The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier Part 23

Lonesome? With the coming and the going of each day's sun gilding cloud-crests, silvering waves, setting you matchless scenes in color effect, some ravis.h.i.+ng in their gorgeous splendor, some soft and tender of tone as the light in the eyes of the woman you wors.h.i.+p, scenes beside which the most brilliant stage settings which metropolitans flock like sheep to see are pathetically paltry counterfeits.

Lonesome? With a mighty, joyously bounding charger like the _Black Prince_ beneath your feet if not between your knees, gayly taking the tallest billows in his stride, whose ever steady pulse-beat bespeaks a soundness of wind and limb you can trust to land you well at the finis.h.!.+

Lonesome? Where privileged to descend into the very vitals of your charger and sit throughout the midnight watch, an awed listener to the throbs of the mighty heart that vitalizes his every function, while each vigorously thrusting piston, each smug, palm-rubbing eccentric, each somnolently nodding lever, drives deeper into your lay brain an overwhelming sense of pride in such of your kind as have had the genius to conceive, and such others as have had the skill and patience to perfect, the conversion of inert ma.s.ses of crude metal into the magnificently powerful and obviously sentient ent.i.ty that is bearing you!

Lonesome? Skirting the coastline of Africa, a country whose potentates, from the Ptolemies to Tom Ryan, have never failed to make world history worth thinking about!

Lonesome? Bearing up toward that sea-made manacle of fallen majesty, St. Helena, absorbed in memories of Bonaparte's magnificent dreams of world-wide dominion, and of his pathetic end on one of its smallest and most isolated patches!

Lonesome? With a chum at your elbow so close a student of the manly game of war that he can glibly reel off for you every important manoeuvre of all the great battles of history, from those of Alexander the Great down to Tommy Burns's latest!

And now and then the elements themselves sit in and take a hand in our game, sometimes a hand we could very well do without--as twice lately.

The first instance happened early last week. Tuesday tropical weather hit us and drove us into pajamas--a cloudless sky, blazing sun, high humidity, while we ploughed our way across long, slow-rolling, unrippled swells that looked so much like a vast, gently heaving sea of petroleum that, had John D. Standardoil been with us he would have suffered a probably fatal attack of heart disease if prevented from stopping right there and planning a pipe line.

Throughout the day close about the s.h.i.+p clouds of flying fish skimmed the sea, and great schools of porpoises leaped from it and raced us, as if, even to them, their native element had become hateful, or as if they sensed something ominous and fearsome abroad from which they sought shelter in our company. One slender little opal-hued diaphanous-winged bird-fish came aboard, and before he was picked up had the happy life grilled out of him on our scorching iron deck, hot almost as boiler plates. Poor little chap! he found with us anything but sanctuary; but perhaps he lived long enough to signal the fact to his mates, for no others boarded us. And yet for one other opal-hued winged wanderer we have been sanctuary; for when we were about one hundred and fifty miles out of New York a highly bred carrier pigeon, bearing on his leg a metal tag marked "32," hovered about us for a time, finally alighted on our rail, and then fluttered to the deck when offered a pan of water--and drank and drank until it seemed best to stop him. By kindness and ingenuity of Chief Engineer Tucker he now occupies a tin house with a wonderful mansard roof, from which he issues every afternoon for an aerial const.i.tutional, giving us a fright occasionally with a flight over far a-sea, but always returning safely enough to his new diggings.

That Tuesday morning the sun rose fiery red out of the steaming Guinea jungles to the east of us, across its lower half two narrow black bars sinister. It looked as if it had blood in its eye, while the still, heavy, brooding air felt to be ominous of evil, harboring devilment of some sort. All the mess were cross-grained, silent, or irritable, raw-edged for the first time, for a better lot of fellows one could not ask to s.h.i.+p with. Nor throughout the day did weather conditions or tempers improve. All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense, low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun, seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-gla.s.s; wherefore it was expedient for the two pajama-clad pa.s.sengers to keep well within the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us. But suddenly, just at the moment the sun must have been descending below the horizon to the south of it, the black wall of cloud slowly parted, and the opening so made widened until it became an enormous oval, reaching from horizon half-way to zenith, framing a scene of astounding beauty and grandeur. Range after range of cloud crests that looked like mountain folds rose one above another, with the appearance of vast intervening s.p.a.ce between, some of the ranges a most delicate blue or pink, some opalescent, some gloriously gilded, while behind the farthest and tallest range, at what seemed an inconceivably remote distance, but in a perspective entirely harmonious with the foreground, appeared the sky itself, a soft luminous straw-yellow in color, flecked thickly over with tiny snow-white cloudlets. It was like a glimpse into another and more beautiful world than ours--the actual celestial world.

But, whether or not ominous of our future, we were permitted no more than a brief glimpse of it, for presently the pall of black cloud fell like a vast drop curtain and shut it from our sight. Then night came down upon us, black, starless, forbidding, although in the absence of any fall of the barometer nothing more than a downpour of rain was expected.

But shortly after I had gone to sleep, at two o'clock suddenly something in the nature of a tropical tornado flew up and struck us hard. I was awakened by a tremendous crash on the bridge-deck above my cabin, a heeling over of the s.h.i.+p that nearly dumped me out of my berth, and what seemed like a solid spout of water pouring in through my open weather porthole, with the wind howling a devil's death-song through the rigging and an uninterrupted smash--bang! above my head.

Throwing on a rain coat over my pajamas, I went outside and up the ladder leading to the bridge-deck; and as head and shoulders rose above the deck level, a wall of hot, wind-borne rain struck me--rain so hot it felt almost scalding--that almost swept me off the ladder. If it had I should probably have become food for the fishes. I got to the upper deck just in time to see Captain Thomas get a crack on the head from a fragment of flying spar of the wreckage from the upper bridge--luckily a glancing blow that did no more damage than leave him groggy for a moment.

For the next fifteen minutes I was busy hugging a bridge stanchion, dodging flying wreckage and trying to breathe; for, driven by the violence of the wind, the rain came horizontally in such suffocatingly hot dense ma.s.ses as nearly to stifle one.

It was the watch of Second Mate Isitt. Afterwards he told me that a few minutes before the storm broke he saw a particularly dense black cloud coming up upon us out of the southeast, where it had apparently been lying in ambush for us behind the northernmost headland of the Gulf of Guinea, an ambush so successful that even the barometer failed to detect it, for when Mate Isitt ran to the chart-room he found that the instrument showed no fall. But scarcely was he back on the bridge before the approaching cloud flashed into a solid ma.s.s of sheet lightning that covered the s.h.i.+p like a fiery canopy; and instantly thereafter, a wall of wind and rain hit the s.h.i.+p, heeled her over to the rail, swung her head at right angles to her course, ripped the heavy canvas awning of the upper bridge to tatters, bent and tore loose from their sockets the thick iron stanchions supporting it, made kindling wood of its heavy spars, and strewed the bridge and forward deck with a pounding tangle of wreckage. How the mate and helmsman, who were directly beneath it, escaped injury, is a mystery. In twenty minutes the riot of wind and water had swept past us out to sea in search of easier game, leaving behind it a dead calm above but mountainous seas beneath, that played ball with us the rest of the night. Heaven help any wind-jammer it may have struck, for if caught as completely unwarned as were we, with all sails set, she and all her crew are likely to be still slowly settling through the dense darksome depths of the twenty-five hundred fathoms the chart showed thereabouts, and weeping wives and anxious underwriters will long be scanning the news columns that report all sea goings and comings--except arrivals in the port of sunken s.h.i.+ps.

The second fall the elements have essayed to take out of us remains yet undecided. The fact is, I am now writing over a young volcano we are all hoping will not grow much older.

Two nights ago I was awakened half suffocated, to find my cabin full of strong sulphurous fumes; but fancying them brought in through my open portholes from the smoke-stack by a s.h.i.+ft aft of the wind, I paid no further attention to them. But when the next morning I as usual turned out on deck to see the sun rise, a commotion aft of me attracted my attention, Looking, I saw the first mate, chief engineer, and a party of sailors, all so begrimed with sweat and coal dust one could scarcely pick officers from seamen, rapidly ripping off the cover of one of the mids.h.i.+p hatches, while others were flying about connecting up the deck fire hose. This didn't look a bit good to me, and when, an instant later, off came the hatch and out poured thick volumes of smoke, I failed to observe that it looked any better.

When the hatch was removed, the men thrust the hose through it, and began deluging the burning bunker with water; for, luckily, it is only a bunker fire,--in a lower and comparatively small bunker.

The fire had been discovered early the day previous, and for nearly twenty-four hours officers and seamen had been fighting it from below, without any mention to their two pa.s.sengers of its existence, fighting by tireless shovelling to reach his seat. And now they were on deck, attacking it from above, only because the heat and fumes below had become so overpowering they could no longer work there. But after an hour's ventilation through the hatch and a continuous downpour of water, the first mate again led his men below.

And so, the usual watches being divided into two-hour relays, the fight has gone on wearily but persistently, until now, the evening of the fourth day, the men are wan and haggard from the killing heat and foul air. In the engine-room in these lat.i.tudes the thermometer ranges from rarely under 108 degrees up to 130, and one has to stay down there only an hour, as I often have, until he is streaming with sweat as if he were in the unholiest heat of a Turkish bath. And as the burning bunker immediately adjoins the other end of the boiler room, to the heat of its own smouldering ma.s.s is added that of the fire boxes, until the temperature is probably close to 140 degrees.

While the fire is confined to the bunker where it started, we are in no particular danger; but if it reaches the bunker immediately above, it will have a free run to the after hold, where several thousand packages of case oil are stored. In the open waist above the oil are a score or more big tanks of gasoline, and, on the p.o.o.p immediately aft of that, a quant.i.ty of dynamite and several thousand detonating caps. Thus if the fire ever gets aft, things are apt to happen a trifle quicker than they can be dodged.

To denizens of _terra firma_, the mere thought of being aboard a s.h.i.+p on fire in mid-sea--we are now five hundred miles from the little British island of Ascension and one thousand and eighty off the Congo (mainland) Coast--is nothing short of appalling. But here with us, in actual experience, it is taken by the officers of the s.h.i.+p as such a simple matter of course, in so far as they show or will admit, that we are even denied the privilege of a mild thrill of excitement.

In the meantime there is nothing for the Doctor and myself to do but sit about and guess whether it is to be a boost from the explosives, a simple grill, a descent to Davy Jones, an adventure while athirst and hungering in an open boat on the tossing South Atlantic, a successful run of the s.h.i.+p to the nearest land--or victory over the fire. I wonder which it will be!

If the worst comes to the worst, I intend to do for these pages what no one these last three weeks has done for me--commit them to a bottle, if I can find one aboard this s.h.i.+p, which is by no means certain. Indeed it is so uncertain I think I had best start hunting one right now.

After nearly a twenty-four hours' search I've got it--a craft to bear these sheets, wide of hatch, generously broad and deep of hull, but dest.i.tute of aught of the stimulating aroma I had hoped might cheer them on their voyage--more than I have been cheered on mine. For the best I am able to procure for them is--a jam bottle!

While the Doctor and I are not novices at golf, this is one "bunker" we are making so little headway getting out of, that both now seem likely to quit "down" to it.

I wonder when the little derelict, tiny and inconspicuous as a Portuguese man-of-war, may be picked up; I wonder when the sheets it bears may reach my publisher to whom it is consigned. Perhaps not for years--a score, two score; perhaps not until he himself, whom a few weeks ago I left in the l.u.s.ty vigor of early manhood, is gathered to his fathers; perhaps not, therefore, until the writer has no publisher left and is himself no longer remembered.

The burning bunker is now a glowing furnace, the men worked down to mere shadows. Plainly the fire is getting the best of them and, what is even more discouraging, there is little more fight left in them.

First Mate Watson, who, almost without rest, has led the fight below since it started, says that another half-hour will--

CHAPTER XIV

THEY WHO MUST BE OBEYED

Few mightier monarchs than Menelek II of Abyssinia ever swayed the destinies of a people. Throughout the vast territory of the Abyssinian highlands his individual will is law to some millions of subjects; law also to hordes of savage Mohammedan and pagan tribesmen without the confines of his kingdom. His court includes no councillors. Alone throughout the long years of his reign Menelek has dealt with all domestic and foreign affairs of state.

But now this last splendid survival of the feudal absolutism exercised and enjoyed by mediaeval rulers is about to disappear beneath encroaching waves of civilization, that do not long spare the picturesque. Cables from far-off Adis Ababa, Menelek's capital, bring news that he has formed a cabinet and published the appointment of Ministers of War, Finance, Justice, Foreign Affairs, and Commerce. And this change has come, not from the pressure of any party or faction within his kingdom, for such do not exist, but out of the fount of his own wisdom. So sound is this wisdom as to prove him a most worthy descendant of the sage Hebrew King whom Menelek claims as ancestor--if, indeed, more proofs were necessary than the statesmanlike way in which he has dealt with jealous diplomats, and the martial skill with which, at Adowa in 1896, he defeated the flower of the Italian army and won from Italy an honorable truce.

No existing royal house owns lineage so ancient as that claimed by Menelek II, Negus Negusti, "King of the Kings of Ethiopia, and Conquering Lion of Judah."

Old Abyssinian tradition has it that in the tenth century, B.C., early in her reign, Makeda, Queen of Sheba, paid a ceremonial visit to the Court of King Solomon, coming with her entire court and a magnificent retinue bearing royal gifts of frankincense and balm, gold and ivory and precious stones. Her gorgeous caravan was bright with the many-colored plumes and silks of litters, blazing with the golden ornaments of elephant and camel caparisons, glittering with the glint of spears and bucklers.

That the two greatest souls of their time, so met, should fuse and blend is little to be wondered at. She of Sheba bore Solomon a son and called him Menelek, so the legend runs. Later the boy was twitted by playmates for that he had no father. In this annoyance the Queen sent an emba.s.sy to Solomon asking some act that should establish their son's royal paternity. Promptly Solomon returned the emba.s.sy bearing to Sheba's court in far southwest Arabia a royal decree declaring Menelek his son, and accompanied it by a son of each of the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel, enjoined to serve as a sort of juvenile royal court to Menelek.

Whether or not the claim of Menelek II be true, that he himself is lineally descended from the son of Solomon and Sheba's Queen, certain it is that in race type Abyssinians are plainly come of sons of Israel, crossed and modified with Coptic, Hamite, and Ethiopian blood. To this day they cling closely as the most orthodox Hebrew, to some of the dearest Israelitish tenets, notably abstention from pork and from meat not killed by bleeding, observance of the Sabbath, and the rite of circ.u.mcision. Notwithstanding this the Abyssinians have been Christians since the fourth century of this era, when, only eight years after the great Constantine decreed the recognition of Christianity by the State, a proselytising monk came among them with a faith so strong, a heart so pure, and an eloquence so irresistible, that, singlehanded, he accomplished the conversion of the Abyssinian race.

Throughout the centuries the Abyssinians have held fast to their faith as first it was taught them. The great wave of Mohammedanism that swept up the Nile and across the Indian Ocean broke and parted the moment it struck the Abyssinian plateau. It completely surrounded, but never could mount the tableland.

Thus cut off for centuries from all other Christian Churches, the Abyssinian religion remains to-day but little changed. Could Paul or John return to earth, of all the Christian sects throughout the world, the forms and tenets of the Abyssinian Church would be the only ones they would find nearly all their own; for the ritual is older than that of either Rome or Moscow.

And remembering the Abyssinian folklore tale of the twelve sons of the chiefs of the twelve tribes of Israel sent by Solomon to Makeda as attendants on Menelek I, it is most curious and interesting to know that the heads of certain twelve Abyssinian families (none of whom are longer notables, some even the rudest ignorant herdsmen), and their forebears from time immemorial, have had and still possess inalienable right of audience with their monarch at any time they may ask it, even taking precedence over royalty itself. Indeed Mr. George Clerk, for the last five years a.s.sistant to Sir John Harrington, British Minister to the Court of Menelek, recently told me that he and other diplomats accredited to Adis Ababa, were not infrequently subjected to the annoyance of having an audience interrupted or delayed by the unannounced coming for a hearing of one of these favored twelve.

Many of Menelek's judgments are masterpieces. Recently two brothers came before him, the younger with the plaint that the elder sought the larger and better part of certain property they had to divide.

Promptly Menelek ordered the elder to describe fully the entire property and state what part he wanted for himself. It was done.

"And this," questioned Menelek, "you consider a just division of the property into two parts of equal value?"

"Yes, Negus," answered the elder.

"Then," decreed Menelek, "give your brother first choice!"

Over wide territory beyond the Abyssinian border, Menelek's power is as much feared and his will as much respected as among his own subjects.

Of this there occurred recently a most dramatic proof.

Bordering Abyssinia on the east is the Danakil country. It adjoins the Province of Shoa, of which Menelek was Ras, or feudal King, before his accession to the Abyssinian throne. The Danakils are a savage pagan people of mixed Hamite (early Egyptian) and Ethiopian ancestry. They are perhaps the most tirelessly warlike race in all Africa. Often severely beaten by their Italian and Somali neighbors, they have never been subdued. Indeed slaughter may, in a way, be said to be a part of their religion, for it is the fetich every young warrior must provide for the wors.h.i.+p of the woman of his choice before he may hope to win and have her. It is necessary that he should have killed royal game--lion, rhinoceros, or elephant--but not enough. Singlehanded he must kill a man and bring the maid a trophy of the slaughter before she will even consider him, and Danakil maids of spirit often demand some plurality of trophies. Thus the license for each Danakil mating is written in the life blood of some neighboring tribesman; thus are the few poltroons in Danakil-land condemned to stay celibate.

Only Menelek's word do they heed; his might they dread.