It took a deal of bellows pumping, patience, and a pile of charcoal to melt the thirty or more pounds of silver in the pot; but at last it looked like dirty quicksilver and gave forth a bluish light; with this we cast five silver bars hardly distinguishable from the one we had borrowed from Takuba. With a better arrangement of our fire bricks and a two-man bellows, I believed we could melt fifty pounds of silver or gold a day.
When the tools arrived, 1 had Zoan divide all his men into two work crews to labor on alternate days, the free day spent in hunting. While the white-veiled Tuareg made charcoal, pumped the bellows, or carried burdens, the haughty black-veiled nobles who had the duty hammered and hacked wonder works of gold and silver into pieces small enough to fit our pot. Avowed to war, pillage, and the chase, scorning labor of any sort, they surprised me by their ready assent to the task, working more cheerfully than Isabel could well explain. Apparently the demolishing of the beautiful objects appealed to them. Deep in their souls, perhaps, they were vandals. Perhaps that had to do with their being such good hunters and warriors—perhaps they hated civilization and all its works. But I guessed in the dark...
In six weeks' work, we had smelted a ton of silver into specie bars and five hundred pounds of gold into ingots similar to those brought from the mines of Shangul. Thus we had five hundred pieces in all, itself a treasure dizzying Jim's mind and mine, although the Tuareg regarded it with complete calm. These bars and ingots I distributed among the score of black-veiled Tuareg and ten of the white-veiled who would accompany Isabel and me to the great Khartoum fair.
The day came that we left Jim and some white-veiled Tuareg at our prosaic-looking camp and struck southeastward on our fleet riding camels into the bush. The beasts had put on fat in their long indolence and suffered throughout the first day's ride; after that they found their gait, and the Tuareg shouted verses in their praise and the long miles sped behind them. Every one of those miles brought forth wonders to see and hear and know. The greatest in the long run was the people following the grass with their cattle and sheep or dwelling in little villages in minute islands in the wilderness. They were at everlasting war with the lions and leopards and hyenas that preyed upon the flocks and herds; the elephants that raided their gardens and pushed down their huts; and the antelope and wild pigs that broke through their fences. Yet striving and surviving still, weeping or singing or laughing, they retold man's story, from its beginning in the swollen beUies of the young wives to its strange end in a new-dug grave. But we, ourselves men, short-sighted as our kind, looked with bigger eyes and quickened breath at lions, leopards, hyenas, elephants, antelope, and wild pigs.
Good fortune rather than good sense—for the Tuareg were loath to yield the trail even to evil-tempered rhinos—saved us from fights, and we ate bountifully of various bucks, including the succulent eland, as big as an ox. Avoiding regions where robbers might Lie in wait, we took six days to gain the Blue Nile, then camped for the night on its eastern bank amid other caravans from the Tigre country. Before we crossed on the big dhows that served for ferries, I donned the full dress of a sheik of high rank, found in a bale from the Beni Kabir and once worn by Suliman on an official visit to Yussuf Pasha.
I wore it to please Isabel, for certain satisfactions and amusements of my own, and as a stroke of policy.
Accompanied by several black-veiled Tuareg, 1 paid a ceremonial visit to the king of Sennar, overlord of a vast territory. Instead of kneeling to him, I clapped hand to head and heart, a bold stand for an Arabic-speaking farengi to take. If I had resources to back it, I should get on well. If a penurious adventurer, I would more likely be impaled on a Fung spear. When I presented my tokens of respect to the monarch, he gave me a smile and the promise of his protection. They were five bars of silver and one small wedge of gold worth at least two thousand rupees or two hundred English pounds. No doubt Kamel Malik would hear of me before the day was out.
When I had changed ten silver bars for twenty skin bags, each containing a hundred silver rupees, our whole band went sight-seeing. There was no sight in Africa quite like the great fair at the interflowing Niles. A deserted promontory and a goat pasture had become and would remain for about two months the greatest city on the continent south of the Sahara.
Back from the bazaars rose the tents and the kraals of hundreds of native kings and chieftains with their attendants and trains. There were brown or reddish Hamites from north and east, coal-black Negroes from the steaming equatorial cornlands, and lean, storklike men, fully as black, with sharp noses and thin, cruel Ups who leaned on their nine foot spears and were the scourge of the peaceful cultivators. These bargained with Arabs in flowing robes, bearded Jews, Armenians, Persians, and no few turbaned Indians for beads, baubles, and finery, tools and weapons, parasols, rugs, cloth, and toys. One whole quarter of the bazaar was a food-and-drink market. Among the dried and salt meat, fruit, nuts, grains, locusts by the basketful next to homey beans and pumpkins, and Indian and Turkish sweets, I saw a cask of salted herring bearing the strange word "Boston," and how it had found its way over a thousand miles up the Nile was beyond my wit to guess.
There was a heavy traffic in ebony and ostrich feathers, both in demand in the great unguessed outside world, but when all was said and done, this was a slave and ivory fair. To judge from the pens that I saw—only a fraction of the total number—ten thousand men, women, and children were being offered for sale. Almost all belonged to the pure Negro tribes, mainly peaceful cultivators from the deep south; the lean nomads were too fierce to please the catchers' fancy. Only a few wept or wailed; some were desperate and must be confined; mainly they appeared stunned. I wished I could jBnish my business quickly and be gone.
It should not take long. Ivory was heaped like cordwood beside most of the larger pavilions; it filled a good many yards of the Arab merchants; and almost every peddler had a tusk or two in a store. Very little was new ivory, and I believed that less than half had been obtained by elephant hunting; the main had been found at the scene of some monster's death on the plains or in the bush. Hence, most were long-dried, and a great many the heavy tusks of old bulls. On the second day of my stay I visited the beast fairs, picking out with the Tuareg's help about two hundred baggage camels for later purchase. On the morning of the third day, alone except for Zoan in his most stately garb, I went to an immense pavilion, hardly second in richness to the Sennar king's, the abode of the king of the traders, Kamel Malik.
Zoan and I were immediately ushered into his gulphor. Kamel himself appeared in a moment or two, a notably handsome Arab of my own age, grave and dignified but far from austere, and employing stately Nahur Arabic instead of the Kalam wati, the vulgar tongue. By now I was used to the shocked first glance of those I met—a quickly hidden consternation in their faces—yet I did not expect to surprise it in the highly disciplined countenance of a notorious slave trader. It passed off, and his eyes narrowed slightly as I replied in the same language. He was wondering who in the devil I might be.
A slave brought coffee and sweetmeats. Thereafter Kamel and I spoke of hunting and war, but we did not mention the beauty of women and of verses because we had not broken bread or salt. Then there fell a little pause.
"Kamel Malik, I wish to buy ivory for export to Europe, and since I need a large quantity, I would like to buy from some merchant rather than the natives."
"That would save time, effendi," Kamel replied, smoothing his small, silky beard. "Also, the merchant who sells you a large quantity at the source of supply should be willing to deal at a modest profit. Would you state an approximation of your needs?"