The Sky And The Forest by C.S. Forester Page B

shore on the other side, and he was interested in observing the behaviour of his guards. The mumbo-jumbo of the Moslems, their ablutions and their prostrations, interested him. He was sharp enough to guess that these formalities were in honour of some god, but he could not guess which god it was. It was more than could be expected of his uneducated mind that it should develop a good working theory regarding comparative religion, but having been a god himself made him something of a practical theologian. Stirring in the dark recesses of Loa's mind there were some curious thoughts, and there was a stern conflict going on. When a man who has always thought of himself as a god begins to have atheistical doubts the conflict is bound to be severe. Loa might well have gone insane if his interest had not been caught by his surroundings -- if, for instance, Nessi's whims and moods had not kept him busy, and if he had not been wondering about escaping.
    The majority of his fellow captives were apathetic in their misery, content to hang round the feeding troughs or merely sit staring at vacancy. There were a few active spirits, but not many, and the kurbash kept them in check. And if the kurbash did not achieve its end there was another punishment possible. Loa never knew what was the crime of the two of his fellow slaves who suffered the death penalty. They may have tried to escape, or they may have gone insane and struck a Moslem. No one really knew, but everyone knew how they died, for they were perched upon stakes of impalement in the centre of the encampment, and there they stayed, screaming throughout one long day, screaming at first so loudly that they could be heard from one end of the camp to the other. Later the screams died down to delirious moans. Loa knew about inflicting death; he had killed people in cold blood himself. And he knew about casual cruelty, the result of carelessness or indifference. But deliberate cruelty of this frightful kind was something new to him. He sat and watched under lowering eyebrows the writhings of the tortured men. It was all part of his education. He had never had to keep men in subjugation -- allegiance to him had been voluntary, so ingrained by habit and tradition as to be classed as instinctive -- but now he knew how it was done.
    There was no attempt at organized sanitation in the camp, and the stench and the flies were consequently appalling; the deluges of tropical rain that fell were welcome in one way, as washing away the filth that lay everywhere, but they added to everyone's discomfort all the same. The naked peoples of Central Africa, like naked people in most parts of the world, detest the impact of rain upon their skin. The slaves tried to huddle together during the storms; Nessi would sit in close embrace with a dozen men and women whose yokemates similarly tried to huddle together at the other end of their poles, all whimpering in chorus, each trying to shelter himself from the pitiless downpour at the expense of the others. But Loa the god sat apart and indifferent (except when Nessi's writhings, communicated through the pole, jerked him off his balance) while the thunder of his brother the sky raved overhead, and the thick clouds obscured the face of his brother the sun so that for a time it was as dark as twilight. He bore the unpleasant nagging of the heavy raindrops on his skin with some kind of stoicism; stripped of his divine dignities he was clinging to his personal dignity -- about which he had hardly thought before.
    There came a day when the whole camp moved off, when the kurbash bit into dark flesh as the raiders herded the slaves into order, when shouts and cries and blows drove the slaves first here and then there in obedience to their masters. Loa and Nessi found themselves loaded again with an elephant's tusk -- not likely to be the one they had borne on their first day, but one as heavy and as bulky. It was slung to their pole in loops of cane, and then they