Nine against the unknown

NINE AGAINST THE UNKNOWN 24I
progress for several days. Infrequent villages would erupt
upon the horizon—villages where the travellers were stared
at askance by the negroes. The first of March brought the
considerable Moorish town of Deena. Here Mungo lodged
with a scared if hospitable black ; but soon the news of his
arrival had spread abroad. The Moors came flocking in droves
to gaze on the Christian, to spit at him ; finally, they broke
open his luggage, stole what they desired, and departed.
Mungo resolved to escape in the early dawn. He and
Demba fled eastwards through a misty morning wherein lions
howled. Day brought heat and thirst and a long stretch of
parched ground. Once they halted and would have ventured a
near-by well but that, even nearer, they heard the cough of a
lion apparently as thirsty as themselves. They slept that
night, uneasily, in a hut of some Foulah shepherds.
But next day, as they swung south towards Bambarra,
forest came again, interspersed with cultivated land. Here
for three days they journeyed unmolested, Mungo noting with
a cool interest the effect of the passing of a cloud of locusts
and the equally surprising effects produced by the native manu¬
facture of gunpowder. They came to the village of Dallu, and
rested there the night. It was almost the last town in Ludamar,
and Mungo confident that he would now escape from the
land of the Moors, robbed, indeed, but unharmed.
But even while he sat so thinking a band of Moors entered
the hut. They were a party of the Emir Ali’s horsemen, sent
to fetch him to the Moorish capital, Benowm, there to gratify
the curiosity of Ali’s wife, Fatima, who had never yet gazed
upon that horrific animal, the Christian.
§7
This was disaster, and Mungo knew it. He begged to be
left alone, he offered all his goods to the Moors, he must have
seemed—that moment while his mask dropped—a very young
and frightened alien indeed. The Moors soothed him, sardonic¬
ally. Ali wished him well: but Fatima also wished to see him.
Back along the dusty roads to Deena, where he had been
maltreated a few days before. Here a son of Ali’s was in
residence. This son, a genuine foretaste of the father, inter¬
viewed them, threatened them, and so frightened them that
Q