"Be quiet, you little baboon, Aboli ordered.
"Slavers!" wailed the eldest child, as he saw Hal's white face. "We are taken by slavers!"
"They will eat us," squeaked the youngest.
"We are not slavers!" Hal told them. "And we will not harm you."
This assurance merely sent' the the trio into fresh paroxysms of terror. "He is a devil who can speak the language of heaven."
"He understands all we say. He is an albino devil." "He will surely eat us as my mother warned me."
Aboli held the eldest at arm's length and glared at him. "What is your name, little monkey?"
"See his tattoos." The boy howled in dread and confusion. "He is tattooed like the Monomatapa, the chosen of heaven."
"He is a great Mambo!"
"Or the ghost of the Monomatapa who died long ago."
"I am indeed a great chief," Aboli agreed. "And you will tell me your name."
"My name is Tweti oh, Monomatapa, spare me for I am but little. I will be only a single mouthful for your mighty jaws."
"Take me to your village, Tweti, and I will spare you and your brothers."
After a while the children began to believe that they would neither be eaten nor turned into slaves, and they started to smile shyly at Hal's overtures. From there it was not long before they were giggling delightedly to have been chosen by the great tattooed chief and the strange albino to lead them to the village.
Driving the cattle herd before them, they took a track through the hills and came out suddenly in a small village surrounded by rudimentary fields of cultivation, in which a few straggling millet plants grew. The huts were shaped like bee-hives and beautifully thatched, but they were deserted. Clay pots stood on the cooking fires before each hut and there were calves in the pens and woven baskets, weapons and accoutrements scattered where they had been dropped when the villagers fled.
The three boys squeaked reassurances into the surrounding bush. "Come out! Come. and see! It is a great Mambo of our tribe come back from death to visit us!"
An old crone was the first to emerge timidly from a thicket of elephant grass. She wore only a greasy leather skirt, and her one eye socket was empty. She had but a single yellow tooth in the front of her mouth. Her dangling dugs flapped against her wrinkled belly, which was scarified with ritual tattoos.
She took one look at Aboli's face, then ran to prostrate herself before him. She lifted one of his feet and placed it on her head. "Mighty Monomatapa," she keened, "you are the chosen of heaven. I am a useless insect, a dung beetle, before your glory."
In singles and pairs, and then in greater numbers, the other villagers emerged from their hiding places and gathered before Aboli to kneel in obeisance and pour dust and ashes on their heads in reverence.
"Do not let this adulation turn your head, oh Chosen One," Hal told him sourly in English.
"I give you royal dispensation," Aboli replied, without smiling. "You need not kneel in my presence, nor pour dust on your head."
The villagers brought Aboli and Hal carved wooden stools to sit upon, and offered them gourds of soured milk mixed with fresh blood, porridge of millet, grilled wild birds, roasted termites and caterpillars seared on the coals so that their hairy coverings were burnt off.
"You must eat a little of everything they offer you," Aboli warned Hal, "or else you will give great offence."
Hal gagged down a few mouthfuls of the blood and milk mixture, while Aboli swigged back a full gourd. Hal found the other delicacies a little more palatable, the caterpillars tasted like fresh grass juice and the termites were crisp and delicious as roasted chestnuts.
When they had eaten, the village headman came forward on hands and knees to answer Aboli's questions. "Where is the town of the Monomatapa?"
It is two days" march in the direction of the setting sun.
"I need ten good men to guide me." "As you command, O Mambo."
The ten men were ready within the hour, and little Tweti and his companions wept bitterly that they were not chosen for this honour but were instead sent back to the lowly task of cattle-herding.
The trail they followed towards the west led through open forests of tall, graceful trees interspersed with wide expanses of savannah grasslands. They began to encounter more herds of the humped cattle herded by small naked boys. The cattle grazed in close and unlikely truce with herds of wild antelope. Some of the game were almost equine, but with coats of strawberry roan or midnight sable, and horns that swept back like Oriental scimitars to touch their flanks.
Several times in the forests they saw elephants, small breeding herds of cows and calves. Once they passed within a cable's length of a gaunt bull standing under a flat-topped Thorn tree in the middle of the open savannah. This patriarch showed little fear of them but spread his tattered ears like battle standards and raised his curved tusks high to peer at them with small eyes.
"It would take two strong men to carry one of those tusks," Aboli said, "and in the markets of Zanzibar they would fetch thirty English pounds apiece."
They passed many small villages of thatched bee-hive huts, similar to the one in which Tweti lived. Obviously, the news of their arrival had gone ahead of them for the inhabitants came out to stare in awe at Aboli's tattoos and then to prostrate themselves before him and cover themselves with dust.
Each of the local chieftains pleaded with Aboli to honour his village by spending the night in the new hut his people had built especially for him as soon as they had heard of his coming. They offered food and drink, calabashes of the blood and milk mixture and bubbling clay pots of millet beer.