Pyrolysis and Other Fantastic Tales by Henrique Montserrat Fernandez - HTML preview

The Muhaloo

 

 

1880, April. After my father’s death, a rich farmer in Devonshire, and, for I’m not the firstling of the family, I received my part of the money inheritance and took a steam train to Durban, in Africa, next entered the large jungle and the desert until Kukuanaland, where they said some famous King Solomon’s gold mines are hidden. The idea was to become rich by myself. Nothing even wronger. During the path the baggage men stole most of my food and clothes, leaving the clothes I was wearing only, besides the bag I carried in which there was some food, a Colt revolver with space for six bullets and the money that lasted from the work and that I had wisely hidden in my journey belt.

 

I quickly found that another English man, Allan Quatermain, was six months preceded than me in my survey and returned from Kukuanaland with his pockets full of gemstones. Even so, I try to go over his steps, but that was useless, due to the already mentioned experience with the baggage men.

 

There, in the desert coast, in the oasis of Al-Makashiba I’ve cursed my lack of luck and rashness, in the small tent I’ve improvised with some palm tree leaves.

 

I returned to Durban, under burning sun and heat. Five days later, thirsty and hungry, I arrived to the large Kurkala jungle, through which I had passed two weeks ago.

 

When I saw the first lagoon, I threw myself on the ground on its shore and drank too much water.

 

I was about to stand up when a penetrating pain started along my left arm. A snake had bitten it with its fangs. My vision started blurring right after the pain and, once more, I’ve cursed my lack of care. My life would be punished for it.

 

* * *

 

I could think I was dreaming, but the pain I was feeling in my left arm demonstrated I was not.

 

Lying on the ridiculous straw hammock, raving due to the fever and without understanding what the strange natives screamed outside the tent, I tried to remember what I was doing there.

 

I stood up and left the tent. A young boy, not older than fifteen years old, pointed his spear at me and made me go back inside.

 

He also entered, spear down this time. In a zulu dialect, which I knew a bit, he said:

 

- It’s dangerous being outside when Muhaloo is hunting.

- What’s this Muhaloo? – I asked, gesticulating for him to understand me.

 

I had no answer from the boy. He left and, next, a woman enwarpped in lianas and ochre painted, came in carrying a bowl with fruits and signed for me to eat them.

 

Starving, I started devouring the fruits while she changed a stinking cataplasm they had put on the snake’s bite.

 

After the meal and the “medicinal” care, a great torpor took over me and, lying on the straw hammock, I fell asleep immediately.

 

* * *

 

When I woke up, there were three children lying on the floor, starring me. I smiled at them that, then, ran outside. The same old lady came in and, next, checked my curative.

 

- Your wound is almost dressed. In two days you’ll be able to leave. – the woman said, without looking at me.

 

- I am very pleased for the treatment I’ve received from you. I would like to reward you somehow. – I said it more for the polite person I am than for anything else.

 

The old lady stared at me for some time, turned around and left the tent.

 

Fifteen minutes later, three adult men with spears and shields made of leopard skin entered the tent. The oldest of them said:

 

- Our Gagool told us your offer. We’re glad to accept it. We’ll leave tomorrow morning, early.

 

I was shocked. I didn’t expect them to accept my offer. To be true, I didn’t know anything but it: we would leave on an expedition tomorrow morning. And nothing else.

 

I couldn’t sleep that night for my great excitement. I ate the fruits Gagool brought me and she “discharged” the bite saying it was cured and healed. The arm wasn’t aching anymore. I felt strong and reborn.

 

The ancient hardly left the tent and the three giant men returned carrying in their hands a leopard skin the warriors dressed. I put it covering my shirt, which was already very threadbare.

 

I checked my revolver munition. I wouldn’t trust a wood spear in the middle of a jungle with uncountable quantities of free savage animals.

 

After everything was checked, I rested for some minutes, showered the best I could and, yet in the dark, the three adult warriors entered to take me.

 

We left the place in a group of twenty men. All of them were very tall. I felt like a dwarf, with my 1.85m tall, near them. The smalles of them must have been almost two meters tall!

 

We ran towards the first day lights and after ¾h walking, we stopped on the shore of a stream to drink and supply our gourds.

 

I took that time to approach the older warrior, the same who had talked to me in the tent, and asked him:

- Where are we going, leader?

- Towards those mountains. – he answered, pointing to some far strains and kept: - It’s a three days journey.

- Right. – I said. – And what will we do there?

- Kill Muhaloo. – he turned and said nothing else. His attitude demonstrated he wouldn’t answer any other questions in that moment.

 

* * *

 

On the second day of walk, talking to the other warriors, I knew the Muhaloo was a horrible beast which devoured warriors and devastated villages by which it passed. No-one had seen it yet and survived to describe it. I noticed all of them were really afraid, but the leader, whose name I knew: Kwala. Actually, his hate against the beast, which killed his family all at one single attack, headed him. Luckily he was on an hunting expedition with his warriors. In all fourty-three people had died in his village.

 

Kwala was a good leader. Fair and benevolent, he knew how to be implacable if needeed. If he were English, I’ve no doubts he would be the general on her Majesty’s service of Queen Victory.

 

The troop reduced the velocity of their walk for me to follow them. I really didn’t like that condescension, but, secretly, I thanked them because I was still feeling very weak.

 

Around two pm, we stopped at a glade and I could see among the vegetation something that looked like a mast to me. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

 

I asked Kwala what that thing was and he ignored it, saying only: - The grandfather of my great-great-grandfather told me it has fallen from above a long time ago. – he turned, it means, he wouldn’t tell me anything else.

 

I aparted myself from the group and approached the object. A hundred feet far from it, I could notice there were some ship rests. A spanish galleon, more exactly. As dark as night. Part of its name could still be read, incrusted in nacre on its side: Pilar.

 

That was a typical ship from the end of the XV century. I could see cannons partially covered by the vegetation. It would still make it in the Spanish Armada of Philip II, besides its age.

 

I didn’t say anything about it, but one of my passions in life and my father’s proud is my interest for navy and its history. Nevertheless, his proud was over when I affirmed I wouldn’t register in navy because my interest was merely academic. I really liked history.

 

I approached the ship, searching some hole through which I could enter the structure. In this moment, I had compeltely forgotten Kwala and our mission.

 

I found a very small hole on the starboard and, after many trials, I could enter Pilar, “wringing” myself in it.

 

Light entered through the spaces between the bad tables of the poop. I checked around me in the half-cleared area.

 

Close to some rests of a draught, I noticed the breast of a light suit of armour incrusted on the wood. At first sight, I thought it had gone through the rotten wood, but when I approached it, I noticed my thought had nothing to do about it. The breats was really incrusted on the wood, as if it had melted like wax and, then, solidified around the iron! I thought that was very strange.

 

A door on the back with a very strong locker caught my attention. It didn’t look like part of the storehouse. Before it, it remembered me something like a pantry. What could I find there?

 

Holding on to a dry, bold branch I had found on the floor, I forced the locker puting my weight over the handspike. I fell on the floor and hurt my knee because the “strong locker” was rotten and didn’t resist my attack.

 

Laming, I stood up and opened the door. An incredible darkness waited for me on the other side.

 

I searched for something that might illuminate the room and didn’t find it. I decided to enter even so and hit the walls of the room with the wood I used to force the entrance, hopeful that they would be as rotten as the other objects in there.

 

The walls were more difficult to me, but in a couple of minutes I could make a crack through which the afternoon sunlight could enter. I turned and fell on my knees when I saw what was in the room!

 

Millions of golden objects, in the size of tea plates crowded on an ammount that would cause envy to the Real Treasure. I got one of them and started admiring it. It remembered me of Mayan’s stars, or something like this. I couldn’t tell it for sure. I saw the others. Besides they had exactly the same size, there weren’t two examples of the same object.

 

I got really excited! I hadn’t found King Solomon’s mines, but what I was holding in my hands was godlike! I kept the most quantity of them I could in my bag and some of them in my pockets. Despairingly, I looked at the enormous ammount of things I’d have to leave behind. I decided not to comment anything to Kwala or the others and remember that place carefully, so as I could return in the future with an expedition to get the other objects. I calculated millions of pounds would be left behind.

 

I covered the crack I made on the wall with the whole vegetation which had invaded the ship during the centuries, I blocked and covered up the door of the room the best I could and left the ship through the same hole I entered.

 

Happy for my discovery, the most important of the questions didn’t even pass through my mind: how did a Spanish galleon from the XV century arrive in the middle of an African jungle, hundreds of kilometers far from the ocean?

 

* * *

 

Neither Kwala or his warriors noticed my absence. All of them were occupied hunting and getting some fruits for the next day’s campaigne.

 

We passed that night at the glade. My mind couldn’t stop thinking of a way to go back to the galleon and get some other golden objects. But when I realized the weight I was carrying on my back was tiring enough, I gave it up. I couldn’t carry any more weight on the return to the village.

 

As soon as the first sun lights appeared, we started our walk. Kwala wouldn’t let anything avoid him to obtain his so desired revenge.

 

The more we approached the beast’s territory, the more my heart became anxious. I wasn’t so anxious for the adventure, for I was carrying so many pre-columbian old gold. Even so, I wouldn’t let Kwala notice my anxiety. After all, those people saved my life! I wasn’t a Majesty’s soldier, but my English ancestry wouldn’t let me disapoint them. There was nothing holier than my promises.

 

We arrived at the bottom of a mountain which top was covered with clouds. The vegetation was going to the top, towards the clouds. The stranger thing about this is that, besides it was very dense, we couldn’t listen to any animal. My back became cold. Kwala was calm, as if that was the most natural situation of the world. Nevertheless, silence remained.

 

We started climbing the mountain, holding on to the vegetation to help us on this process when the pandemonium has taken over us.

 

A light bolt got Kwala right on his forehead and left by the back of his head! Scarred, the warriors let their spears and shields drop and ran away. That didn’t help them. The bolt shot one after another and made them fall on the floor, sometimes with a hole on the belly, other times on the chest, other times in the middle of the head, just like Kwala’s shot.

 

I was terrified. The silent bolts didn’t stop reaching the warriors. Horrified, I hid behind a stone and put my hands on my ears not to hear the horrible yells of the panicky zulus.

 

Less than five minutes and a sepulchral silence returned to the jungle after it had been forgotten by the terrified yells of the warriors.

 

I have never seen such a terrible thing and I wish I never ever see it again. The following scenes had driven me crazy.

 

A very tall animal, more than three meters tall, got out of the trees. He looked like a giant octopus, but with ten tails from a horrible triangular head with one single eye in the middle. There was a rod, or something like this, in one of the tails, and it was silver. Its skin, just like some octopus, vibrated on a sequence of colors, mainly red and yellow, but sometimes blue or green appeared in some slippery strips.

 

Walking, it seemed it was fluctuating on the ground, but it was the slippery of its tails that created this illusion. The animal didn’t stop looking around while approached the fallen warriors.

 

It held Kwala in one of the tails, just like the great warrior was nothing more than a cloth doll, and took him to the triangle base, which was its head.

 

A ripple in its skin opened itself and a terrible neb, just like a parrot’s one, came out and ate the zulu’s leader’s head, grabbing it from its base.

 

I couldn’t see anything else, my eyes became dark, I covered my mouth with both hands avoiding setting free the scream that was echoing in my head facing that horror scene, and I fell on the floor.

 

* * *

 

Ten days later, I woke up on a bed in a campaign tent. My eyes were blurred and my head was horribly aching. A thirty-something year old cloistress entered the tent and started speaking in french with a belgian accent.

 

- How do you feel? We found you fallen on a shore near here, dying in fever due to insolation and your skin was raw because you walked too much!

 

My french wasn’t good, but I tried to tell her something:

- I don’t remember anything, sister, but I know I was carrying a bad with me... – I really didn’t remember anything that happened, but the gold I had in my bag, that was the first thing that came up in my mind.

 

- Rest here. – she said. – Your gold wasn’t touched. You didn’t stop talking about it in your delirium. It must be very important to you.

 

I didn’t answer, but my relief expression must have been enough to her.

- Now, rest. We’ll talk later. – the cloistress said.

 

* * *

 

I spent twenty days in this campaign, until I recovered myself. After I gave one of my golden pieces to the missionaries, my life became way much easier. They were really honest people. They didn’t touch anything that was mine, but they accepted the gold with no demands.

 

When I remembered the adventures I passed after Muhaloo with Kwala and his warriors, I couldn’t believe how come I was still alive.

 

After waking up from the faint caused by the beast’s attack, I must have been out of myself for several days, walking nowhere around the region. Truth is I must have walked hundreds of kilometers on a very different direction, because the mission was very close to Durban city, from which my journey started.

 

I took the first steam train to London. I didn’t want to get any more gold from the Spanish galleon after what happened to my zulu friends. I was lucky for not being devoured by the monster. I was even luckier for not being reached by one of those mysterious death bolts. I imagined I would’nt probably have such a great lucky another time, if I returned to get the gold.

 

Besides, I was taking back to Devonshire more than my father had obtained during all his life. I’ll become a rich landowner!

 

But, the more encouraging the future would look like to me in that moment, something inside didn’t let me rest because of the horrible scenes I’ve been through in the bottom of the cursed mountain. And this feeling wouldn’t get rid of me anymore.