“What do you find?” I asked Cabral and Faleiro, when we came together from our foraging.
Their faces were dark. “Small serpents,” said Cabral. “A kind of rat. Some crabs.”
“And a few sprigs of bush,” said Faleiro, “with no fruit upon them.”
“Well, then we will be eating snakeskins and toasted bones before long,” Cabral said, making a smile on it, though we all knew it was no jest but the truth.
“And after that,” said I, “we will be eating one another.”
“Ah, and are you a Jaqqa, to say such a thing?” Faleiro demanded sourly.
“God forbid,” said I. “Let us take our lives, before it come to that!”
Yet sometimes in jest the most frightful things are foretold.
We made a melancholy cold meal, and wandered our little kingdom, and waited for night, and slept poorly, and waited for morning. And morning, when it came, revealed a monstrous thing. For although it had not been possible for us to reach the land by crossing the quicksand, certain folk had been able to come the other way, at least on the adjoining point where Figueira and his seven or eight companions were. I was looking idly out to sea, and dreaming of a vessel that would come to rescue us, when Cabral grasped my arm most fierce and cried, “Look! Across the way!”
“Jesu preserve us,” I said.
For a demonic band of dark naked figures now surrounded our companions on the other spit. Like revelers out of Hell had come some dozens of long-legged graceful men, who pranced and capered in a weird dance, throwing out their arms and legs with evident glee, and circling round and round.
“Mother of God!” said Faleiro, in a voice like that of one who is being garroted. “They are Jaqqas!”
And so they were, and now a true nightmare unfolded before our eyes, nor could we wake from it, but must witness every grisly ghastly moment.
How the man-eaters had come out onto the point, God alone can say. Perhaps they knew some path through the quicksanded pitfalls, or else they had come swimming up from the other side, or in boats: I never knew, I cannot tell you now. But they were there, and as our hapless shipmates knelt and prayed most fervently, the cannibals fell upon them, one by one slitting their throats.
We could do nothing. Our only weapons were knives and swords, that were of no use at such a distance.
“Blood of the saints!” roared one grizzled old Portugal of our band. “We must save them!” And he went struggling out into the water, brandishing a blade in each hand; but he got no more than a dozen yards, and found himself mired up to the knees, and it was all he could do to return to shore. At which the Jaqqas looked up from their slaughter, and gestured mockingly to us, and laughed, and called out as though to say, “Wait ye your turn there, and we will come and have you next!”
And so we watched. And cursed, and raved, and shook our fists, and were utterly helpless.
Our friends were entirely slain. Figueira himself was the last, a tall and noble-looking man of silvered hair, who called upon Heaven to avenge him, and then the long knives went into him. And after the killing came worse, the butchery and the cooking. God’s truth, it was a terrible sight, much more grievous than that other cannibal feast I had witnessed long ago in Brazil, for these were men I knew by name, that had only just survived a dread ordeal by sea, and did not merit such a fate as the next thing. From scraps of wood and old dried seaweeds and the like the Jaqqas did build a fire, and cut our men into several parts, some three or five of them, and roasted them before our eyes, and sat crosslegged in a merry way, gnawing at haunches. God’s death! I was thankful only that some hundreds of yards of open water separated us from them, not so much that it gave us safety, but that we did not see that dread feasting at any closer range. For it was vile enough, at that distance.
It went on and on, the roasting and the eating. And I think that the worst of it all was that in our starved state, the aroma of that roasting meat did arouse in us a hunger despite our horror, so that our mouths ran with rivers of spittle and our stomachs griped and yearned. And what monstrousness was this, to stir with such famine at the smell of man’s cooking flesh? But so starved were we that we could not tell ourselves it was unholy to yearn for some of that meat: it could have been mere pork, for all that our ignorant noses were able to tell.
I know not how many hours the ghastly feast proceeded. But at length it was over; and the Jaqqas rose, and slung over their shoulders the bodies of those men whom they had not consumed, and in their ghostly way did steal away, over a little rise in the sandy spit, and vanished on the other side.
“They will come to us next,” said Faleiro in gloom.
“I think they are sated for now,” I said.
“Ever looking on the brighter side, eh, Piloto?” said he. And it was true, in good sooth: for what value is it to take ever the darkest outlook? We placed guards, and for all the rest of the time we dwelled in that place we looked out day and night for the coming of the Jaqqas. But they did not come, either because they could not reach our shore as readily as they had the other, or because they had satisfied their needs here and now were journeying to some far destination to perform the next of their foul celebrations.
Yet it was hard enough, living there, to walk about with the memory so bright in us of what we had witnessed. A thousand times I wished I had looked away, and closed my eyes, while that feast was happening. But I could not; none of us could; we had witnessed every terrible instant of it, and it blazed now, and for long afterward, in my soul.
After a few days, though, it began to seem to us that our fallen companions were the fortunate ones. For there was next to nothing to eat in that place, and if we had not had the good luck to locate a spring of fresh water we would have died a death even more frightsome than theirs. As it was, we were hard put to live, and Cabral’s jest was amply fulfilled, for we were reduced to such things as gnawing on bones, and chewing scraps of snakeskin, and sucking roots. I thought often of the hardships I had known since leaving England, and nothing seemed worse than this, though perhaps I was mistaken in that: but the hardship of the moment often seems far greater than those endured in other days. I lay staring out to sea, much, and dreamed of home, and sometimes of Anne Katherine and sometimes of Dona Teresa, whose amulet I took from my pocket and studied long. But the sight of it, its breasts and cleft of sex and smooth shining buttocks, did stir distressing desires in me that I could not fulfill, and I regretted bringing it forth. And also did I continue to wonder whether I should be carrying such a talisman at all, it being forbidden by my church and by God Himself to place faith in idols.
Well, and that evil time ended, as all evil times of my life have late or soon come to their end. A vessel out of São Tomé, going south on business to São Paulo de Loanda, passed that way and saw the timbers of the Infanta Beatrix upon the shoal; and, thinking there might be survivors, approached the shore, where the hand of God directed it to us. So were we rescued, and given food and clothing, and a place to sleep, and bit by bit we began to recover from our ordeal. And as we neared São Paulo de Loanda I felt almost myself again. But within my mind now forever were certain images and pictures I would gladly have scraped out. I saw, and still see, Tristão Caldeira de Rodrigues hanging suspended in mid-air after I had struck him with my oar; and I saw the dark teeth of the shoal by lightning-flare, with our tight little pinnace wrecked upon it; and I saw, most bitter and painful of all, the demon Jaqqas dancing about our crewfellows, and slaying them, and falling to most heartily on their flesh. Ah, what a world it is, I thought, that has such wolves in human guise loose upon it!