Being loath to return without trade, we determined to go up into the land after them. So we went fifty of us on shore, Captain Diogo Pinto Dourado and his boatswain among the party, and left our ship riding in the Bay of Benguela to stay for us. And marching two days up into the country, where all was green and the land was tawny and the air was filled with little glimmering midges with eyes like sapphires and beaks of fire, we entered to the domain of a great lord which is called Mofarigosat. And coming to his first town, we found it all burned to the ground and despoiled, with bloodied mangled bodies strewn here and there in a terrible way that was familiar to me from another sad slaughter long ago.
“The Jaqqas have been here and are gone,” said Pinto Dourado.
He sent for a Negro slave which we had bought of the Jaqqas, and who lived with us, and ordered him to carry a message to the Lord Mofarigosat. This slave did tell Mofarigosat that we were white men allied to the Jaqqas, and seeking to meet with them our friends, and so we desired entry and free passage through his territory.
Two days went past and we thought our envoy might have been slain, which would have been a great insult and required us to make war. But then the slave returned, and with him was a dignitary of the court of Mofarigosat, a broad-bodied black with a great crimson sash of office across his breast, who bowed low before us as though we were demon-princes out of Hell, and said most humbly, “My master bids me tell you that you are welcome here.”
Mofarigosat himself was less humble. This chieftain, who received us a day later in his capital village, did stand tall before us, and his eyes did flash, and there was no smile on his lips, as he bade us make our home with him. “A thousand welcomes,” he said, yet his voice was cold and he did but pretend a welcome to us: I could tell, and it took little shrewdness to see it, that he was merely admitting us for fear of Imbe Calandola, with whom he wanted no disagreement.
Mofarigosat was a man of nearly sixty years, white-haired and white-bearded but with great strength and vigor. His body was lean and strong and warlike, and bore no scrap of fatty surplus upon it. He dressed only in a blue loin-cloth and in a necklace of small golden plates. The gold surprised us, that metal not being an object of much desire among these African folk. Coming before us in his council-chamber, Mofarigosat did walk from one to another of us, inspecting us close, our skins, our guns, our armor, for no white man had ever been in this part before. At last he said, in the Kikongo tongue but with a more fluid accent of the south, “Do you serve the great Imbe-Jaqqa, or is he vassal to you?”
Pinto Dourado looked to me to make reply, and after a moment, hastily constructing an answer, I said, “We are equal allies, that do trade with one another for the universal benefit of both.”
“Ah,” said Mofarigosat. “Equal allies.”
“Go to, you should have told him the Jaqqa is our servant!” Pinto Dourado said sharply to me.
“I think it would have been a hard lie to make,” I said. “They know the Jaqqa too well here.”
Mofarigosat ordered feasting for us, and professed no enmity for Calandola, even that he had burned and spoiled one of his outlying villages. That small event the chieftain appeared to regard merely as the Imbe-Jaqqa’s due. As he passed through this territory, it was only to be expected, a natural thing, that Calandola would pause to make his dinner somewhere, and if he dined on some of the subjects of Mofarigosat, well, then so be it. I understood now how this lord had been able to rule so long here and reach such a great age unmolested: for he, too, knew the art of bending to the breeze, lest he be snapped and swept away in storms.
Yet plainly was he no petty chief, but rather a lord most powerful, and no coward neither, but a shrewd and valiant man. Mofarigosat his town was large and well-appointed, with many dwellings and great wooden palaces covered with deep thatch, and a palisado of sharp-edged stakes set all about it, that would be difficult to breach. He had a great many warriors, strong and able, equipped with lances and large bows, that he took care to keep on display for our benefit.
I think that if Imbe Calandola had chosen to attack this lord Mofarigosat, he would have had a heavy task in the defeating of him. In the end the Jaqqa very likely would have triumphed, for I think Calandola did believe so strongly in his own invincibility that he could convince all others of that, even his foes. Yet it would have cost him sorely. So at this time Calandola had chosen not to expend his energies in a hard war with Mofarigosat, but to go on instead in a wide circle around his city and into the deeper forest, which be the true home of Jaqqas.
And seeing the size of Mofarigosat’s army and the tough mettle of Mofarigosat himself, I began to feel some unease about our own safety in this place, we being but fifty men and they being many hundreds. I know that the Spaniards did conquer the entire nations of Mexico and Peru with armies hardly greater than our little band, but those folk were Indians and not Negroes, and perhaps were more readily cowed by muskets and white skins, Indians being a frailer people, and timid. I had not noticed the troops of Kafuche Kambara greatly cowed by those things that time they fell upon the Portugals in the desert. And I did not think those of Mofarigosat would greatly be, neither.
At the first it was all feasting and celebration. The palm-wine flowed like water, and Mofarigosat caused his best cattle to be led forth and butchered for our delight, and we ate and drank until we were stupored by it.
To his credit, Pinto Dourado became suspicious early of this soft treatment, thinking it might be the prelude to a massacring, when we were all thoroughly besotted. So he gave the order that at all times five out of our fifty were to take no drink at all, and that all of us were to keep our muskets close within reach during the banqueting.
The kindness of Mofarigosat toward us did not cease for some days. Each day as the orange sun fell swiftly toward the distant blue shield of the sea we gathered and we did revel with Mofarigosat and his people, and often the lord himself presided over the festivities. There was dancing in which the men and women were divided into two facing rows, and did stamp their feet in place, and rush toward one another to counterfeit the act of copulation, with thrustings of hips and the like. Yet this dance was far less licentious than the similar one that the Jaqqa women had performed, since those Jaqqas had rubbed their slippery bodies together in high hot passion, and these did only mime the act in a very chaste way, with open space between them. Still, it was not like the dances one sees and does in England or in Portugal, and it did stir some lusts in us.
To satisfy these, we were given women: not of Mofarigosat’s own nation, to be sure, but slave-wenches of some other tribe. All the women of this country do sharpen their teeth for beauty’s sake, but these carried the style to its utmost, with pointed teeth like needles, that scarce hold much beauty for me. Also were they deeply ornamented on their skins not just with the usual carvings and cicatrices, but with colored patterns that are pressed into the skin with sharp blades. This was done on the forehead, the breasts, the shoulders, and the buttocks, and made the girls look piebald and strange. I saw this skin-coloring being done to a small girl, that was made to lie on the ground whilst the image of a flower was carved into her belly by an artist of that kind. They say that if the child endures these incisions without crying out, she will be good for childbearing; but if she cannot endure them, she will never marry, and is likely to be sold for slavery. Thus men who are looking for brides here seek first to see if the women are perfectly ornamented on their bellies.