CHAPTER VIII.

ALPHONSE EXPLAINS

And so the fight was ended. On returning from the shocking scene it

suddenly struck me that I had seen nothing of Alphonse since the

moment, some twenty minutes before—for though this fight has taken a

long while to describe, it did not take long in reality—when I had been

forced to hit him in the wind with the result of nearly getting myself

shot. Fearing that the poor little man had perished in the battle, I

began to hunt among the dead for his body, but, not being able either

to see or hear anything of it, I concluded that he must have survived,

and walked down the side of the kraal where we had first taken our

stand, calling him by name. Now some fifteen paces back from the kraal

wall stood a very ancient tree of the banyan species. So ancient was it

that all the inside had in the course of ages decayed away, leaving

nothing but a shell of bark.

“Alphonse,” I called, as I walked down the wall. “Alphonse!”

“Oui, monsieur,” answered a voice. “Here am I.”

I looked round but could see nobody. “Where?” I cried.

“Here am I, monsieur, in the tree.”

I looked, and there, peering out of a hole in the trunk of the banyan

about five feet from the ground, I saw a pale face and a pair of large

mustachios, one clipped short and the other as lamentably out of curl

as the tail of a newly whipped pug. Then, for the first time, I

realised what I had suspected before—namely, that Alphonse was an

arrant coward. I walked up to him. “Come out of that hole,” I said.

“Is it finished, monsieur?” he asked anxiously; “quite finished? Ah,

the horrors I have undergone, and the prayers I have uttered!”

“Come out, you little wretch,” I said, for I did not feel amiable; “it

is all over.”

“So, monsieur, then my prayers have prevailed? I emerge,” and he did.

As we were walking down together to join the others, who were gathered

in a group by the wide entrance to the kraal, which now resembled a

veritable charnel-house, a Masai, who had escaped so far and been

hiding under a bush, suddenly sprang up and charged furiously at us.

Off went Alphonse with a howl of terror, and after him flew the Masai,

bent upon doing some execution before he died. He soon overtook the

poor little Frenchman, and would have finished him then and there had I

not, just as Alphonse made a last agonized double in the vain hope of

avoiding the yard of steel that was flashing in his immediate rear,

managed to plant a bullet between the Elmoran’s broad shoulders, which

brought matters to a satisfactory conclusion so far as the Frenchman

was concerned. But just then he tripped and fell flat, and the body of

the Masai fell right on the top of him, moving convulsively in the

death struggle. Thereupon there arose such a series of piercing howls

that I concluded that before he died the savage must have managed to

stab poor Alphonse. I ran up in a hurry and pulled the Masai off, and

there beneath him lay Alphonse covered with blood and jerking himself

about like a galvanized frog. Poor fellow! thought I, he is done for,

and kneeling down by him I began to search for his wound as well as his

struggles would allow.

“Oh, the hole in my back!” he yelled. “I am murdered. I am dead. Oh,

Annette!”

I searched again, but could see no wound. Then the truth dawned on

me—the man was frightened, not hurt.

“Get up!” I shouted, “Get up. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You are

not touched.”

Thereupon he rose, not a penny the worse. “But, monsieur, I thought I

was,” he said apologetically; “I did not know that I had conquered.”

Then, giving the body of the Masai a kick, he ejaculated triumphantly,

“Ah, dog of a black savage, thou art dead; what victory!”

Thoroughly disgusted, I left Alphonse to look after himself, which he

did by following me like a shadow, and proceeded to join the others by

the large entrance. The first thing that I saw was Mackenzie, seated on

a stone with a handkerchief twisted round his thigh, from which he was

bleeding freely, having, indeed, received a spear-thrust that passed

right through it, and still holding in his hand his favourite carving

knife now bent nearly double, from which I gathered that he had been

successful in his rough and tumble with the Elmoran.

“Ah, Quatermain!” he sang out in a trembling, excited voice, “so we

have conquered; but it is a sorry sight, a sorry sight;” and then

breaking into broad Scotch and glancing at the bent knife in his hand,

“It fashes me sair to have bent my best carver on the breastbone of a

savage,” and he laughed hysterically. Poor fellow, what between his

wound and the killing excitement he had undergone his nerves were much

shaken, and no wonder! It is hard upon a man of peace and kindly heart

to be called upon to join in such a gruesome business. But there, fate

puts us sometimes into very comical positions!

At the kraal entrance the scene was a strange one. The slaughter was

over by now, and the wounded men had been put out of their pain, for no

quarter had been given. The bush-closed entrance was trampled flat, and

in place of bushes it was filled with the bodies of dead men. Dead men,

everywhere dead men—they lay about in knots, they were flung by ones

and twos in every position upon the open spaces, for all the world like

the people on the grass in one of the London parks on a particularly

hot Sunday in August. In front of this entrance, on a space which had

been cleared of dead and of the shields and spears which were scattered

in all directions as they had fallen or been thrown from the hands of

their owners, stood and lay the survivors of the awful struggle, and at

their feet were four wounded men. We had gone into the fight thirty

strong, and of the thirty but fifteen remained alive, and five of them

(including Mr Mackenzie) were wounded, two mortally. Of those who held

the entrance, Curtis and the Zulu alone remained. Good had lost five

men killed, I had lost two killed, and Mackenzie no less than five out

of the six with him. As for the survivors they were, with the exception

of myself who had never come to close quarters, red from head to

foot—Sir Henry’s armour might have been painted that colour—and utterly

exhausted, except Umslopogaas, who, as he grimly stood on a little

mound above a heap of dead, leaning as usual upon his axe, did not seem

particularly distressed, although the skin over the hole in his head

palpitated violently.

“Ah, Macumazahn!” he said to me as I limped up, feeling very sick, “I

told thee that it would be a good fight, and it has. Never have I seen

a better, or one more bravely fought. As for this iron shirt, surely it

is ‘tagati’ [bewitched]; nothing could pierce it. Had it not been for

the garment I should have been _there_,” and he nodded towards the

great pile of dead men beneath him.

“I give it thee; thou art a brave man,” said Sir Henry, briefly.

“Koos!” answered the Zulu, deeply pleased both at the gift and the

compliment. “Thou, too, Incubu, didst bear thyself as a man, but I must

give thee some lessons with the axe; thou dost waste thy strength.”

Just then Mackenzie asked about Flossie, and we were all greatly

relieved when one of the men said he had seen her flying towards the

house with the nurse. Then bearing such of the wounded as could be

moved at the moment with us, we slowly made our way towards the

Mission-house, spent with toil and bloodshed, but with the glorious

sense of victory against overwhelming odds glowing in our hearts. We

had saved the life of the little maid, and taught the Masai of those

parts a lesson that they will not forget for ten years—but at what a

cost!

Painfully we made our way up the hill which, just a little more than an

hour before, we had descended under such different circumstances. At

the gate of the wall stood Mrs Mackenzie waiting for us. When her eyes

fell upon us, however, she shrieked out, and covered her face with her

hands, crying, “Horrible, horrible!” Nor were her fears allayed when

she discovered her worthy husband being borne upon an improvised

stretcher; but her doubts as to the nature of his injury were soon set

at rest. Then when in a few brief words I had told her the upshot of

the struggle (of which Flossie, who had arrived in safety, had been

able to explain something) she came up to me and solemnly kissed me on

the forehead.

“God bless you all, Mr Quatermain; you have saved my child’s life,” she

said simply.

Then we went in and got our clothes off and doctored our wounds; I am

glad to say I had none, and Sir Henry’s and Good’s were, thanks to

those invaluable chain shirts, of a comparatively harmless nature, and

to be dealt with by means of a few stitches and sticking-plaster.

Mackenzie’s, however, were serious, though fortunately the spear had

not severed any large artery. After that we had a bath, and what a

luxury it was! And having clad ourselves in ordinary clothes, proceeded

to the dining-room, where breakfast was set as usual. It was curious

sitting down there, drinking tea and eating toast in an ordinary

nineteenth-century sort of way just as though we had not employed the

early hours in a regular primitive hand-to-hand Middle-Ages kind of

struggle. As Good said, the whole thing seemed more as though one had

had a bad nightmare just before being called, than as a deed done. When

we were finishing our breakfast the door opened, and in came little

Flossie, very pale and tottery, but quite unhurt. She kissed us all and

thanked us. I congratulated her on the presence of mind she had shown

in shooting the Masai with her Derringer pistol, and thereby saving her

own life.

“Oh, don’t talk of it!” she said, beginning to cry hysterically; “I

shall never forget his face as he went turning round and round, never—I

can see it now.”

I advised her to go to bed and get some sleep, which she did, and awoke

in the evening quite recovered, so far as her strength was concerned.

It struck me as an odd thing that a girl who could find the nerve to

shoot a huge black ruffian rushing to kill her with a spear should have

been so affected at the thought of it afterwards; but it is, after all,

characteristic of the sex. Poor Flossie! I fear that her nerves will

not get over that night in the Masai camp for many a long year. She

told me afterwards that it was the suspense that was so awful, having

to sit there hour after hour through the livelong night utterly

ignorant as to whether or not any attempt was to be made to rescue her.

She said that on the whole she did not expect it, knowing how few of

us, and how many of the Masai—who, by the way, came continually to

stare at her, most of them never having seen a white person before, and

handled her arms and hair with their filthy paws. She said also that

she had made up her mind that if she saw no signs of succour by the

time the first rays of the rising sun reached the kraal she would kill

herself with the pistol, for the nurse had heard the Lygonani say that

they were to be tortured to death as soon as the sun was up if one of

the white men did not come in their place. It was an awful resolution

to have to take, but she meant to act on it, and I have little doubt

but what she would have done so. Although she was at an age when in

England girls are in the schoolroom and come down to dessert, this

“child of the wilderness” had more courage, discretion, and power of

mind than many a woman of mature age nurtured in idleness and luxury,

with minds carefully drilled and educated out of any originality or

self-resource that nature may have endowed them with.

When breakfast was over we all turned in and had a good sleep, only

getting up in time for dinner; after which meal we once more adjourned,

together with all the available population—men, women, youths, and

girls—to the scene of the morning’s slaughter, our object being to bury

our own dead and get rid of the Masai by flinging them into the Tana

River, which ran within fifty yards of the kraal. On reaching the spot

we disturbed thousands upon thousands of vultures and a sort of brown

bush eagle, which had been flocking to the feast from miles and miles

away. Often have I watched these great and repulsive birds, and

marvelled at the extraordinary speed with which they arrive on a scene

of slaughter. A buck falls to your rifle, and within a minute high in

the blue ether appears a speck that gradually grows into a vulture,

then another, and another. I have heard many theories advanced to

account for the wonderful power of perception nature has given these

birds. My own, founded on a good deal of observation, is that the

vultures, gifted as they are with powers of sight greater than those

given by the most powerful glass, quarter out the heavens among

themselves, and hanging in mid-air at a vast height—probably from two

to three miles above the earth—keep watch, each of them, over an

enormous stretch of country. Presently one of them spies food, and

instantly begins to sink towards it. Thereon his next neighbour in the

airy heights sailing leisurely through the blue gulf, at a distance

perhaps of some miles, follows his example, knowing that food has been

sighted. Down he goes, and all the vultures within sight of him follow

after, and so do all those in sight of them. In this way the vultures

for twenty miles round can be summoned to the feast in a few minutes.

We buried our dead in solemn silence, Good being selected to read the

Burial Service over them (in the absence of Mr Mackenzie, confined to

bed), as he was generally allowed to possess the best voice and most

impressive manner. It was melancholy in the extreme, but, as Good said,

it might have been worse, for we might have had “to bury ourselves”. I

pointed out that this would have been a difficult feat, but I knew what

he meant.

Next we set to work to load an ox-wagon which had been brought round

from the Mission with the dead bodies of the Masai, having first

collected the spears, shields, and other arms. We loaded the wagon five

times, about fifty bodies to the load, and emptied it into the Tana.

From this it was evident that very few of the Masai could have escaped.

The crocodiles must have been well fed that night. One of the last

bodies we picked up was that of the sentry at the upper end. I asked

Good how he managed to kill him, and he told me that he had crept up

much as Umslopogaas had done, and stabbed him with his sword. He

groaned a good deal, but fortunately nobody heard him. As Good said, it

was a horrible thing to have to do, and most unpleasantly like

cold-blooded murder.

And so with the last body that floated away down the current of the

Tana ended the incident of our attack on the Masai camp. The spears and

shields and other arms we took up to the Mission, where they filled an

outhouse. One incident, however, I must not forget to mention. As we

were returning from performing the obsequies of our Masai friends we

passed the hollow tree where Alphonse had secreted himself in the

morning. It so happened that the little man himself was with us

assisting in our unpleasant task with a far better will than he had

shown where live Masai were concerned. Indeed, for each body that he

handled he found an appropriate sarcasm. Alphonse throwing Masai into

the Tana was a very different creature from Alphonse flying for dear

life from the spear of a live Masai. He was quite merry and gay, he

clapped his hands and warbled snatches of French songs as the grim dead

warriors went “splash” into the running waters to carry a message of

death and defiance to their kindred a hundred miles below. In short,

thinking that he wanted taking down a peg, I suggested holding a

court-martial on him for his conduct in the morning.

Accordingly we brought him to the tree where he had hidden, and

proceeded to sit in judgment on him, Sir Henry explaining to him in the

very best French the unheard-of cowardice and enormity of his conduct,

more especially in letting the oiled rag out of his mouth, whereby he

nearly aroused the Masai camp with teeth-chattering and brought about

the failure of our plans: ending up with a request for an explanation.

But if we expected to find Alphonse at a loss and put him to open shame

we were destined to be disappointed. He bowed and scraped and smiled,

and acknowledged that his conduct might at first blush appear strange,

but really it was not, inasmuch as his teeth were not chattering from

fear—oh, dear no! oh, certainly not! he marvelled how the “messieurs”

could think of such a thing—but from the chill air of the morning. As

for the rag, if monsieur could have but tasted its evil flavour, being

compounded indeed of a mixture of stale paraffin oil, grease, and

gunpowder, monsieur himself would have spat it out. But he did nothing

of the sort; he determined to keep it there till, alas! his stomach

“revolted”, and the rag was ejected in an access of involuntary

sickness.

“And what have you to say about getting into the hollow tree?” asked

Sir Henry, keeping his countenance with difficulty.

“But, monsieur, the explanation is easy; oh, most easy! it was thus: I

stood there by the kraal wall, and the little grey monsieur hit me in

the stomach so that my rifle exploded, and the battle began. I watched

whilst recovering myself from monsieur’s cruel blow; then, messieurs, I

felt the heroic blood of my grandfather boil up in my veins. The sight

made me mad. I ground my teeth! Fire flashed from my eyes! I shouted

‘En avant!’ and longed to slay. Before my eyes there rose a vision of

my heroic grandfather! In short, I was mad! I was a warrior indeed! But

then in my heart I heard a small voice: ‘Alphonse,’ said the voice,

‘restrain thyself, Alphonse! Give not way to this evil passion! These

men, though black, are brothers! And thou wouldst slay them? Cruel

Alphonse!’ The voice was right. I knew it; I was about to perpetrate

the most horrible cruelties: to wound! to massacre! to tear limb from

limb! And how restrain myself? I looked round; I saw the tree, I

perceived the hole. ‘Entomb thyself,’ said the voice, ‘and hold on

tight! Thou wilt thus overcome temptation by main force!’ It was

bitter, just when the blood of my heroic grandfather boiled most

fiercely; but I obeyed! I dragged my unwilling feet along; I entombed

myself! Through the hole I watched the battle! I shouted curses and

defiance on the foe! I noted them fall with satisfaction! Why not? I

had not robbed them of their lives. Their gore was not upon my head.

The blood of my heroic—”

“Oh, get along with you, you little cur!” broke out Sir Henry, with a

shout of laughter, and giving Alphonse a good kick which sent him

flying off with a rueful face.

In the evening I had an interview with Mr Mackenzie, who was suffering

a good deal from his wounds, which Good, who was a skilful though

unqualified doctor, was treating him for. He told me that this

occurrence had taught him a lesson, and that, if he recovered safely,

he meant to hand over the Mission to a younger man, who was already on

his road to join him in his work, and return to England.

“You see, Quatermain,” he said, “I made up my mind to it, this very

morning, when we were creeping down those benighted savages. ‘If we

live through this and rescue Flossie alive,’ I said to myself, ‘I will

go home to England; I have had enough of savages.’ Well, I did not

think that we should live through it at the time; but thanks be to God

and you four, we have lived through it, and I mean to stick to my

resolution, lest a worse thing befall us. Another such time would kill

my poor wife. And besides, Quatermain, between you and me, I am well

off; it is thirty thousand pounds I am worth today, and every farthing

of it made by honest trade and savings in the bank at Zanzibar, for

living here costs me next to nothing. So though it will be hard to

leave this place, which I have made to blossom like a rose in the

wilderness, and harder still to leave the people I have taught, I shall

go.”

“I congratulate you on your decision,” answered I, “for two reasons.

The first is, that you owe a duty to your wife and daughter, and more

especially to the latter, who should receive some education and mix

with girls of her own race, otherwise she will grow up wild, shunning

her kind. The other is, that as sure as I am standing here, sooner or

later the Masai will try to avenge the slaughter inflicted on them

today. Two or three men are sure to have escaped the confusion who will

carry the story back to their people, and the result will be that a

great expedition will one day be sent against you. It might be delayed

for a year, but sooner or later it will come. Therefore, if only for

that reason, I should go. When once they have learnt that you are no

longer here they may perhaps leave the place alone.”[8]

[8] By a sad coincidence, since the above was written by Mr

Quatermain, the Masai have, in April 1886, massacred a missionary and

his wife—Mr and Mrs Houghton—on this very Tana River, and at the spot

described. These are, I believe, the first white people who are known

to have fallen victims to this cruel tribe.—Editor.

“You are quite right,” answered the clergyman. “I will turn my back

upon this place in a month. But it will be a wrench, it will be a

wrench.”