The villagers came running when they saw us. A drum began beating some place, and to its beat we were marched up a narrow street and to a hut near the biggest hut. We were thrust into this, a gate of bamboo bars was lashed to the entrance, and we sat against its back wall while the villagers took turns looking in at us. As a whole, they were a good-looking people, the average of beauty being much higher than that seen in the East End of London, for instance. The women wore only long cloth skirts, though necklaces of shells hung around their necks and their long hair was decorated with flowers. The prepubescent children were stark naked.
Presently, food was brought to us. This consisted of delicious baked fish, roasted pygmy antelope, unleavened bread, and a brew that would under other circumstances have been too sweet for my taste. I am not ashamed to admit that Holmes and I gorged ourselves, devouring everything set before us.
I went to sleep shortly afterward, waking after dusk with a start. A torch flared in a stanchion just outside the entrance, at which two guards stood. Holmes was sitting near it, reading his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen. “Holmes,” I began, but he held up his hand for silence. His keen ears had detected a sound a few seconds before mine did. This swelled to a hubbub with the villagers swarming out while the drum beat again. A moment later we saw the cause of the uproar. Six warriors, with Reich and Von Bork among them, were marching toward us. And while we watched curiously the two Germans were shoved into our hut.
Though both were much younger than Holmes and I, they were in equally bad condition — probably, I suppose, because they had not practiced the good old British custom of walking whenever possible. Von Bork refused to talk to us, but Reich, always a gentleman, told us what had happened to his party.
“We too heard the noises and that horrible cry,” he said. “We made our way cautiously toward it, until we saw the carnage in a clearing. There were five dead men sprawled there, and six running in one direction and four in another. Standing with his foot on the chest of the largest corpse was a white man clad only in a leopard-skin. He was the one uttering that awful cry, which I would swear no human throat could make.”
“Der englisch Affenmensch,” Von Bork muttered, his only contribution to the conversation that evening.
“Three of the men had arrows in them; the other two obviously had had their necks broken,” Reich continued. “Von Bork whispered to me the wild man’s identity, and so I whispered to my men to fire at him. Before we could do so, he had leaped up and pulled himself by a branch into a tree, and he was gone. We searched for him for some time without success. Then we started out to the east, but at dusk one of my men fell with an arrow through his neck. The angle of the arrow showed that it had come from above. We looked upward but could see nothing. Then a voice, speaking in excellent German, with a Branden-burger accent yet, ordered us to turn back. We were to march to the southwest. If we did not, one of us would die at dusk each day until no one was left. I asked him why we should do this, but there was no reply. Obviously, he had us entirely at his mercy — which, I suspected, from the looks of him, he utterly lacked.”
“He claims that German officers murdered his wife,” Holmes said.
“That’s a lie!” Reich said indignantly. “More British propaganda! We are not the baby-bayoneting Huns your propaganda office portrays us as being!”
“There are some bad apples in every barrel,” Holmes replied coolly.
Reich looked as if something had suddenly disturbed him. I thought it was a gas pain, but he said, “So, then, you met Greystoke! He told you this! But why did he desert you, leave you to fall into the hands of these savages?”
“I don’t know,” Holmes said. “Please carry on with your story.”
“My first concern was the safety and well-being of my men. To have ignored Greystoke would have been to be brave but stupid. So I ordered the march to the southwest. After two days if became evident that Greystoke intended for us to starve to death. All our food was stolen that night, and we dared not leave the line of march to hunt, even though I doubt that we would have been able to shoot anything. The evening of the second day, I called out, begging that he let us at least hunt for food. He must have had some pangs of conscience, some mercy in him after all. That morning we woke to find a freshly killed wild pig, one of those orange-bristled swine, in the center of the camp. From somewhere in the branches overhead his voice came mockingly. ‘Pigs should eat pigs!’
“And so we struggled southwestward until today. We were attacked by these people. Greystoke had not ordered us to lay down our arms, so we gave a good account of ourselves. But only Von Bork and I survived, and we were knocked unconscious by the flats of their axes. And marched here, the Lord only knows for what end.”
“I suspect that the Lord of the Jungle, one of Greystoke’s unofficial titles, knows,” Holmes said glumly.
Nine
If Greystoke did know, he did not appear to tell us what to expect. Several days passed while we slept and ate and talked to Reich. Von Bork continued to ignore us, even though Holmes several times addressed him. Holmes asked him about his health, which I thought a strange concern for a man who had not killed us only because he lacked the opportunity.
Holmes seemed especially interested in his left eye, once coming up to within a few inches of it and staring at it. Von Bork became enraged at this close scrutiny.
“Get away from me, British swine!” he yelled. “Or I will ruin both of your eyes!”
“Permit Dr. Watson to examine it,” Holmes said. “He might be able to save it.”
“I want no incompetent English physician poking around it,” Von Bork said.
I became so indignant that I lectured him on the very high standards of British medicine, but he only turned his back on me. Holmes chuckled at this and winked at me.
At the end of the week, we were allowed to leave the hut during the day, unaccompanied by guards. Holmes and I were not restrained in any way, though the Germans were hobbled with shackles so that they could not walk very fast. Apparently, our captors decided that Holmes and I were too old to give them much of a run for their money.
We took advantage of our comparative freedom to stroll around the village, inspecting everything and also attempting to learn the language.
“I don’t know what family it belongs to,” Holmes said. “But it is related neither to Cornish nor Chaldean, of that I’m sure.”
Holmes was also interested in the white china of these people, which represented their highest art form. The black figures and designs they painted upon it reminded me somewhat of early Greek vase paintings. The vases and dishes were formed from kaolin deposits which existed to the north near the precipices. I mention this only because the white clay was to play an important part in our salvation in the near future.
At the end of the second week, Holmes, a superb linguist, had attained some fluency in the speech of our captors. “It belongs to a completely unknown language family,” he said. “But there are certain words which, degenerated though they are, obviously come from ancient Persian. I would say that at one time these people had contact with a wandering party of descendants of Darius. The party settled down here, and these people borrowed some words from their idiom.”