Chapter 2

Makara went back to his village a little uneasy.

For all that Sanders had heard was true: Makara had brought about a
revolution in the custom of the country. In this black hinterland, men
have a defined place and the sphere of their activities is rigidly
confined by immemorial custom. For example, no woman is allowed to build
a hut. The most lordly of the tribes reserve that work to men, partly,
it is believed, because house-building has been the work of man since
the beginning of time, and partly because, as is well known, a terrible
curse lies on any roof that is thatched by a woman. No matter how
indolent men may be, the erection of a house is their sole prerogative.
On the other hand, no man with any spirit will till a field or grow corn
or soak manioc or cook a meal. There once was a tribe so degraded that
the men cooked their own dinners, and the name of that tribe was a
reproach from the Lado to Eschowe. No woman may hunt or fish: that also
is man’s job, and the folk of Kobala’ba had terribly offended in this
respect.

“They come by night from the little river between the grass,” reported
an indignant petty chief of the Isisi; “ten women in each canoe, and
they spear fish under the eyes of my young men, and when my fishermen
speak to them they answer them shamefully. Now, lord, because these are
Akasava folk we can do nothing. A moon and a rime of a moon ago, I sent
word to the great chief of the Akasava and told him of this terrible
thing. He said that Kobala’ba was a country by itself, and that though
the people were of his tribe they mocked him. Also, lord, they say that
in Kobala’ba the women take their spears and hunt in the forest, and
that the men sit at home in their huts, which is strange to me.”

It is true that the village of Kobala’ba was sometimes called a country
by itself, and with good reason. At the end of a shallow and narrow
little creek which runs into the great river, and separated from all the
world by a crescent of swamp, is a little lake on the northern shore of
which rises a hog’s back of good solid land. Here are long, sunny slopes
where corn may be grown, and groves of Isisi palms affording pleasant
shade, and behind the knoll a ten mile depth of forest, where men can
hunt profitably, and women, too, as it seemed.

North of the creek is a girdle of swamp that separates the hunting
ground from the forest of the Ochori; eastward is swamp again; to the
west a desolation that is sometimes river and sometimes marsh. The
isolation of Kobala’ba is complete. It is a dry oasis in a desert of
water and near water, where crocodiles breed, and tiny mosquitoes rise
in dense white clouds at every sunset.

In the days of the bad King Elibi, when his spears were triumphant from
the Ghost Mountains to the Little River, Kobala’ba was uninhabited. Its
inaccessibility, its isolation, the age-old legend of ghosts and devils,
as many as the grasses that grew on its slope, made this place an
undesirable residence. When Sanders broke Elibi in the early days of his
mission, the remnants of an Akasava fighting regiment made its way to
the little lake, taking the goats and wives it had acquired by violence.
Here they established themselves in the huts they built, and raised a
new generation, which was mainly feminine—a phenomenon peculiar to the
union of warriors and slaves. And that was the peculiarity of Kobala’ba,
which persisted through the years, that three girls were born for every
boy; so that in the course of time Kobala’ba was a village of
straight-backed young women and puny youths who sat at the doors of
their huts and were waited upon by sisters and cousins, mothers and
aunts innumerable.

With the death of the old chief and the coming of Makara, a considerable
change came over the economic life of Kobala’ba, and he discovered an
easy way to wealth. Slavery became systematized; he sent out bands of
women hunters, at first under the guidance of a man, eventually by
themselves, and there accumulated in the village great stores of skins
and rubber. His canoes brought him fish to be dried in the sun, and,
with the skins and rubber, exported secretly across the frontier into
the French territory.

Makara in another land might have become a captain of industry, for he
was blessed with the gift of organization. Slavery is forbidden, but
women have a price on the Great River, and it is lawful to buy wives.
Makara and his enthusiastic men recruited a new kind of labour; his
canoes went up and down the river seeking “wives.” On the day he came to
Sanders there were half a thousand women in his compounds and as many
roving the forest in search of pelts.

At the end of three weeks’ hard paddling, Makara’s weary paddlers
brought him to his village and to a domestic problem; for one of his
wives, the tall T’lini, had led a band of huntresses into the forest and
had returned almost empty-handed. Makara held a conference, which was
attended by the forty-seven grown males of the village.

“We must not beat her or lay her in the sun,” he said, “for presently
Sandi will come, and she will tell evil stories about us. Let us be kind
to her, and after Sandi is gone I will do certain things that will make
her sorry.”

T’lini, who had lain for twenty-four hours, her hands and feet tied
together, in the big pen where the surplus women were kept, was released
and well fed, and for seven days the male heads of families assembled
their quotas and rehearsed them in the story they must tell. And it
might well have been that the slave community would have grown
undetected, and with it the wealth of Makara, had not science in two
stout volumes come to Lieutenant Tibbetts of the King’s Houssas.

Bones spent a fortnight of intensive reading and study before he started
in to impart his newly acquired knowledge to the indigenous natives.

“What is it Bones is swotting so hard?” asked Sanders one night after
Bones had made an unceremonious and hasty departure from the dinner
table.

Hamilton knocked off the ash of his cheroot in his coffee cup, and his
nose wrinkled disparagement.

“Science,” he said laconically.

“Very admirable,” murmured Sanders, and waited for the explosion, for
Hamilton was on the touchy side, having just recovered from an attack of
malaria.

“Science!” sneered Hamilton. “Astronomy, natural history, botany,
biology. . . . My God, if he’d only keep it to himself!”

The two handsomely illustrated books which had come to Bones by the last
mail dealt with science in a popular way, in all its aspects. The
volumes had been edited by a great savant, the articles written by men
with the gift of informing in the most simple language. Bones read and
was fascinated. The two volumes exceeded in interest the modest
expectations which were aroused by the sample page so cunningly
dispatched to him.