Jules Verne For Children: 16 Incredible Tales of Mystery, Courage & Adventure (Illustrated Edition). Jules Verne
night under the trees, and to-morrow, when it is broad daylight, we will proceed on our journey! Two or three miles still, that will be an hour’s walk!”
“Be it so,” replied Harris.
At that moment Dingo commenced to bark furiously.
“Here, Dingo, here!” cried Dick Sand. “You know well that no one is there, and that we are in the desert!”
This last halt was then decided upon.
Mrs. Weldon let her companions work without saying a word. Her little Jack was sleeping in her arms, made drowsy by the fever.
They sought the best place to pass the night. This was under a large bunch of trees, where Dick Sand thought of disposing all for their rest. But old Tom, who was helping him in these preparations, stopped suddenly, crying out:
“Mr. Dick! look! look!”
“What is it, old Tom?” asked Dick Sand, in the calm tone of a man who attends to everything.
“There—there!” cried Tom; “on those trees—blood stains!—and—on the ground—mutilated limbs!”
Dick Sand rushed toward the spot indicated by old Tom. Then, returning to him: “Silence, Tom, silence!” said he.
In fact, there on the ground were hands cut off, and above these human remains were several broken forks, and a chain in pieces!
Happily, Mrs. Weldon had seen nothing of this horrible spectacle.
As for Harris, he kept at a distance, and any one observing him at this moment would have been struck at the change made in him. His face had something ferocious in it.
Dingo had rejoined Dick Sand, and before these bloody remains, he barked with rage.
The novice had hard work to drive him away.
Meanwhile, old Tom, at the sight of these forks, of this broken chain, had remained motionless, as if his feet were rooted in the soil. His eyes were wide open, his hands clenched; he stared, murmuring these incoherent words:
“I have seen—already seen—these forks—when little—I have seen!”
And no doubt the memories of his early infancy returned to him vaguely. He tried to recall them. He was going to speak.
“Be silent, Tom!” repeated Dick Sand. “For Mrs. Weldon’s sake, for all our sakes, be silent!”
And the novice led the old black away.
Another halting place was chosen, at some distance, and all was arranged for the night.
The repast was prepared, but they hardly touched it. Fatigue took away their hunger. All were under an indefinable impression of anxiety which bordered on terror.
Darkness came gradually: soon it was profound. The sky was covered with great stormy clouds. Between the trees in the western horizon they saw some flashes of heat lightning. The wind had fallen; not a leaf moved on the trees. An absolute silence succeeded the noises of the day, and it might be believed that the heavy atmosphere, saturated with electricity, was becoming unfit for the transmission of sounds.
Dick Sand, Austin, and Bat watched together. They tried to see, to hear, during this very dark night, if any light whatsoever, or any suspicious noise should strike their eyes or their ears. Nothing troubled either the calm or the obscurity of the forest.
Tom, not sleepy, but absorbed in his remembrances, his head bent, remained quiet, as if he had been struck by some sudden blow.
Mrs. Weldon rocked her child in her arms, and only thought of him.
Only Cousin Benedict slept, perhaps, for he alone did not suffer from the common impression. His faculty for looking forward did not go so far.
Suddenly, about eleven o’clock, a prolonged and grave roaring was heard, with which was mingled a sort of sharper shuddering. Tom stood up and stretched out his hand toward a dense thicket, a mile or more distant.
Dick Sand seized his arm, but he could not prevent Tom from crying in a loud voice: “The lion! the lion!”
This roaring, which he had so often heard in his infancy, the old black had just recognized it.
“The lion!” he repeated.
Dick Sand, incapable of controlling himself longer, rushed, cutlass in hand, to the place occupied by Harris.
Harris was no longer there, and his horse had disappeared with him.
A sort of revelation took place in Dick Sand’s mind. He was not where he had believed he was!
So it was not on the American coast that the Pilgrim had gone ashore! It was not the Isle of Paques, whose bearing the novice had taken at sea, but some other island situated exactly to the west of this continent, as the Isle of Paques is situated to the west of America.
The compass had deceived him during a part of the voyage, we know why! Led away by the tempest over a false route, he must have doubled Cape Horn, and from the Pacific Ocean he had passed into the Atlantic! The speed of his ship, which he could only imperfectly estimate, had been doubled, unknown to him, by the force of the hurricane!
Behold why the caoutchouc trees, the quinquinas, the products of South America were missing in this country, which was neither the plateau of Atacama nor the Bolivian pampa!
Yes, they were giraffes, not ostriches, which had fled away in the opening! They were elephants that had crossed the thick underwood! They were hippopotami whose repose Dick Sand had troubled under the large plants! It was the tsetse, that dipter picked up by Benedict, the formidable tsetse under whose stings the animals of the caravans perish!
Finally, it was, indeed, the roaring of the lion that had just sounded through the forest! And those forks, those chains, that knife of singular form, they were the tools of the slave-trader! Those mutilated hands, they were the hands of captives!
The Portuguese Negoro, and the American Harris, must be in collusion! And those terrible words guessed by Dick Sand, finally escaped his lips:
“Africa! Equatorial Africa! Africa of the slave-trade and the slaves!”
PART II
CHAPTER I
The Slave Trade.
The slave trade! Nobody is ignorant of the significance of this word, which should never have found a place in human language. This abominable traffic, for a long time practised to the profit of the European nations which possessed colonies beyond the sea, has been already forbidden for many years. Meanwhile it is always going on a large scale, and principally in Central Africa. Even in this nineteenth century the signature of a few States, calling themselves Christians, are still missing from the Act for the Abolition of Slavery.
We might believe that the trade is no longer carried on; that this buying and this selling of human creatures has ceased: it is not so, and that is what the reader must know if he wishes to become more deeply interested in the second part of this history. He must learn what these men-hunts actually are still, these hunts which threaten to depopulate a whole continent for the maintenance of a few slave colonies; where and how these barbarous captures are executed; how much blood they cost; how they provoke incendiarism and pillage; finally, for whose profit they are made.
It is in the fifteenth century only that we see the trade in blacks carried on for the first time. Behold under what circumstances it was established:
The Mussulmans, after being expelled from Spain, took refuge beyond the Strait on the coast of Africa. The