The Sky And The Forest (4 page)

“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 grey 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 colour, 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 “grey” colour 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 sceptical, 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 half-castes 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.

Delli lived in her little pen a full week. She was not actively unhappy in it, not even actively uncomfortable, for they made it six feet long and three feet wide, so that she could lie at full length, and three feet high so that she could sit up in it. They thatched it roughly with big leaves so that the rain hardly came through at all, and Musini herself gave her another couple of armfuls of leaves on which to lie, which was a sensible precaution, as someone as thin as Delli was at the start, and as scratched, might have broken out into sores had she been compelled to lie on the undisguised earth. They interwove the palisades, and the beams of the roof, with tough creeper stems, so that there was hardly a place wide enough to pass through the bowls of food which Musini saw to it were continually being provided for her.

So for some days Delli was content to lie in her pen recovering from the hardships of her wanderings in the forest. To lie still, to sleep, to fill her belly all through the day with good food; that was all Delli wanted at first, and a few days of it made a great difference to her condition. The bones of her skinny limbs were soon less apparent; her ribs disappeared under a layer of fat, and her previously lifeless-looking skin took on a healthy gloss. It was gratifying to Loa, when he walked past her pen, to see how she was responding to treatment. It boded well for the future; his meat hunger was a perfect obsession now, and all his dreams were positive torment, full of tantalizing visions of meat. In his dreams he could even smell the delicious stuff, and he would wake up with the saliva running from his mouth.

It was only natural, then, that he should be moved to wild rage when Vira pointed out to him one morning that Delli had been trying to escape. She had gnawed through a full dozen of the tough dried vines, and in a purposeful manner, too.

“See,” said Vira. “These she has bitten through.”

He pointed to the chewed ends, all between one pair of palisades. Then he went on:

“Soon she would chew these, where the wall meets the roof. She would bite through this knot, and this one. And then ...”

Vira made a gesture to show how, then, Delli would have been able to force the two palisades apart a little way, just wide enough, presumably, for her to slip through. And then in the darkness she would make her way out of the village into the forest, where she would be as inaccessible as if she were already serving Nasa. Anger at the thought of losing her made Loa quite frantic.

“She is a wicked woman,” raved Loa. “She is a thief, an adultress.”

Loa's language contained some twenty synonyms for “adultress,” each expressing a different aspect from which the act was regarded; each word was liable to be used as a term of opprobrium, and Loa used them all. His heavy features were drawn together in a scowl of rage.

“She is a devil, an ape,” said Loa.

Delli was looking up at him as she crouched in her pen; her eyes were unwinking and her face expressionless.

“Bring me that stick!” roared Loa, and someone ran and obsequiously fetched it.

Loa snatched it from him and rushed at the pen. He could not beat her or strike her with any advantage, thanks to the stout palisades which surrounded her. He could only prod her with the stick, but his prods were dangerous and painful, delivered as they were with his full strength. Delli screamed and rolled over, trying to protect her more vulnerable parts; Loa might have killed her then and there had his rage lasted longer. But sanity came back to him, and he let the stick fall, and wiped the sweat from his face with his hands.

“Bring more vines!” he ordered. “Tough ones. Hard ones. Stringy ones. Mend that hole! Put more vines all round the pen and over the roof, and see that the knots are tight.”

A fresh idea struck him, a really important one.

“What old women are there?” he asked. “Ah! There is Nari. Come here, Nari. Vira, tie her legs with vines. Tether her to the pen. Nari, you will watch over Delli. You cannot go away. You will stay here all through the day and the night. If ever Delli tries to bite through the vines you will cry out. Loudly. Have you heard me?”

The old woman stood on her feeble legs with the sun in her eyes. Oppressed at the same time by the majesty of Loa and by the sunlight she blinked and squirmed.

“Have you heard me?” shouted Loa.

“I have heard you,” she piped at last.

“See that it is done,” said Loa to Vira. “Musini, see that Nari is fed as well.”

He glowered round at them all; he was still too moved and excited at the moment to consider relapsing again into torpor, and he strode off aimlessly at first. It was only when he was on the way down the street that he remembered a reason for going this way. From the farthest end of the street came the regular tapping of a drum; Tali, one of the sons of Litti, the worker in iron, was beating out a new rhythm. He was always experimenting with such things, perhaps to the detriment of his real work. But a good drummer made an important contribution to the life of the town, and if his father would buy him a wife or two whether Tali worked in iron or not that was all to the good.

This end of the street was not nearly as quiet or as clean as the other end where Loa's house stood. Here ran the little swampy stream, tributary to the great river two miles away, which supplied the town's drinking water and carried away its trash. The stink of the rotting piles of refuse was perceptible to Loa's nose where he stood, but refuse piles always stank. Where the forest came right to the edge of the town stood Litti's ironworks, in the shade of a group of large trees. On the flat tops of two rocks glowed charcoal fires, blown to a fierce heat by bellows worked by small children.

Litti was squatting beside them with his eldest son; a short distance away Tah was tapping on his drum while round him a little group of idlers made tentative attempts to adapt a dance step to the rhythm. Litti and his family did not prostrate themselves before Loa; when they were actually engaged in the working of iron there was no need.

“What of my son's axe?” asked Loa.

“It will be made,” said Litti tranquilly.

He raised his white head to see where the sun stood.

“Now?” asked his son.

“No, not now,” answered Litti.

Loa squatted down on his heels to wait; there was a deep fascination about watching the waves of heat play over the surface of the glowing charcoal as the bellows worked. Charcoal burned without a flame; Litti had the secret of preparing it. He would go into the forest and cut a great heap of wood, set fire to it, and bank earth upon it. After a time the wood would lose its fiery spirit, and change itself into a coal-black reproduction of itself, which, when ignited, needed the spirit of the air blown into it by bellows to make it burn well.

Those rhythms Tali was tapping out were quite captivating; time passed unnoticed.

“Now,” said Litti at length.

“Hey!” called Litti's eldest son, rising to his feet, and one of his brothers detached himself from the group of dancers and came to help. With a pair of tongs they opened the larger of the fires, revealing in its heart a glowing lump of material, so hot that it was white and brilliant. They swept the little fire from the other rock (it was only there to make that rock hot) and, seizing the glowing lump in the tongs, transferred it to the hot surface. Then they took heavy iron hammers that stood near by, and began to pound it. At every blow a fountain of sparks shot from the incandescent lump, clearly visible in the deep shade. They struck and they struck, turning the lump with the tongs, until its white heat died away and it glowed only sullenly red and it ceased to give off sparks under the blows. Litti got stiffly to his feet and peered down at the red mass.

“It is iron,” he decided. “Soon we will make the axe.”

His sons lifted the lump back into the fire, piled more charcoal upon it, and the waiting child set to work again with the bellows. The young men's brown skins glistened with sweat.

“It takes many days for an axe to be made,” grumbled Loa. “And after that I shall need a collar and bracelets for my son like these.”

He fingered his own ornaments, spirals of wrought iron round his neck and arms.

“That will take longer yet,” said Litti. “For that I shall need a wife for my son Tali.”

“Let him tell me which girl it is he wants,” said Loa, “and I will see.”

His bare toes were playing gratefully in the thick bed of dead sparks which covered the soil for yards round, the accumulation of a thousand years, of the labour of fifty generations of Litti's predecessors. Out in the forest, beyond the swampy stream, was an outcrop of reddish rock -- it had once been an outcrop, but now it was a basin, for so much of it had been dug away. Within this rock lay the spirit of the iron. When a lump of it was heated to a white glow and then pounded with hammers, the devils that enchained the iron flew off as sparks. Three or four such poundings freed the iron completely, so that it lay in a dark hard lump. Under the influence of fire it softened, and with hammers it could be beaten into any shape desired, and given an edge which would cut wood. But with fire and water the iron could be made better yet. It was a tricky thing to do -- even old Litti often made mistakes. But an axehead, or a billhook, or a sword, heated in the glowing charcoal and then cooled in water, grew hard and glittering; and, when ground upon a smooth rock, became so sharp that even the hardest woods to be found in the forest could be cut by it.