On the afternoon of a certain day in spring a party of eighteen men was marching through the rocky, bush-covered country near the north-western corner of Lake Chad, in Northern Nigeria. It consisted of two white men, in khaki and sun helmets, and sixteen stalwart Hausas, wearing nothing but their loin-cloths, but carrying on their heads boxes and bundles of all shapes and sizes. The white men and nine of the negroes had rifles slung over their backs.
They were marching wearily. Since early morning, almost without stopping, they had been trudging their toilsome way over parched and barren land, only once discovering a water-hole at which they were able to slake their burning thirst.
For the greater part of the day the sun had beat upon them fiercely; but the sky was now overclouded, and a keen north-east wind had sprung up—the harmattan of the desert—blowing full in their faces, stinging their skins and filling mouths and ears and nostrils with the particles of fine grey dust which it swept along in its desolating course.
The jaded carriers, who were wont to enliven the march with song and chatter, were now silent. The two Englishmen in advance, bending forward to keep the grit out of their eyes, tramped along, side by side, with an air of dejection and fatigue.
"We are down on our luck, old man," said Hugh Royce presently, turning his back upon the wind. "The village can't be far away, if Drysdale's map is correct; but we can't go on much farther without a long rest."
"It's rank bad luck, as you say," replied Tom Challis. "It's not as if we had been over-marching; we've really taken it pretty easy; but we didn't reckon with sickness. These Hausas look as strong as horses, but I doubt whether half of them will be able to lift their loads to-morrow."
"When we get to the village, we'll let them slack for a day or two, and dose them well. I'll tell John; it will encourage them to stick it a little longer."
He beckoned up a strapping negro, the head-man of the company, upon whom a former employer had bestowed the name John in place of his own—a succession of clicks and gurgles which white men found unpronounceable. Telling him the decision just come to, the leader of the expedition ordered him to acquaint the men with it, and urge them to persevere a little longer.
The weary, willing carriers perked up a little at the prospect of a holiday, and began to talk to one another of how much they would eat. It did not matter, they agreed, if they made themselves ill, for the little balls out of the white men's bottles would soon set them to rights again.
Hugh Royce was one of those hardy persons whom wealth does not spoil. Inheriting, at the age of twenty-three, a large fortune from an uncle, he resolved to realise his dearest ambition—to travel into some little-known region of the world, not for mere sport, but to study its animals and birds, and add something to the general stock of knowledge.
A chance meeting with a friend of his, named Drysdale, who had just returned from a sporting expedition in Nigeria, led him to choose that country as a promising field of discovery.
Being sociably inclined, he wanted a companion. Drysdale himself could not join him, but he happened to mention that traces of tin had recently been found near one of the tributaries of the River Yo. This led Royce to think of his school-fellow, Tom Challis, a mining engineer who was not getting on so fast as he would have liked. He went to Challis and proposed that they should go together, Challis to prospect for tin, while he himself pursued his studies in natural history.
"If things look well," he said, "we'll start a tin mine, and go half-shares."
"That's hardly fair to you, as you're going to stand all expenses," replied Challis. "I shall be satisfied with a quarter."
"You're too modest, Tom. Well, I want your company, so I'll agree to a third, nothing less. So that's settled."
Royce purchased a quantity of tinned goods; medical stores; prints, mirrors, and beads for trading with the natives; rifles and ammunition; a tent and other necessaries; and they left Southampton one February day for the Gold Coast. Here they engaged a staff of experienced Hausa carriers—called "boys," whatever their age might be—and started for the interior.
That was several weeks ago, and they were now approaching the tin-bearing region marked on the map with which Drysdale had provided his friend.
About an hour after the promise of a rest had stimulated the carriers, they were further encouraged by striking a native track, which indicated the proximity of a village. Tired as they were, they quickened their pace, and another half-hour's march brought them to cultivated fields of millet and ground-nuts.
The white men, walking ahead of the party, looked forward eagerly for the conical roofs of the village huts, which they expected to see rising above the crops in the distance, and were surprised to find that nothing of the sort was in sight.
"It must be a bigger place than I thought," said Royce. "A small village wouldn't have such extensive fields. Drysdale marks the people as friendly; I hope we shall find them so."
The narrow track wound through the fields, high stalks growing on either side. A sudden turn brought them in sight of an object which caused them to halt, and struck them with a foreboding of ill.
Lying in a curiously huddled posture across the track was the body of a black man.
Insensibly lightening their tread, they approached it, and found that the man was dead, and bore marks of slashing and defacement.
"There's been bad work here," said Royce in a whisper.
They looked ahead; no one was in sight. They listened; there was not a sound but the chirping of insects in the crops.
Unslinging their rifles, they went slowly on, oppressed with a sense of tragedy; and a few steps more disclosed a scene for which their discovery of the dead man had partly prepared them. The absence of the well-known conical roofs was explained. The site of what had once been a flourishing village was now desolate, a black waste. Great heaps of ashes marked the spots where the cane huts had stood, and here and there lay bodies stiff in death, from which a number of sated carrion birds rose noisily into the air at the approach of men.
Their hearts sank as they contemplated the pitiful scene. It was a new thing in their experience, though it represented one of the commonest of tragedies in that region. The village had recently been raided by a more powerful neighbour; its men had been killed, its women and children carried off into slavery.
Happily, such raids are becoming less frequent as the Great Powers strengthen their grip on the areas marked on the maps as their spheres of influence. But in the remoter parts of those vast territories, life still proceeds much as it has done for hundreds or thousands of years past.
The horror of the scene, the misery it represented, sank deep into the hearts of the two Englishmen. And mingled with the distress which every humane person must have felt, was their consciousness of the bearing this discovery would have upon their own situation. They had hoped to make this village their resting-place, to give their men time to recover from the sickness which had crept upon them of late, to renew their store of fresh provisions. But it was now late in the afternoon; the next village marked on the map was fifteen or twenty miles away; the fatigue and weakness of the carriers rendered it impossible for the expedition to advance so far.
"We are indeed down on our luck," said Challis gloomily. "This will just about be the finishing stroke for our boys."
"They can't move another step, that's certain," said Royce. "We shall have to camp somewhere about here for the night. Here they are. Look at their faces! I never saw fright so clearly expressed. We must put the best face on it with them."
The carriers had halted at the edge of the village clearing, and stood like images of terror and despair. Royce went up to them.
"This is very bad, John," he said to the head-man. "Keep the boys as cheerful as you can. They had better put down their loads against those palm-trees yonder. Find the village well, and get some water; then the strongest of them must build a zariba for the night. Get up our tent, and then we'll talk things over."
"Boys 'fraid of Tubus, sah."
"Tubus?"
"Yes, sah—Tubus done dat."
"How do you know?"
"Savvy cuts on black fella's face, sah. Tubus' knives done dat."
"Well, they needn't be afraid. The Tubus won't come again; if they did, they wouldn't face our rifles. Fix things up, and then come back. We'll see what can be done."