Late in the afternoon of the next day they came to a spot where a gap occurred in the thick vegetation that lined the bank. Here, said Nando, they must land. Ilola, the principal village of the chief to whom they were bound, stood a short distance from the river, and the way to it lay through the clear space between two forest belts. A quarter of an hour's walking brought them to the village, a cluster of tent-shaped grass huts almost hidden in the bush. The settlement was surrounded by a stockade, and the plantations of banana, maize, and ground-nuts showed signs of careful cultivation.
Nando went alone to interview the chief, bearing a present of cloth and a small copper token which Mr. Martindale had received from his friend Barnard. The chief would recognize it as the replica of one given to him. Nando returned in an hour's time, troubled in countenance. Imbono the chief, he said, had refused to meet the white man, or to have any dealings with him. He well remembered the white man who had cured his son and given him the token two years before; had they not become blood brothers! But since then many things had happened. Dark stories had reached his ears of the terrible consequences that followed the coming of the white man. One of his young men--his name was Faraji--who had joined a party of traders carrying copper down the Congo, had just come back with dreadful tales of what he himself had seen. When Imbono was a boy his people had lived in terror of the white-robed men from the East.[2] There had been a great white-robed chief named Tippu Tib, who sent his fighting men far and wide to collect ivory and slaves. These men knew no pity; they carried destruction wherever they went, tearing children from parents, husbands from wives, chaining them together, beating them with cruel whips, strewing the land with the corpses of slaves exhausted by long marching or slain because they were ill or weak.
But terrible as were the warriors of Tippu Tib, surely the servants of the Great White Chief[3] were more terrible still; for it often happened that the slave hunters, having come once, came not again; like a fierce tempest they passed; but as, when a storm has devastated a forest, new trees grow and flourish in the room of the old, so when a village had been robbed of its youth, their places were in course of time filled by other boys and girls. And even when the slave hunters came some villagers would escape, and hide in dens or among the forest trees until the danger had passed. But the servants of the Great White Chief were like a blight settling for ever on the land. They came, and stayed; none could escape them, none were spared, young or old. Imbono feared the white man; he prayed him to go in peace; the men of Ilola were peaceable, and sought not to make enemies, but they had bows and arrows, and long shields, and heavy-shafted spears, and if need be they would defend themselves against the stranger.