The chief center and tumult of the battle was altogether gone from us now. I saw in the distance only the bloody bodies of the fallen, and the vultures flapping about them, seeking out the most choicest titbits.
And then I saw an even more sinister thing: five naked black men that came out of another direction, the south-west, that had been quiet all the day. Three were very tall with elongated tapering limbs, and two were short and broad and exceeding powerful of frame, and all that they wore were the weapons strapped about their waists, except that one had a collar fastened around his neck, and every one had his body painted in white with certain symbols and emblems. They moved in a single file, very silent, like cats, with the tallest in the front and the second tallest at the end of the file.
I had seen such as these before, and I took no joy in seeing of them now. For I knew them to be Jaqqas, and my heart sank within me. God will provide, I had said, and God had indeed provided. But, I thought, what He has sent us are demons to hurry us to our last repose.
And yet, and yet, something within me was aroused with a fascination. As I have said before: I find myself drawn to the darkness, to the strange obscure subterraneous mysteries, I know not why. The great coccodrillo that had come out of the river to me on that desert isle where I was cast away in Brazil had worked a magnetism on me, and so also had the Jaqqa prince standing by himself in the forest on the first voyage to Masanganu, and the dead one in Loango. And now I stared at these five emissaries of Satan as they marched across the horizon and I could not take my eyes away, for they exerted an irresistible pull on my soul.
They moved through the battlefield shambles, examining the dead, prodding this one and that, turning him over, feeling his flesh the way one might poke and scrutinize meat in a butcher-shop, seeing how much fat there was and how much sinew, and how firm the texture. I that had seen cannibals before, in the forests behind the town of Rio de Janeiro and after my shipwreck, knew what these men were about here, and it did chill my blood.
With great calmness and in no hurry they chose out of all the hundreds and hundreds in that field of gore three corpses, all of them blackamoors, as though white man’s flesh was inferior upon their palates. These three they hoisted to the shoulders of the three Jaqqas in the midst of the file, the one that wore the collar and the two that were short and very muscular, and, looking well satisfied at their scavenging, they continued onward, crossing from south to north.
Then did they notice us.
We had not moved nor spoken all the while that they were prowling about. We huddled in our little sandy declivity, praying not to be observed; for although we were ten men and they were five, we were all of us spent and wounded, and we had no weapons other than empty muskets and broken lances, and there was not a man among us who had the least further taste for fighting that day. So shrank we down from view; but the Jaqqas paused, they sniffed the air like troubled leopards, they turned in circles to scan the terrain, and then, without a word, they put down their burden of dead men and commenced moving toward us.
“We are lost,” said the Portugal surgeon. “These are the man-eaters, the Jaqqas.”
I said, “And why should they trouble to slay us, when enough dead men do lie before us to feed all their nation for half a month?”
“That meat on the ground will spoil in days,” the surgeon answered. “We remain fresh until we are slaughtered. We will be captives, and when their appetites require it we will be eaten.”
But none of us made a move to flee. We were all so feeble and frail with strain, and they all looked to be as fleet as zevveras. And a time comes to every man when his death is upon him and he knows that there is no escaping it, and so he merely stands and waits.
I confess that of, all the deaths that I had imagined for myself in the idle hours of my boyhood, when one thinks much on death and strives to understand its nature, the one death I had never envisioned was that of being roasted and devoured by my own fellow men. Which was not a pleasing notion to me; and yet how does it matter, when you are dead, whether you become food for worms or fishes or ants, or Jaqqas? You are dead; that is the essence of the thing; and it seemed to me now that I would very soon be coming to the end of my journey.
The Jaqqas neared us and stood in a ring around us, with their hands resting lightly on the hilts of their long daggers. And I saw a gesture pass from the collared one to the very tall one that seemed their leader, and it was plainly a gesture of inquiry, without accompanying words, to which the leader made quick silent reply with a single shake of his left hand. I suspected that the collared one was asking permission to kill us, and the permission was denied. In this afterward I found out that I was right, for among the Jaqqas the young men do wear a collar about their neck in token of slavery, until they bring an enemy’s head slain in battle, and then they are uncollared, freed, and dignified with the title of soldiers. This one was asking if he could earn his freedom by slaying us. But clearly we were too contemptible to slay, and it would not be fair battle, and he was refused.
For a long while they studied us, and we them. They went round and round us, in strange contemplation, never once uttering a sound. Their silence was the most frightening thing of all, for it made them seem like dream-creatures, nightmare-things.
But there was much else that was frightful about them. For their eyes were bright as sizzling coals, and their bodies gleamed beneath their paint so that every muscle stood out like a statue’s, and they did have two teeth above and two below knocked out, Jaqqa-fashion, which made them look like evil jack-o’-lanterns when they grinned. We remained silent, too, as they surveyed us, out of fear or perhaps out of mystification, for one does not chatter when one is in the presence of devils.
At last they reached a decision concerning us. By pantomime gesture they had us remove our battered bloodstained armor and toss it aside, leaving us only clad in the light linen surplices and such that we wore below it. Then they beckoned, indicating with a tossing of their heads that we should follow them, and led us up out of our sheltering-place toward the path they had been following before they discovered us.
They arrayed us in a line, and disposed us within their own formation, one of them followed by two of us, and again one of them and two of us, so that we all were in the single file, now three times its former size. And we began to march toward the north, they again carrying the three blackamoor corpses slung over their shoulders, we lurching along as best we could, considering our wearied condition.
“Ah, Madonna, where are they taking us?” asked one Portugal behind me.
And another replied, “To their main camp, so that they can feast on us with great celebration.”
A third said, “Should we run?”
And a fourth did answer, with a laugh, “Better to take wing and fly, methinks. That way we might escape them.”
I kept my peace. Night was coming on, and I was beginning to recover my strength, and I wanted to waste none of it in idle conversation. The arrow-wound in my back now was giving me extraordinary pain, that came in waves like a series of bombard-blasts that did explode within me, but I knew myself not to be badly injured for all of that. And the other exhaustions of the battle, the pounding in my chest and the soreness in my legs and the throbbing of my eyes and the cuts of my flesh, were starting now to leave me as the deep natural recuperative strength of my body asserted itself. So I thought I might wait until darkness was complete and then try to slip away from these Jaqqas, with one or two of the Portugals if they cared to come, and find my way back to Masanganu.