Umango much nearer.”
“No chance?” Mark’s eyes narrowed as he looked into the dark. “You mean this tribe is closing in, in a circle?”
The Bushongo nodded urgently, and seemed to be making up his mind whether or not to run for it. Abruptly he reached a decision, swung around, and then fled across the clearing like a shadow.
“Come back here, you scum!” Mark roared after him, then as the noise of drums suddenly stopped, he too became quiet, gazing fearfully around him. The silence seemed awe-inspiring after the reverberation that had been so ceaseless.
Slowly Mark turned back into the tent. He collided with Ruth in the darkness.
“Get the kids,” he said briefly. “We’re getting out.”
“But—where to? Where do we go?” There was utter hopelessness in Ruth’s voice.
“I don’t know. The Umango are all around us, closing in. We might escape. Be better out in the open fighting it out than hemmed in this clearing. You take the kids, and I’ll carry what I can.”
Mark picked up his .303 Enfield and strapped on cartridge bandoliers. Ruth did not go immediately to the twin sons, now silent in the corner; she moved instead to the bottled water, bully beef tins, and other provisions. In the darkness she began sorting them out.
“Why should the Umango particularly wish to attack us?” she asked after a moment. “We’re doing them no harm.”
“We’re in their territory and not welcome,” Mark’s clipped voice retorted. “Our boys have all gone and left us to it. If we’re caught, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe a sacrifice, maybe anything. Come on, Ruth, how in hell much longer?”
“Ready, ready,” she said quickly, putting two water bottles in the big haversack along with the provisions.
Mark lifted the tent flap, peering cautiously into the utter and eerie silence. Untrained in jungle lore, he did not hear the stealthy advance of hundreds of fantastically painted warriors. His first awareness of anything was when a barbed shaft, soaked in venom, crashed into his chest.
He gulped, uttered a strangling cry, then pitched over on his face. Ruth looked up in alarm from the rough crib from which she had been about to gather the infants.
“Mark!” she whispered; then in a sudden frenzy as she dashed to the tent opening: “Mark! Mark—!”
She stopped, seeing him lying face down in the rank grass. In the deep gloom she could detect that he was not moving.
“Mark—” She caught at his shoulders desperately and dragged on them—then another sound made her look up. The clearing seemed to be alive with shadows, sweeping in towards her.
Fantastic figures poured out of the dark. Powerful hands seized her hair, her shoulders, her arms, her legs. She screamed frantically, again and again, until the forest seemed to be echoing to her cries.
* * * *
1952
Caleb Moon sat and sweated. There was not much else he could do in this stinking, tobacco-smoked café on the waterfront of Makondo in Somaliland. As he sat he drank and sweated some more. He was a heavily built man, inclined to corpulence, and dressed in a faded khaki-drill suit. A sun-helmet was pushed up on his damp black hair, His face was podgy, greasy, and unprepossessing. Dark eyes, black as sloes, darted about in eternally restless movement as though he were afraid of seeing somebody he did not like. In a sense this was true. As a trader of dubious scruples, dealing in ivory, diamonds, skins, or anything else that had a value, he had many enemies.
For nearly half an hour he remained slouched, hardly moving, watching either the men and women around him, or else the bead curtains that screened the outer door of the café. Then, suddenly, he straightened and got to his feet. A man and a woman, obviously Europeans, had just appeared and were looking about them. They looked surprisingly clean and cool in this oppressive den of seamen, half-breeds, and drifting women.
Moon went over to the man and woman and raised his sun-helmet briefly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Perrivale?” he enquired, with an unctuous smile. “Caleb Moon....”
“How are you, Mr. Moon?” Harry Perrivale’s greeting was completely matter-of-fact as he shook the trader’s damp hand.
“How do you do?” Rita Perrivale acknowledged, contented with a mere nod.
“Over here—” Moon motioned. “I have a quiet table.”
He led the way to where he had been seated and dragged up chairs. There were one or two curious glances towards the well-dressed Europeans, then interest in them expired. It was too hot to be interested in anybody.
“Drink?” Moon asked, mopping his neck.
“Whiskey,” Harvey Perrivale answered, and Rita named a soft drink. The waiter obliged, and then Moon sat back and breathed heavily.
“I was beginning to fear you weren’t coming,” he commented. “And that would have been a pity—for both of us.”
“We were delayed.” Perrivale sipped his drink. He was a man of thirty-five, sharp-featured, dark, handsome after a fashion, but spoilt by a dissolute mouth and poor chin. “From Port Durnford to here is quite a distance. Anyway, let’s hear more of this proposition of yours.”
“It is unchanged from when I explained it to you in Port Durnford,” Moon shrugged. “I have a map showing a route through Central Africa to a lost city by the name of Akada. In that city there is gold and ivory for the picking up—but I am not a man of money. To fit out a safari to cross Central Africa takes a good deal of finance. You have backed tropical expeditions before now; I thought you might wish to back this one.”
“Mmmm. I gathered that was it. What is there in it for me?”
“Fifty-fifty on whatever Akada contains. Surely that’s fair enough? I have the map; you have the money. Neither of us can do without the other. Share profits.”
There was silence for a moment. Rita Perrivale’s grey eyes travelled over the assembled men and women at the tables and her sensitive nostrils twitched in disgust. She was a girl of infinite refinement, ten years younger than her husband, and not all sure what had been the matter with her when she had fallen for him. He was a millionaire, certainly, but that was not everything.
“Let me see the map,” Perrivale ordered at length, but Moon shook his head and grinned.
“Wouldn’t be good business, sir. You might have a photographic mind.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean—bluntly—that I won’t show it you unless we have an agreement. Your finance—my map.”
Rita sat back and smiled rather bitterly. She was accustomed to these wrangles with traders and shysters on this torrid coast. Her husband, bored with millions, found he got a kick out of trying to add to them—hence he was known as the moneybags behind most of the expeditions into the interior. Usually he cleaned up something out of his risk.
“I don’t see why
