Resistance was manifestly useless. What could they do against a hundred natives? they were assailed on every hand. In accordance with what seemed a preconcerted plan, they were carried off from the anthill with brutal violence, in two parties, without the chance of a farewell word or sign.
Dick Sands saw that Mrs. Weldon, Jack, and Cousin Benedict were placed on board one boat, and were conveyed towards the camp, whilst he himself, with the five negroes and old Nan, was forced into another, and taken in a different direction. Twenty natives formed a bodyguard around them, and five boats followed in their rear.
Useless though it were, Dick and the negroes made one desperate attempt to maintain their freedom; they wounded several of their antagonists, and would doubtless have paid their lives as a penalty for their daring, if there had not been special orders given that they should be taken alive.
The passage of the flood was soon accomplished. The boat had barely touched the shore, when Hercules with a tremendous bound sprang onto the land. Instantly two natives rushed upon him. The giant clave their skulls with the butt end of his gun, and made off. Followed though he was by a storm of bullets, he escaped in safety, and disappeared beneath the cover of the woods.
Dick Sands and the others were guarded to the shore, and fettered like slaves.
VII
A Slave Caravan
The storm of the previous night, by swelling the tributaries of the Cuanza, had caused the main river to overflow its banks. The inundation had entirely changed the aspect of the country, transforming the plain into a lake, where the peaks of a number of anthills were the sole objects that emerged above the watery expanse.
The Cuanza, which is one of the principal rivers of Angola, falls into the Atlantic about a hundred miles from the spot at which the Pilgrim was stranded. The stream, which a few years later was crossed by Cameron on his way to Benguela, seems destined to become the chief highway of traffic between Angola and the interior; steamers already ply upon its lower waters, and probably ten years will not elapse before they perform regular service along its entire course.
Dick Sands had been quite right in searching northwards for the navigable stream he had been so anxious to find; the rivulet he had been following fell into the Cuanza scarce a mile away, and had it not been for this unexpected attack he and his friends might reasonably have hoped to descend the river upon a raft, until they reached one of the Portuguese forts where steam vessels put in. But their fate was ordered otherwise.
The camp which Dick had descried from the anthill was pitched upon an eminence crowned by an enormous sycamore-fig, one of those giant trees occasionally found in Central Africa, of which the spreading foliage will shelter some five hundred men. Some of the non-fruit-bearing kind of banyan-trees formed the background of the landscape.
Beneath the shelter of the sycamore, the caravan which had been referred to in the conversation between Negoro and Harris had just made a halt. Torn from their villages by the agents of the slave-dealer Alvez, the large troop of natives was on its way to the market of Kazonndé, thence to be sent as occasion required either to the west coast, or to Nyangwé, in the great lake district, to be dispersed into Upper Egypt or Zanzibar.
Immediately on reaching the camp, the four negroes and old Nan were placed under precisely the same treatment as the rest of the captives. In spite of a desperate resistance, they were deprived of their weapons, and fastened two and two, one behind another, by means of a pole about six feet long, forked at each end, and attached to their necks by an iron bolt. Their arms were left free, that they might carry any burdens, and in order to prevent an attempt to escape a heavy chain was passed round their waists. It was thus in single file, unable to turn either right or left, they would have to march hundreds of miles, goaded along their toilsome road by the havildar’s whip. The lot of Hercules seemed preferable, exposed though undoubtedly he would be in his flight to hunger, and to the attacks of wild beasts, and to all the perils of that dreary country. But solitude, with its worst privations, was a thing to be envied in comparison to being in the hands of those pitiless drivers, who did not speak a word of the language of their victims, but communicated with them only by threatening gestures or by actual violence.
As a white man, Dick was not attached to any other captive. The drivers were probably afraid to subject him to the same treatment as the negroes, and he was left unfettered, but placed under the strict surveillance of a havildar. At first he felt considerable surprise at not seeing Harris or Negoro in the camp, as he could not entertain a doubt that it was at their instigation the attack had been made upon their retreat; but when he came to reflect that Mrs. Weldon, Jack, and Cousin Benedict had not been allowed to come with them, but had been carried off in some other direction, he began to think it probable that the two rascals had some scheme to carry out with regard to them elsewhere.
The caravan consisted of nearly eight hundred, including about five hundred slaves of both sexes, two hundred soldiers and freebooters, and a considerable number of havildars and drivers, over whom the agents acted as superior officers.
These agents are usually of Portuguese or Arab extraction; and the cruelties they inflict upon the miserable captives are almost beyond conception; they beat them continually, and if any unfortunate
