog began yapping.
'Good. Let's go.' Sebastian had donned his eagle helmet and was struggling into his boots.
'First I will send the Askari to surround the village.'
Why? 'Sebastian looked up in surprise.
'Otherwise there will be nobody there when we arrive.'
During his service with the German Imperial Army, Mohammed had been on tax expeditions before.
'Well if you think it necessary,' Sebastian agreed dubiously.
Half an hour later Sebastian swaggered in burlesque of a German officer into the village of M'tapa, and was dismayed by the reception he received. The lamentations of two hundred human beings made a hideous chorus for his entry.
Some of them were on their knees and all of them were wringing their hands, smiting their breasts or showing other signs of deep distress. At the far end of the village M'tapa, the headman, waited under guard by Mohammed and two of his Askari.
M'tapa was an old man, with a cap of pure white wool, and an emaciated body covered with a parchment of dry skin. One eye was glazed over with tropical ophthalmia, and he was clearly very agitated. 'I crawl on my belly before you, Splendid and Merciful Lord,' he greeted Sebastian, and prostrated himself in the dust.
'I say, that isn't necessary, you know,' murmured Sebastian.
'My poor village welcomes you,' whimpered M'tapa.
Bitterly he recriminated. himself for thus being taken unawares. He had not expected the tax expedition for another two months, and had taken no pains with the disposal of his wealth. Buried under the earthen floor of his hut was nearly a thousand silver Portuguese escudos and half again as many golden Deutschmarks. The traffic of his villagers in dried fish, netted in the RoVUma river, was highly organized and lucrative.
Now he dragged himself pitifully to his old knees and signalled two of his wives to bring forward stools and gourds of palm wine.
'It has been a year of great pestilence, disease and famine,' M'tapa began his prepared speech, when Sebastian was seated and refreshed. The rest of it took fifteen minutes to deliver, and Sebastian's Swahili was now strong enough for him to follow the argument. He was deeply touched.
Under the spell of palm wine and his new rosy outlook on life, he felt his heart going out to the old man.
While M'tapa spoke, the other villagers had dispersed quietly and barricaded themselves in their huts. It was best not to draw attention to oneself when candidates for the rope were being selected. Now a mournful silence hung over the village, broken only by the mewling of an infant and the squabbling of a pair of mangy mongrels, contesting the ownership of a piece of offal.
'Manali,' impatiently Mohammed interrupted the old man's catalogue of misfortune. 'Let me search his hut.'
Wait,' Sebastian stopped him. He had been looking about, and beneath the single baobab tree in the centre of the village he had noticed a dozen or so crude litters. Now he stood up and walked across to them.
When he saw what they contained, his throat contracted with horror. In each litter lay a human skeleton, the bones still covered with a thin layer of living flesh and skin. Naked men and women mixed indiscriminately, but their bodies so wasted that it was almost impossible to tell their sex. The pelvic girdles were gaunt basins of bone, elbows and knees great deformed knobs distorting the stick-like limbs, each rib standing out in clear definition, the faces were skulls whose lips had shrunk to expose the teeth in a perpetual sardonic grin, But the real horror was contained in the sunken eye cavities; the lids were fixed wide open and the eyeballs glared like red marbles. There was no pupil nor iris, just those polished orbs the colour of blood.
Sebastian stepped back hurriedly, feeling his belly heave and the taste of it in his throat. Not trusting himself to speak, he beckoned for M'tapa to come to him, and pointed at the bodies in the litters.
M'tapa glanced at them without interest. They were so much part of the ordinary scene that for many days he had not consciously been aware of their existence. The village was situated on the edge of a tsetse fly belt, and since his childhood there had always been the sleeping sickness cases lying under the baobab tree, deep in the coma which precedes death. He could not understand Sebastian's concern.
'When... Sebastian's voice faltered, and he swallowed before going on. 'When did these people last eat? 'he asked.
'Not for a long time.' M'tapa was puz led by the question.
Everybody knew that once the sleeping time came they never ate again.
Sebastian had heard of people dying of starvation. It happened in places like India, but here he was confronted with the actual fact. A revulsion of feeling swept over him.
109 This was irrefutable proof that all M'tapa had told him was true. This was famine as he had not believed really could exist and he had been trying to extort money from these people!
Sebastian walked slowly back to his stool and sank down upon it. He removed the heavy helmet from his head, held it in his lap and sat staring miserably at his own feet. He was helpless with guilt and compassion.
Flynn O'Flynn had reluctantly provided Sebastian with one hundred escudos as travelling expenses to meet any emergency that might arise before he could make his first collection. Some of this had been expended on the hire of canoes to cross the Rovuma, but there was still eighty escudos left.
From his hip-pocket, Sebastian produced the tobacco pouch containing the money and counted out half of it.
tapa,' his voice was subdued. 'Take this money. Buy food for them.'
'Manali,' screeched Mohammed in protest. 'Manali. Do not do it.'
'Shut up!' Sebastian snapped at him, and prodded the handful of coins towards M'tapa. 'Take it!'
M'tapa stared at him as though he offered a live scorpion.
It was as unnatural as though a man-eating lion had walked up and rubbed itself against his leg.
'Take it,' Sebastian insisted impatiently, and in disbelief, M'tapa extended his cupped hands.
'Mohammed,' Sebastian stood up and replaced his helmet, 'we'll move on immediately to the next village.'
Long after Sebastian's column had disappeared into the bush again, old M'tapa squatted alone, clutching the coins, too stunned to move. At last he roused himself and shouted for one of his sons.
'Go quickly to the village of Saali, who is my brother.
Tell him that a madman comes to him. A German lord who comes to collect the hut tax and stays to offer gifts.
Tell him -.' here his voice broke as though he could not believe what he was about to say,'... tell him that this lord should be shown the ones who sleep, and that the madness will then come upon him, and he will give you forty escudos of the Portuguese. And, furthermore, there will be no hangings.'
saali, my uncle, will not believe these things.'
'No,' M'tapa admitted. 'It is true that he will not believe.
But tell him anyway.'
Saali received the message from his elder brother, and it induced in him a state of terror bordering on
1)paralysis- M'tapa, he knew, had a vicious sense of humour and there was between them that matter of the woman Gita, a luscious little fourteen- year-old who had deserted the village of M'tapa within two days of taking up her duties as M'tapa's junior wife, on the grounds that he was impotent and smelled like an hyena. She was now a notable addition to Saali's household. Saali was convinced that the true interpretation of his brother's, message was that the new German commissioner was a rampaging lion who would not be content with merely hanging a few of the old men but who might extend his attentions to Saali himself. Even should he escape the noose, he would be left destitute; his carefully accumulated
