Читать книгу The Sky and the Forest - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 6

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Some young men of the town hunting in the forest had captured a strange woman. They brought her back with them, and everyone assembled to look at her and to listen to her absurd speech. Delli, her ridiculous name was, she said—in itself that was enough to make people laugh and clap their thighs. All her words were comical like that, with l where r should be, and the strangest turns of speech. Everybody in the town knew there were many ways of addressing people; one spoke differently, with different words, if one were addressing one person, or two persons, or many persons, or if the persons addressed were old or young, male or female, married or single, important or unimportant. But this woman muddled it all up, and spoke (when it was possible to disentangle her curious pronunciation) to the crowd as if it were made up of three little children. Everyone laughed uproariously at that.

They brought her to Loa where he sat on his tripod stool with Indeharu and Vira standing behind him, and they swarmed close round her to hear the quaint things she said.

“Who are you?” asked Loa.

“Delli,” she said.

That ridiculous name again! Everyone laughed.

“Where do you come from?”

“I come from the town.”

That was just as ridiculous as her name. This was the town, and everyone knew it. She rolled her eyes from side to side at the crowd, a very frightened woman. She held her hand over her heart as she looked about her, naked save for a wisp of bark cloth. She was a very puzzled woman as well, quite unable to understand why the simple things she said should occasion so much merriment.

“She was in the forest eating amoma fruits,” interposed Ura, one of the young men, explaining with the proper gestures how they came to catch her. “She did not hear us. Maketu went over that way. Huva went over there. We went silently forward through the trees. Then she saw Maketu and ran. Then she saw Huva and ran the other way, towards me. I was behind a tree, and I sprang out and I caught her. She hit me, here, on my shoulder, and she scratched with her nails. But still I held her. She could not escape from Ura.”

“She was eating amoma fruits?” asked Loa.

“Yes.”

Amoma fruits were not good eating; their watery acid pulp could not deceive a healthy stomach for a moment. Children ate them during their games, but no sensible person ever did. Loa stared harder at the strange woman. The scar-tattooing on her cheeks and upper lip was of an odd pattern. She was terribly thin, like a skeleton, her bones standing out through her skin, and her breasts fallen away to empty bags although she was a young woman, not yet the mother of more than two children or so. And her body and legs and arms were covered with scratches, some of them several days old, some of them fresh, but altogether making a complete network over her. She was calmer now, but Loa’s next question threw her into a worse panic than ever.

“Why were you in the forest?” asked Loa.

Her face distorted itself with fear.

“Bang bang,” she said, and repeated herself. “Bang bang.”

That was almost too funny to bear, to see this amusing woman shaking with fright and to hear her say “bang bang!” She goggled round at the laughing throng and took a grip of herself. When she spoke again the intensity of her emotion made her voice a hoarse whisper, but silence fell on the crowd and every word could be heard.

“Men came,” she said. “Many men, at night. We were all asleep. Bang bang. Bang bang. Men were killed, women were killed. My man was sleeping beside me, and he woke up and took his spear. Everyone was shouting. Other men of the town came running into the house. Some were wounded. We stood by the door with spears and we would not come out although they shouted to us to come out. Houses were burning so that we could see out. Bang bang. Bang bang. Fire in the night, like red lightning. My man fell down and he was dead. Still we would not come out. Then our house burned. They were waiting for us outside the door so I would not go out when the men did. I jumped up and caught the roof beams of the house. Not all the thatch was burning so I pulled the thatch aside and climbed through the roof. I stood there and all the town was burning. Bang bang. Bang Bang. The thatch was burning beside me and so I jumped. I jumped far, very far. The old clearing was beside our house and I jumped into it, right into the bushes. I tried to run through the bushes, but I could not go far, not in the dark. I lay there and saw the flames and heard them shouting. My baby—I think I heard her cry too.”

Delli stopped speaking, her hand to her heart again. A babble of talk rose from the crowd the moment it ceased to be repressed by the dramatic nature of Delli’s utterance. The fantastic tale must be discussed. Loa waved his arm for silence.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I lay there,” said Delli, “and daylight came while the flames were still burning. I climbed an old tree trunk and looked into the town. The people were gathered at one end, with the strange men round them. Some of them were pale men.”

“Pale men?” demanded Loa.

“They had not faces like ours,” said Delli, struggling wildly to explain something beyond all experience.

Her hands went up to her own face in feverish gestures trying to convey an impression of features quite different from the broad nostrils and heavy jaws which characterized the only human faces she knew.

“They wore clothes—so.”

Delli flung one arm across her breast and her hands fluttered as she tried to give a mental picture of an ample cloak.

“And they were pale men?” asked Loa. Clothes were something he knew something about, for he wore a leopardskin himself and women often wore bark-cloth gowns, but pale faces were something else. “Were they like the little men?”

“No! Oh no!” said Delli.

The forest pygmies were often of a far lighter shade than the village-dwelling natives, inclining to pale bronze, but they had the same kind of features as the rest of Delli’s world and Loa’s world.

“They were big men. Tall men,” said Delli, “with thin noses; and their faces were—gray.”

Loa shook his head in admission that this was more than he could understand.

“What did these men do?” he asked.

“They tied the people together. With poles. They tied one end of a pole to someone’s neck, and the other end of the pole to someone else’s neck.”

Loa had never heard of such a thing being done. The whole story was of something beyond his experience, beyond his scanty traditions.

“What did they do next?” he asked.

“They came to the banana groves to cut fruit. And in the old clearings there were many people hidden besides me, people who had run into the clearings when the town burned. They saw us, and they came after us. They had axes and swords, and I think they caught all the other people.”

That was quite probable; a man with a sword to cut a path for himself would easily overtake an unarmed fugitive trying to make his way through the tangled undergrowth of an overgrown clearing.

“And you?”

“I went right through the clearing. A man was chasing me but he did not catch me. I came into the forest and I ran from him and then he did not chase me any more. But still I ran, and when I stopped I did not know where I was.”

This was something everyone could understand; there was a murmur of agreement in the listening throng. To lose one’s way in the forest was very easy indeed; to be fifty yards from the nearest known landmark was the same as being fifty miles from it if once the sense of direction was lost. Loa knew now the explanation of Delli’s network of old scars. Plunging through an abandoned clearing to escape pursuit would tear her skin to ribbons. She must have been streaming with blood by the time she reached the forest. The newer scratches must have been acquired in the ordinary course of life in the forest, searching for food.

“Where was your town?” he asked.

Bewilderment showed itself in Delli’s face again.

“Many days. Many days away. I do not know. I looked for it.”

There was a puzzled murmur from the crowd. It was hard enough for anyone there to realize even that other towns existed. But everyone in the crowd knew his town so intimately and well. Despite their knowledge of the ease with which one could lose oneself in the forest, it was impossible for them to sympathize with someone who simply could not say where her town was. They could not put themselves in her mental situation; a woman might as well say she did not know where her own body was. Delli’s face did not lose its look of bewilderment; her expression was fixed and she was staring at something far away.

“I cannot stand,” she said faintly, and with that she abruptly sat down.

Still bewildered in appearance, puzzled by the strange new feelings within her, she swayed for a moment, and then her head came forward to her knees, and next she toppled over on one side and lay limp and unconscious. Musini came forward and knelt over her, and prodded the bony back and the skinny loins. She raised one of the skeleton arms and shook her head over it with distaste.

“Nothing there now,” she said, letting the limp arm drop to the ground. “She has long been hungry.”

“In a pen she will grow fat,” said Loa, looking round at Vira, who nodded. It was Vira who attended to the temporal business of Loa’s rule, as Indeharu attended to the spiritual. Loa had to say nothing more about the pen; Vira would attend to that. Loa looked down at the skinny limbs; plenty of food, and some days of idleness in a pen, would fill them out again. Even a healthy well fed human was all the better for three or four days in a pen; idleness improved the quality of the meat. Moreover this stranger with the queer speech and the odd experiences might be a more welcome visitor to his father Nasa than some ordinary man or woman of the town—Musini for instance—as she would bring with her an element of novelty. She might amuse Nasa while she served him.

“See that she has food, plenty of food,” said Loa to Musini.

It was hot here in the sun, and Loa had been attending to business for more than an hour, quite long enough for him to feel restless and in need of a change of occupation. He rose to his feet, and the assembled crowd instantly fell forward on their faces; they had been close-packed standing up, and now they carpeted the ground two or more deep. He turned and walked back to the narrow strip of shade cast by the eaves of his house. There he would doze for a while; as the village became aware that he had retired they began to withdraw, in proper humility. Silent at first, and moving with constraint, they soon began to elbow each other and to chatter as they streamed off down the street.

A few idlers dallied to watch Musini and a subordinate wife revive Delli with food and drink, but Vira interrupted that pastime by setting them to work on constructing a pen; cutting stakes, pointing them, and driving them deep into the earth with heavy mauls, and connecting them together with many strands of creeper. Everyone else was all agog with the fantastic story Delli had told; they were busy discussing the gray men who wore clothes and had faces different from ordinary people, who killed people with a noise and a flash, and who tied their captives together with poles. Loa’s lethargic brain was idly turning over the same matters as he lay in the shade—later Indeharu and Vira would tell him what they thought about it all. And even perhaps at some time he would hear about it from Musini or other women.

For the stagnation of a thousand years—of two thousand years, of three thousand years—was coming to an end. Invaders were entering into Central Africa, the first since Loa’s forebears had infiltrated into the forest among their pygmy predecessors, all those many centuries ago. Strangely enough, it was not the European, restless and enterprising though he might be, who was penetrating into these forest fastnesses. The European was still confined to the coastal strip, although European culture and influence was slowly percolating inland. It was an Asiatic culture which was at last reaching out to Central Africa, all the way across the huge continent from the east. Mohammedanism had taken no more than a hundred years after Mohammed’s death to flood along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, to engulf Spain, and even to cross the Pyrenees; but it took twelve hundred years of slow advance for it to creep up the Nile valley, to circle around the Sahara Desert, and now to penetrate into the equatorial forest.

In twelve hundred years the original Arab stock had become vastly attenuated; the invaders were often hardly lighter in color, thanks to continual miscegenation, than the black peoples they conquered. But most of them still showed the aquiline profile that distinguished them from the pure Negro, and many of them bore proof of their Arab blood in their swarthy complexions—the “gray” color that Delli had noticed. Yet they were marked out far more plainly in other ways from the people they were attacking. Besides their guns, and their clothes, and their material possessions, they had a religion that demanded converts, a social organization that made movement possible, and a tradition of activity more important than all.

More than one culture contributed to that tradition. In the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek civilization had profoundly influenced Arab thought. The tiny arable plains of Greece and the Greek islands were no more conducive to stagnation than the deserts of Arabia. It was a world where men went—were driven—from one place to another, where it was of the first necessity to inquire, to seek out, to make contact with other peoples who might supply some of life’s necessities. The skeptical, the inquiring turn of mind was the natural one, and the geniuses who arose through the centuries found themselves in a civilization ripe for them; they had available to them languages admirably suitable for argument and discussion, and the invention of writing which would perpetuate their thoughts and enable them to influence the thinking of future generations. It may be strange, but it is true that Plato and Aristotle as well as Mohammed had something to do with the raiding of Delli’s village by swarthy halfcastes bent merely on acquiring slaves and ivory.

Loa and his people were the product of an entirely different set of circumstances. They never knew what famine was, for the plantain and the manioc provided an unfailing source of food in return for very little effort. Sleeping sickness and malaria and cannibalism combined to keep the population small. The forest made migration—even minor movements—almost impossible, restricting the spread of ideas and the diffusion of inventions. The absence of writing made progress difficult, for each generation was dependent on the scanty information conveyed by word of mouth, and even if the forest people had learned to write, their language—the clumsy, complicated, unimproved language of the barbarian—was enough to hamper thought and impede its diffusion. Thought is based on words, and Loa’s words were few and simple yet linked together—tangled together would be a better term—by a grammar of unbelievable clumsiness. And Loa lived in a climate where there were no seasons, where the nights were hardly less warm than the days, where it was easy to do nothing—as Loa was doing now; where there was no need to take thought for the morrow—and Loa was taking none.