Bones of the River - Edgar Wallace [78]
D’lama-m’popo listened to the proposal without enthusiasm, squatting before his crazy hut and playing with the dust, from which he never raised his eyes.
“O man,” he said at last, “it is true I owe you a bag-that-is-not-a-bag of salt, and when the little monkeys come back from their mysterious breeding place, I will kill many and sell them to the Government, and then I will bring you so much salt. But this woman Kobali is a witch, and who marries a witch loses his eyes. That is well known, for witches must have many eyes to see their way in the dark.”
“That is foolish, D’lama,” said her father – he was a mild and skinny man and incapable of violence. “For has she taken mine? She is a very fine girl…”
He proceeded to enumerate her physical attractions with a frankness which is not common in the fathers of civilisation, employing the language of superlatives which adorns the pages of a bloodstock catalogue.
“She may be this, and she may be that,” said D’lama, unimpressed at the end of a long recital, “but I am a lonely man and have no wish for women.”
Thereupon the father of the paragon was inspired to lie.
“The birds have told my little woman that you will take her to your hut.”
Whereupon the countenance of D’lama fell. “O ko!” he said. “That means that I shall go mad! For who but a madman would take as his wife a Bird Witch? Ko ko! This is terrible to me!”
The father went back to his house by the river, and there he found Kobali sitting under a tree where the weaver birds made their home, and she was gazing upward to the excited throng above her, so intent upon all that she was hearing that until her parent had called her twice she did not heed him.
“Woman,” he said, “you go to the hut of D’lama of the woods. He is a capable hunter, and he owes me salt. Now, on the last night of the moon, I will have a great dance for you.”
“You make no wedding dance for me, husband of my mother,” she said, “for the birds have told me that I shall marry a white man.”
The jaw of the fisherman dropped. “Woman,” he gasped, “now I know that you are mad! This must come in palaver before Sandi, who is near by, so that I shall not be blamed for your foolish talk.”
His daughter did not quail. “The birds speak, and it is,” she said simply. “Now, I tell you this, that if, in two moons, I do not marry a white man, I will go to the hut of D’lama, though he is a man of no people and is a killer of the weak. For the birds told me that he chopped an old woman for the ring she wore about her neck.”
The agitated father carried the news to D’lama, who was sufficiently uncultured to show his relief.
“Who knows,” he said, “that such a wonder may not happen? For this woman of yours is very cunning and understands magic, and by her cleverness she may grow a white man out of the ground.”
The old fisherman blinked. “That is true, D’lama,” he said, “for Kobali speaks with the birds and learns strange mysteries. This day she told me that once upon a time you killed an old woman in the bush because of the brass ring she wore upon her neck.”
Being a native, D’lama did not faint, but he was silent for a very long time.
“If such things come to the ears of Sandi,” he said a little huskily, “there will be a hanging palaver. Get this woman married, and I will give you more than two bags of salt.”
The old man went back to his daughter and wrangled and argued with her throughout the night, without shaking her from her determination. The next morning he took his canoe and paddled three hours in the slack shore water to the juncture of the Isisi River, where a white paddle-wheel gunboat was moored while Sanders held palaver.
He sat alone in judgment, for Bones had been sent up the Isisi River to arrest a certain petty chief who had sanctioned witchcraft in his territory. Under the striped awning on the after-deck of the Zaire Sanders listened to complaints, tried matrimonial