"Balloo, please give me something to wear," she begged as she stumbled after him. There was a slight path, but she was still amazed by how he so easily made his way.
"Soon," he assured her, and that's all he would say.
It was not long before they came to the river he had mentioned earlier in the morning. It had to be a small branch from the Gambia River, Julie decided. One of the things she had thought she had seen as they left the area of their hut, was another hut through the trees. At another point in their journey, she could have sworn she had heard low voices. Now as they broke through the edge of the jungle to approach the river, she saw that there were indeed other people around, mostly women here. They were laughers like the men she knew, and their broad teeth were dazzling in the morning sunlight.
Her appearance caused absolute consternation. One by one, as they saw her, they stopped whatever they were doing, their expressions froze in place on their laces, and they stared, looking her up and down with great curiosity. Momentarily, Julie thought how they looked at her as though they had never seen a white woman before, and then she stopped to think about it, realizing that they probably had not! The women never came to her father's mission house. One handsome woman was standing in the river, her huge tits just breaking water, unable to tear her big eyes from this strange sight, a girl with no color in her skin! Such things had been heard of before. Every once in awhile a single baby in one tribe or other was born without color in the skin or hair just as that thing happened sometimes among the animals. Since the animals preserved such creatures carefully, the natives preserved their albinos also, even though they rarely lived as long as anyone else, a though it was said that in a neighboring village there lived one of these strange ones to be the oldest of his people, but that was legend.
The surprising thing about this creature, though, the women noticed, was that although she had no color in her skin, she did have color in her hair, and so they didn't know how she was categorized. Julie noticed that a woman kneeling at the river, scrubbing some of the roughly worn material that the natives made for every day wear around here, had frozen with the garment half in the water. They came close to this woman and she was looking up at their approach, half in awe and half in fear. She trembled a little. Julie then saw that the woman's garment seemed to be trying to tug away from her. It was curious how instead of floating in the river, it kept dunking itself periodically, dunking and pulling.
Then Balloo slapped his hand onto her shoulder silently in a gesture that told her plainly to keep quiet and hold still. She looked up to see that he was staring at the garment as well. Stealthily he approached the kneeling woman, whose eyes had not left Julie's strange white body, and suddenly, he thrust himself down into the relatively shallow water at the river's edge at a point just beyond the garment. Up he came, laughing in gales even before the water had dripped from his eyes. He fumbled to his feet and was clearly holding a burden just under the water with both arms. Gradually he lifted them, and as he did, the garment lifted also. A great tortoise held the material firmly in his mouth and had withdrawn all his limbs and his head, still holding the garment, into his shell.
"Aaaiueee!" the woman screamed and dropped her end of the material gladly.
"You must wash yourself," Balloo told Julie. "I cannot put thees down." Apparently, he had meant to wash her. Well, she was glad for the appearance of the tortoise in that case.
"The dress here," she then asked because she noticed that one of the things he had been carrying and had dropped when he leaped into the river, seemed to be a robe of some kind. It looked like burlap although of a softer weave. "Is this mine?"
"Yes, but not unclean," he instructed coldly. She took that as a threat to wash before touching it. She needed no threat! In spite of the fact there might well be another tortoise in the river; there could be anything, her father had warned, in these rivers: she jumped in almost immediately. She knew the natives scooped sand from the bottom of the river to use as a cloth with which to scrub themselves. She and her father had learned that when they had introduced washing before tea. They had taken the men to the pump to wash and had been amazed to see that they scooped dirt from the ground with which to wash! She copied them now because she didn't want to risk irritating Balloo. She didn't know what "unclean" might mean to him within his mysterious set of taboos, and she did not wish to discover the penalty before the rule!
By the time she finished scrubbing herself down with the rough sand and the river water, she could see that she had changed appearance considerably. Her skin was everywhere a ruddy pink, and her light brown hair was matted fairly flat to her head, combed with her fingers as best she could. She climbed up onto the river bank again and picked up the garment that she was to wear. It felt like a tent going over her head, and she was relieved to find that it at least covered her tits. She had been afraid that it would be only a long skirt, but she found holes for her arms, and there was a cord to tie around her tiny waist.
Meanwhile, a couple of the women had helped Balloo construct a kind of branch sleigh by which to haul the big tortoise back to the hut. It was a little slower returning because of the addition of the big turtle, but Julie still had to marvel at the agility with which Balloo managed to maneuver through the woods. A great roar of laughter and happiness met them when the other men saw the prize, but instead of taking the poor creature into the hut, they loaded it into the back seat of the car, which Dawak and Kubby were filling with gasoline when Balloo and Julie returned. Then Julie was invited into the back seat, too, though Enhar was given the task of keeping the tortoise under his feet, and Julie was placed against the opposite door, shielded by Balloo from tortoise and Enhar both, for which she was greatly relieved.
"Where… where are we going?" she questioned when she saw that they were all taking off again. Was she being taken home already?
"Ah," Balloo gasped. "We go to King Daranje Kawat with fine food," he told her, his eyes twinkling with mischief. He wanted her to be frightened, that he meant she would be the food, but she knew he was referring to the tortoise.
"Why me?" she asked, not frightened. He knew she wanted to know why she was involved with all this.
"Hey you," he said sternly, slivers of ice appearing an the glint of his eyes, "much business. Business, business, business."
That was not a word he learned from her father but from the market place. Most of the traders the natives here dealt with in the market were French, but some were English. The Reverend Davenport had discovered that the primitives had learned a number of English words before they came to him. They seemed to enjoy learning the language. In fact, the missionary often complained that that was all they seemed to want to learn. They soaked up the English words and seemed to let the English religion go over their heads! Oh, they played the ceremonial games with him but with other motivation than worship, he suspected. The problem was that he seemed unable to decipher their reasons!
Julie fell silent after that. Apparently, she was not going to learn about her abduction until they were good and ready to tell her the story. By this time, having been through everything there was to terrify her, she was more curious than afraid. But she must wait.
Even when the automobile stopped in the dusty middle of a clearing that was surrounded by several of the familiar rush-woven huts, but mostly by one single long hut that was also taller than the others, Julie knew no more than she had when the men had stolen into her bedroom the night before. She had to wait, the object of much curious staring by the people, while the men wrestled the big tortoise out of the car. It was almost as though the poor creature knew that he was destined for the pot! But that's the usual way of life, Julie thought. When the strong grab the weak, it's to put them into the pot, and most creatures know this instinctively. It gets complex on the human level, though. She was being put into some kind of pot for some selfish reasons the natives had, but as long as they didn't literally boil her, there was not much else for her to lose, it seemed. She would have to be patient to see what kind of pot lay in her future.