Indignant as he had been at the sight of the herded slaves in the village, his blood boiled at the scenes which met his gaze during the march, and his fingers itched to get to grips with the slave-traders. "If I were only Hercules, or Samson, or any of the fabled giants of old!" he sighed, chafing at his impotence. The slaves were driven on without remorse or ruth, the heavy whip descending upon their shoulders or curling about their loins at any sign of lagging. Mothers carried their babies till they collapsed from exhaustion, strong youths fell, utterly spent, by the path-side. Some of the weaklings were butchered as they lay, the rest were left to die of famine, or perchance to be enslaved again if haply some Good Samaritan found them and nursed them back to strength.
Besides these actual evidences of present cruelty, the path itself bore witness to savageries in the past. Leading, like all native paths, up hill and down dale, crossing rocky uplands or traversing dense forests, it had been trodden with no attempt to find the easiest way, sometimes winding like a snake where a straight course would have saved miles, sometimes making a straight line up a precipitous ascent where a circular route would have been more expeditious. If a tree had fallen across it the obstruction was not removed, but a new path was trodden round it, joining the original path again at a point beyond. At more than one spot Tom saw a skeleton across the track, and there the path made a little divergence of two or three yards, returning to its course at the same distance on the other side. In answer to Tom's question the hakim told him that if a man died on the road he was never buried, but left to the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air. The loop formed by the path about the body remained for ever, though the obstacle in course of time disappeared. Several of the grisly skeletons there encountered had the iron rings still about their necks; and with each, fuel was added to Tom's wrath, and strength to his resolve.
Towards noon, on the second day after leaving the slave-village, Tom, marching among his guards, felt more than usually dejected in spirit. He held his head high, and preserved an undaunted mien before the Arabs, but in reality he was beginning to despair of ever beholding England and his friends again. For one thing, he was physically out of sorts; the villages in which the long caravan encamped at night were not models of cleanliness, and he was sometimes too sick to swallow the unsavoury foods provided for him. Moreover, he had been terribly plagued with the jiggers, the scourge of African travel,--insects which pierced the skin and laid their eggs beneath it, these in their turn becoming worms that caused intolerable pain and irritation.