The Gold of Akada: A Jungle Adventure Novel. John Russell Fearn
In the darkness she began sorting them out.
“Why should the Umango particularly wish to attack us?” she asked after a moment. “We’re doing them no harm.”
“We’re in their territory and not welcome,” Mark’s clipped voice retorted. “Our boys have all gone and left us to it. If we’re caught, I don’t know what will happen. Maybe a sacrifice, maybe anything. Come on, Ruth, how in hell much longer?”
“Ready, ready,” she said quickly, putting two water bottles in the big haversack along with the provisions.
Mark lifted the tent flap, peering cautiously into the utter and eerie silence. Untrained in jungle lore, he did not hear the stealthy advance of hundreds of fantastically painted warriors. His first awareness of anything was when a barbed shaft, soaked in venom, crashed into his chest.
He gulped, uttered a strangling cry, then pitched over on his face. Ruth looked up in alarm from the rough crib from which she had been about to gather the infants.
“Mark!” she whispered; then in a sudden frenzy as she dashed to the tent opening: “Mark! Mark—!”
She stopped, seeing him lying face down in the rank grass. In the deep gloom she could detect that he was not moving.
“Mark—” She caught at his shoulders desperately and dragged on them—then another sound made her look up. The clearing seemed to be alive with shadows, sweeping in towards her.
Fantastic figures poured out of the dark. Powerful hands seized her hair, her shoulders, her arms, her legs. She screamed frantically, again and again, until the forest seemed to be echoing to her cries.
* * * *
1952
Caleb Moon sat and sweated. There was not much else he could do in this stinking, tobacco-smoked café on the waterfront of Makondo in Somaliland. As he sat he drank and sweated some more. He was a heavily built man, inclined to corpulence, and dressed in a faded khaki-drill suit. A sun-helmet was pushed up on his damp black hair, His face was podgy, greasy, and unprepossessing. Dark eyes, black as sloes, darted about in eternally restless movement as though he were afraid of seeing somebody he did not like. In a sense this was true. As a trader of dubious scruples, dealing in ivory, diamonds, skins, or anything else that had a value, he had many enemies.
For nearly half an hour he remained slouched, hardly moving, watching either the men and women around him, or else the bead curtains that screened the outer door of the café. Then, suddenly, he straightened and got to his feet. A man and a woman, obviously Europeans, had just appeared and were looking about them. They looked surprisingly clean and cool in this oppressive den of seamen, half-breeds, and drifting women.
Moon went over to the man and woman and raised his sun-helmet briefly.
“Mr. and Mrs. Perrivale?” he enquired, with an unctuous smile. “Caleb Moon....”
“How are you, Mr. Moon?” Harry Perrivale’s greeting was completely matter-of-fact as he shook the trader’s damp hand.
“How do you do?” Rita Perrivale acknowledged, contented with a mere nod.
“Over here—” Moon motioned. “I have a quiet table.”
He led the way to where he had been seated and dragged up chairs. There were one or two curious glances towards the well-dressed Europeans, then interest in them expired. It was too hot to be interested in anybody.
“Drink?” Moon asked, mopping his neck.
“Whiskey,” Harvey Perrivale answered, and Rita named a soft drink. The waiter obliged, and then Moon sat back and breathed heavily.
“I was beginning to fear you weren’t coming,” he commented. “And that would have been a pity—for both of us.”
“We were delayed.” Perrivale sipped his drink. He was a man of thirty-five, sharp-featured, dark, handsome after a fashion, but spoilt by a dissolute mouth and poor chin. “From Port Durnford to here is quite a distance. Anyway, let’s hear more of this proposition of yours.”
“It is unchanged from when I explained it to you in Port Durnford,” Moon shrugged. “I have a map showing a route through Central Africa to a lost city by the name of Akada. In that city there is gold and ivory for the picking up—but I am not a man of money. To fit out a safari to cross Central Africa takes a good deal of finance. You have backed tropical expeditions before now; I thought you might wish to back this one.”
“Mmmm. I gathered that was it. What is there in it for me?”
“Fifty-fifty on whatever Akada contains. Surely that’s fair enough? I have the map; you have the money. Neither of us can do without the other. Share profits.”
There was silence for a moment. Rita Perrivale’s grey eyes travelled over the assembled men and women at the tables and her sensitive nostrils twitched in disgust. She was a girl of infinite refinement, ten years younger than her husband, and not all sure what had been the matter with her when she had fallen for him. He was a millionaire, certainly, but that was not everything.
“Let me see the map,” Perrivale ordered at length, but Moon shook his head and grinned.
“Wouldn’t be good business, sir. You might have a photographic mind.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
“I mean—bluntly—that I won’t show it you unless we have an agreement. Your finance—my map.”
Rita sat back and smiled rather bitterly. She was accustomed to these wrangles with traders and shysters on this torrid coast. Her husband, bored with millions, found he got a kick out of trying to add to them—hence he was known as the moneybags behind most of the expeditions into the interior. Usually he cleaned up something out of his risk.
“I don’t see why you hesitate,” Moon said, spreading his hands. “I know you’ve financed half a dozen expeditions into the interior—sometimes for zoological purposes, and once even for the Botanical Institute. That’s why I contacted you in Port Durnford when this map came into my hands. I’d have laid my scheme before you there, only—well, this is my territory. I don’t belong on the high-class outskirts of Durnford where you and the lady live.”
“I wish to heaven we didn’t.” Rita commented, sighing, and she looked away to avoid her husband’s coldly reproving glance. Moon’s gaze strayed to her. He liked her youthful figure in the white costume and blouse. He liked her aloof expression, blonde hair, and independent chin. He rarely saw a white woman in the course of his erratic career, and when one as good as this turned up—
“At least tell me where you got the map,” Perrivale suggested. “I’m not financing anything so big as a safari right across the interior without knowing all the details.”
Moon considered this, fingering his underlip gently, his sloe-black eyes on Rita. Then as she caught him out in gazing he said slowly:
“How I got the map is my business, Mr. Perrivale. All I will tell you is that I got it from a Bushongo who had been in a recent safari. He found it amidst a lot of other things in a wallet lying in the clean-picked bones of a skeleton. According to the other things in the wallet, the map was made twenty years ago. In that wallet, what bit could be read of various things like insurance certificates, letters, airport passes, and so on, everything was dated 1932. So, time passes on.”
“And this Bushongo came straight to you?”
“All those who matter do so.” Moon aimed a level glance. “I’m a trader, Mr. Perrivale. It pays me to keep in with the black boys. I get lots of tips that way.”
“And how do you know this map of yours is genuine?”
“Because Mark Hardnell was not the kind of man to go into the bush without good reason. He was looking for Akada, maybe for the same reason that I am now hoping to look for it.”
“Hardnell?” Perrivale scratched his receding