CHAPTER VIII.

Delcarte and Taylor were now in mid-stream, coming toward us, and I

called to them to keep aloof until I knew whether the intentions of my

captors were friendly or otherwise. My good men wanted to come on and

annihilate the blacks. But there were upward of a hundred of the

latter, all well armed, and so I commanded Delcarte to keep out of

harml’s way, and stay where he was till I needed him.

A young officer called and beckoned to them. But they refused to come,

and so he gave orders that resulted in my hands being secured at my

back, after which the company marched away, straight toward the east.

I noticed that the men wore spurs, which seemed strange to me. But

when, late in the afternoon, we arrived at their encampment, I

discovered that my captors were cavalrymen.

In the center of a plain stood a log fort, with a blockhouse at each of

its four corners. As we approached, I saw a herd of cavalry horses

grazing under guard outside the walls of the post. They were small,

stocky horses, but the telltale saddle galls proclaimed their calling.

The flag flying from a tall staff inside the palisade was one which I

had never before seen nor heard of.

We marched directly into the compound, where the company was dismissed,

with the exception of a guard of four privates, who escorted me in the

wake of the young officer. The latter led us across a small parade

ground, where a battery of light field guns was parked, and toward a

log building, in front of which rose the flagstaff.

I was escorted within the building into the presence of an old negro, a

fine looking man, with a dignified and military bearing. He was a

colonel, I was to learn later, and to him I owe the very humane

treatment that was accorded me while I remained his prisoner.

He listened to the report of his junior, and then turned to question

me, but with no better results than the former had accomplished. Then

he summoned an orderly, and gave some instructions. The soldier

saluted, and left the room, returning in about five minutes with a

hairy old white man—just such a savage, primeval-looking fellow as I

had discovered in the woods the day that Snider had disappeared with

the launch.

The colonel evidently expected to use the fellow as interpreter, but

when the savage addressed me it was in a language as foreign to me as

was that of the blacks. At last the old officer gave it up, and,

shaking his head, gave instructions for my removal.

From his office I was led to a guardhouse, in which I found about fifty

half-naked whites, clad in the skins of wild beasts. I tried to

converse with them, but not one of them could understand Pan-American,

nor could I make head or tail of their jargon.

For over a month I remained a prisoner there, working from morning

until night at odd jobs about the headquarters building of the

commanding officer. The other prisoners worked harder than I did, and I

owe my better treatment solely to the kindliness and discrimination of

the old colonel.

What had become of Victory, of Delcarte, of Taylor I could not know;

nor did it seem likely that I should ever learn. I was most depressed.

But I whiled away my time in performing the duties given me to the best

of my ability and attempting to learn the language of my captors.

Who they were or where they came from was a mystery to me. That they

were the outpost of some powerful black nation seemed likely, yet where

the seat of that nation lay I could not guess.

They looked upon the whites as their inferiors, and treated us

accordingly. They had a literature of their own, and many of the men,

even the common soldiers, were omnivorous readers. Every two weeks a

dust-covered trooper would trot his jaded mount into the post and

deliver a bulging sack of mail at headquarters. The next day he would

be away again upon a fresh horse toward the south, carrying the

soldiers’ letters to friends in the far off land of mystery from whence

they all had come.

Troops, sometimes mounted and sometimes afoot, left the post daily for

what I assumed to be patrol duty. I judged the little force of a

thousand men were detailed here to maintain the authority of a distant

government in a conquered country. Later, I learned that my surmise was

correct, and this was but one of a great chain of similar posts that

dotted the new frontier of the black nation into whose hands I had

fallen.

Slowly I learned their tongue, so that I could understand what was said

before me, and make myself understood. I had seen from the first that I

was being treated as a slave—that all whites that fell into the hands

of the blacks were thus treated.

Almost daily new prisoners were brought in, and about three weeks after

I was brought in to the post a troop of cavalry came from the south to

relieve one of the troops stationed there. There was great jubilation

in the encampment after the arrival of the newcomers, old friendships

were renewed and new ones made. But the happiest men were those of the

troop that was to be relieved.

The next morning they started away, and as they were forced upon the

parade ground we prisoners were marched from our quarters and lined up

before them. A couple of long chains were brought, with rings in the

links every few feet. At first I could not guess the purpose of these

chains. But I was soon to learn.

A couple of soldiers snapped the first ring around the neck of a

powerful white slave, and one by one the rest of us were herded to our

places, and the work of shackling us neck to neck commenced.

The colonel stood watching the procedure. Presently his eyes fell upon

me, and he spoke to a young officer at his side. The latter stepped

toward me and motioned me to follow him. I did so, and was led back to

the colonel.

By this time I could understand a few words of their strange language,

and when the colonel asked me if I would prefer to remain at the post

as his body servant, I signified my willingness as emphatically as

possible, for I had seen enough of the brutality of the common soldiers

toward their white slaves to have no desire to start out upon a march

of unknown length, chained by the neck, and driven on by the great

whips that a score of the soldiers carried to accelerate the speed of

their charges.

About three hundred prisoners who had been housed in six prisons at the

post marched out of the gates that morning, toward what fate and what

future I could not guess. Neither had the poor devils themselves more

than the most vague conception of what lay in store for them, except

that they were going elsewhere to continue in the slavery that they had

known since their capture by their black conquerors—a slavery that was

to continue until death released them.

My position was altered at the post. From working about the

headquarters office, I was transferred to the colonel’s living

quarters. I had greater freedom, and no longer slept in one of the

prisons, but had a little room to myself off the kitchen of the

colonel’s log house.

My master was always kind to me, and under him I rapidly learned the

language of my captors, and much concerning them that had been a

mystery to me before. His name was Abu Belik. He was a colonel in the

cavalry of Abyssinia, a country of which I do not remember ever

hearing, but which Colonel Belik assured me is the oldest civilized

country in the world.

Colonel Belik was born in Adis Abeba, the capital of the empire, and

until recently had been in command of the emperorl’s palace guard.

Jealousy and the ambition and intrigue of another officer had lost him

the favor of his emperor, and he had been detailed to this frontier

post as a mark of his sovereignl’s displeasure.

Some fifty years before, the young emperor, Menelek XIV, was ambitious.

He knew that a great world lay across the waters far to the north of

his capital. Once he had crossed the desert and looked out upon the

blue sea that was the northern boundary of his dominions.

There lay another world to conquer. Menelek busied himself with the

building of a great fleet, though his people were not a maritime race.

His army crossed into Europe. It met with little resistance, and for

fifty years his soldiers had been pushing his boundaries farther and

farther toward the north.

“The yellow men from the east and north are contesting our rights here

now,” said the colonel, “but we shall win—we shall conquer the world,

carrying Christianity to all the benighted heathen of Europe, and Asia

as well.”

“You are a Christian people?” I asked.

He looked at me in surprise, nodding his head affirmatively.

“I am a Christian,” I said. “My people are the most powerful on earth.”

He smiled, and shook his head indulgently, as a father to a child who

sets up his childish judgment against that of his elders.

Then I set out to prove my point. I told him of our cities, of our

army, of our great navy. He came right back at me asking for figures,

and when he was done I had to admit that only in our navy were we

numerically superior.

Menelek XIV is the undisputed ruler of all the continent of Africa, of

all of ancient Europe except the British Isles, Scandinavia, and

eastern Russia, and has large possessions and prosperous colonies in

what once were Arabia and Turkey in Asia.

He has a standing army of ten million men, and his people possess

slaves—white slaves—to the number of ten or fifteen million.

Colonel Belik was much surprised, however, upon his part, to learn of

the great nation which lay across the ocean, and when he found that I

was a naval officer, he was inclined to accord me even greater

consideration than formerly. It was difficult for him to believe my

assertion that there were but few blacks in my country, and that these

occupied a lower social plane than the whites.

Just the reverse is true in Colonel Belikl’s land. He considered whites

inferior beings, creatures of a lower order, and assured me that even

the few white freemen of Abyssinia were never accorded anything

approximating a position of social equality with the blacks. They live

in the poorer districts of the cities, in little white colonies, and a

black who marries a white is socially ostracized.

The arms and ammunition of the Abyssinians are greatly inferior to

ours, yet they are tremendously effective against the ill-armed

barbarians of Europe. Their rifles are of a type similar to the

magazine rifles of twentieth century Pan-America, but carrying only

five cartridges in the magazine, in addition to the one in the chamber.

They are of extraordinary length, even those of the cavalry, and are of

extreme accuracy.

The Abyssinians themselves are a fine looking race of black men—tall,

muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline

distinctly toward Semitic mold—I refer to the full-blooded natives of

Abyssinia. They are the patricians—the aristocracy. The army is

officered almost exclusively by them. Among the soldiery a lower type

of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses.

These men are recruited, so the colonel told me, from among the

conquered tribes of Africa. They are good soldiers—brave and loyal.

They can read and write, and they are endowed with a self-confidence

and pride which, from my readings of the words of ancient African

explorers, must have been wanting in their earliest progenitors. On the

whole, it is apparent that the black race has thrived far better in the

past two centuries under men of its own color than it had under the

domination of whites during all previous history.

I had been a prisoner at the little frontier post for over a month,

when orders came to Colonel Belik to hasten to the eastern frontier

with the major portion of his command, leaving only one troop to

garrison the fort. As his body servant, I accompanied him mounted upon

a fiery little Abyssinian pony.

We marched rapidly for ten days through the heart of the ancient German

empire, halting when night found us in proximity to water. Often we

passed small posts similar to that at which the colonel’s regiment had

been quartered, finding in each instance that only a single company or

troop remained for defence, the balance having been withdrawn toward

the northeast, in the same direction in which we were moving.

Naturally, the colonel had not confided to me the nature of his orders.

But the rapidity of our march and the fact that all available troops

were being hastened toward the northeast assured me that a matter of

vital importance to the dominion of Menelek XIV in that part of Europe

was threatening or had already broken.

I could not believe that a simple rising of the savage tribes of whites

would necessitate the mobilizing of such a force as we presently met

with converging from the south into our trail. There were large bodies

of cavalry and infantry, endless streams of artillery wagons and guns,

and countless horse-drawn covered vehicles laden with camp equipage,

munitions, and provisions.

Here, for the first time, I saw camels, great caravans of them, bearing

all sorts of heavy burdens, and miles upon miles of elephants doing

similar service. It was a scene of wondrous and barbaric splendor, for

the men and beasts from the south were gaily caparisoned in rich

colors, in marked contrast to the gray uniformed forces of the

frontier, with which I had been familiar.

The rumor reached us that Menelek himself was coming, and the pitch of

excitement to which this announcement raised the troops was little

short of miraculous—at least, to one of my race and nationality whose

rulers for centuries had been but ordinary men, holding office at the

will of the people for a few brief years.

As I witnessed it, I could not but speculate upon the moral effect upon

his troops of a sovereignl’s presence in the midst of battle. All else

being equal in war between the troops of a republic and an empire,

could not this exhilarated mental state, amounting almost to hysteria

on the part of the imperial troops, weigh heavily against the soldiers

of a president? I wonder.

But if the emperor chanced to be absent? What then? Again I wonder.

On the eleventh day we reached our destination—a walled frontier city

of about twenty thousand. We passed some lakes, and crossed some old

canals before entering the gates. Within, beside the frame buildings,

were many built of ancient brick and well-cut stone. These, I was told,

were of material taken from the ruins of the ancient city which, once,

had stood upon the site of the present town.

The name of the town, translated from the Abyssinian, is New Gondar. It

stands, I am convinced, upon the ruins of ancient Berlin, the one time

capital of the old German empire, but except for the old building

material used in the new town there is no sign of the former city.

The day after we arrived, the town was gaily decorated with flags,

streamers, gorgeous rugs, and banners, for the rumor had proved

true—the emperor was coming.

Colonel Belik had accorded me the greatest liberty, permitting me to go

where I pleased, after my few duties had been performed. As a result of

his kindness, I spent much time wandering about New Gondar, talking

with the inhabitants, and exploring the city of black men.

As I had been given a semi-military uniform which bore insignia

indicating that I was an officerl’s body servant, even the blacks

treated me with a species of respect, though I could see by their

manner that I was really as the dirt beneath their feet. They answered

my questions civilly enough, but they would not enter into conversation

with me. It was from other slaves that I learned the gossip of the

city.

Troops were pouring in from the west and south, and pouring out toward

the east. I asked an old slave who was sweeping the dirt into little

piles in the gutters of the street where the soldiers were going. He

looked at me in surprise.

“Why, to fight the yellow men, of course,” he said. “They have crossed

the border, and are marching toward New Gondar.”

“Who will win?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?” he said. “I hope it will be the

yellow men, but Menelek is powerful—it will take many yellow men to

defeat him.”

Crowds were gathering along the sidewalks to view the emperorl’s entry

into the city. I took my place among them, although I hate crowds, and

I am glad that I did, for I witnessed such a spectacle of barbaric

splendor as no other Pan-American has ever looked upon.

Down the broad main thoroughfare, which may once have been the historic

Unter den Linden, came a brilliant cortege. At the head rode a regiment

of red-coated hussars—enormous men, black as night. There were troops

of riflemen mounted on camels. The emperor rode in a golden howdah upon

the back of a huge elephant so covered with rich hangings and

embellished with scintillating gems that scarce more than the beastl’s

eyes and feet were visible.

Menelek was a rather gross-looking man, well past middle age, but he

carried himself with an air of dignity befitting one descended in

unbroken line from the Prophet—as was his claim.

His eyes were bright but crafty, and his features denoted both

sensuality and cruelness. In his youth he may have been a rather fine

looking black, but when I saw him his appearance was revolting—to me,

at least.

Following the emperor came regiment after regiment from the various

branches of the service, among them batteries of field guns mounted on

elephants.

In the center of the troops following the imperial elephant marched a

great caravan of slaves. The old street sweeper at my elbow told me

that these were the gifts brought in from the far outlying districts by

the commanding officers of the frontier posts. The majority of them

were women, destined, I was told, for the harems of the emperor and his

favorites. It made my old companion clench his fists to see those poor

white women marching past to their horrid fates, and, though I shared

his sentiments, I was as powerless to alter their destinies as he.

For a week the troops kept pouring in and out of New Gondar—in, always,

from the south and west, but always toward the east. Each new

contingent brought its gifts to the emperor. From the south they

brought rugs and ornaments and jewels; from the west, slaves; for the

commanding officers of the western frontier posts had naught else to

bring.

From the number of women they brought, I judged that they knew the

weakness of their imperial master.

And then soldiers commenced coming in from the east, but not with the

gay assurance of those who came from the south and west—no, these

others came in covered wagons, blood-soaked and suffering. They came at

first in little parties of eight or ten, and then they came in fifties,

in hundreds, and one day a thousand maimed and dying men were carted

into New Gondar.

It was then that Menelek XIV became uneasy. For fifty years his armies

had conquered wherever they had marched. At first he had led them in

person, lately his presence within a hundred miles of the battle line

had been sufficient for large engagements—for minor ones only the

knowledge that they were fighting for the glory of their sovereign was

necessary to win victories.

One morning, New Gondar was awakened by the booming of cannon. It was

the first intimation that the townspeople had received that the enemy

was forcing the imperial troops back upon the city. Dust covered

couriers galloped in from the front. Fresh troops hastened from the

city, and about noon Menelek rode out surrounded by his staff.

For three days thereafter we could hear the cannonading and the

spitting of the small arms, for the battle line was scarce two leagues

from New Gondar. The city was filled with wounded. Just outside,

soldiers were engaged in throwing up earthworks. It was evident to the

least enlightened that Menelek expected further reverses.

And then the imperial troops fell back upon these new defenses, or,

rather, they were forced back by the enemy. Shells commenced to fall

within the city. Menelek returned and took up his headquarters in the

stone building that was called the palace. That night came a lull in

the hostilities—a truce had been arranged.

Colonel Belik summoned me about seven o’clock to dress him for a

function at the palace. In the midst of death and defeat the emperor

was about to give a great banquet to his officers. I was to accompany

my master and wait upon him—I, Jefferson Turck, lieutenant in the

Pan-American navy!

In the privacy of the colonel’s quarters I had become accustomed to my

menial duties, lightened as they were by the natural kindliness of my

master, but the thought of appearing in public as a common slave

revolted every fine instinct within me. Yet there was nothing for it

but to obey.

I cannot, even now, bring myself to a narration of the humiliation

which I experienced that night as I stood behind my black master in

silent servility, now pouring his wine, now cutting up his meats for

him, now fanning him with a large, plumed fan of feathers.

As fond as I had grown of him, I could have thrust a knife into him, so

keenly did I feel the affront that had been put upon me. But at last

the long banquet was concluded. The tables were removed. The emperor

ascended a dais at one end of the room and seated himself upon a

throne, and the entertainment commenced. It was only what ancient

history might have led me to expect—musicians, dancing girls, jugglers,

and the like.

Near midnight, the master of ceremonies announced that the slave women

who had been presented to the emperor since his arrival in New Gondar

would be exhibited, that the royal host would select such as he wished,

after which he would present the balance of them to his guests. Ah,

what royal generosity!

A small door at one side of the room opened, and the poor creatures

filed in and were ranged in a long line before the throne. Their backs

were toward me. I saw only an occasional profile as now and then a

bolder spirit among them turned to survey the apartment and the

gorgeous assemblage of officers in their brilliant dress uniforms. They

were profiles of young girls, and pretty, but horror was indelibly

stamped upon them all. I shuddered as I contemplated their sad fate,

and turned my eyes away.

I heard the master of ceremonies command them to prostrate themselves

before the emperor, and the sounds as they went upon their knees before

him, touching their foreheads to the floor. Then came the official’s

voice again, in sharp and peremptory command.

“Down, slave!” he cried. “Make obeisance to your sovereign!”

I looked up, attracted by the tone of the manl’s voice, to see a

single, straight, slim figure standing erect in the center of the line

of prostrate girls, her arms folded across her breast and little chin

in the air. Her back was toward me—I could not see her face, though I

should like to see the countenance of this savage young lioness,

standing there defiant among that herd of terrified sheep.

“Down! Down!” shouted the master of ceremonies, taking a step toward

her and half drawing his sword.

My blood boiled. To stand there, inactive, while a negro struck down

that brave girl of my own race! Instinctively I took a forward step to

place myself in the manl’s path. But at the same instant Menelek raised

his hand in a gesture that halted the officer. The emperor seemed

interested, but in no way angered at the girl’s attitude.

“Let us inquire,” he said in a smooth, pleasant voice, “why this young

woman refuses to do homage to her sovereign,” and he put the question

himself directly to her.

She answered him in Abyssinian, but brokenly and with an accent that

betrayed how recently she had acquired her slight knowledge of the

tongue.

“I go on my knees to no one,” she said. “I have no sovereign. I myself

am sovereign in my own country.”

Menelek, at her words, leaned back in his throne and laughed

uproariously. Following his example, which seemed always the correct

procedure, the assembled guests vied with one another in an effort to

laugh more noisily than the emperor.

The girl but tilted her chin a bit higher in the air—even her back

proclaimed her utter contempt for her captors. Finally Menelek restored

quiet by the simple expedient of a frown, whereupon each loyal guest

exchanged his mirthful mien for an emulative scowl.

“And who,” asked Menelek, “are you, and by what name is your country

called?”

“I am Victory, Queen of Grabritin,” replied the girl so quickly and so

unexpectedly that I gasped in astonishment.