The Lost Continent
captors were friendly or otherwise. My good men wanted to come on and
annihilate the blacks. But there were upward of a hundred of the
latter, all well armed, and so I commanded Delcarte to keep out of
harml’s way, and stay where he was till I needed him.
A young officer called and beckoned to them. But they refused to come,
and so he gave orders that resulted in my hands being secured at my
back, after which the company marched away, straight toward the east.
I noticed that the men wore spurs, which seemed strange to me. But
when, late in the afternoon, we arrived at their encampment, I
discovered that my captors were cavalrymen.
In the center of a plain stood a log fort, with a blockhouse at each of
its four corners. As we approached, I saw a herd of cavalry horses
grazing under guard outside the walls of the post. They were small,
stocky horses, but the telltale saddle galls proclaimed their calling.
The flag flying from a tall staff inside the palisade was one which I
had never before seen nor heard of.
We marched directly into the compound, where the company was dismissed,
with the exception of a guard of four privates, who escorted me in the
wake of the young officer. The latter led us across a small parade
ground, where a battery of light field guns was parked, and toward a
log building, in front of which rose the flagstaff.
I was escorted within the building into the presence of an old negro, a
fine looking man, with a dignified and military bearing. He was a
colonel, I was to learn later, and to him I owe the very humane
treatment that was accorded me while I remained his prisoner.
He listened to the report of his junior, and then turned to question
me, but with no better results than the former had accomplished. Then
he summoned an orderly, and gave some instructions. The soldier
saluted, and left the room, returning in about five minutes with a
hairy old white man—just such a savage, primeval-looking fellow as I
had discovered in the woods the day that Snider had disappeared with
the launch.
The colonel evidently expected to use the fellow as interpreter, but
when the savage addressed me it was in a language as foreign to me as
was that of the blacks. At last the old officer gave it up, and,
shaking his head, gave instructions for my removal.
From his office I was led to a guardhouse, in which I found about fifty
half-naked whites, clad in the skins of wild beasts. I tried to
converse with them, but not one of them could understand Pan-American,
nor could I make head or tail of their jargon.
For over a month I remained a prisoner there, working from morning
until night at odd jobs about the headquarters building of the
commanding officer. The other prisoners worked harder than I did, and I
owe my better treatment solely to the kindliness and discrimination of
the old colonel.
What had become of Victory, of Delcarte, of Taylor I could not know;
nor did it seem likely that I should ever learn. I was most depressed.
But I whiled away my time in performing the duties given me to the best
of my ability and attempting to learn the language of my captors.
Who they were or where they came from was a mystery to me. That they
were the outpost of some powerful black nation seemed likely, yet where
the seat of that nation lay I could not guess.
They looked upon the whites as their inferiors, and treated us
accordingly. They had a literature of their own, and many of the men,
even the common soldiers, were omnivorous readers. Every two weeks a
dust-covered trooper would trot his jaded mount into the post and
deliver a bulging sack of mail at headquarters. The next day he would
be away again upon a fresh horse toward the south, carrying the
soldiers’ letters to friends in the far off land of mystery from whence
they all had come.
Troops, sometimes mounted and sometimes afoot, left the post daily for
what I assumed to be patrol duty. I judged the little force of a
thousand men were detailed here to maintain the authority of a distant
government in a conquered country. Later, I learned that my surmise was
correct, and this was but one of a great chain of similar posts that
dotted the new frontier of the black nation into whose hands I had
fallen.
Slowly I learned their tongue, so that I could understand what was said
before me, and make myself understood. I had seen from the first that I
was being treated as a slave—that all whites that fell into the hands
of the blacks were thus treated.
Almost daily new prisoners were brought in, and about three weeks after
I was brought in to the post a troop of cavalry came from the south to
relieve one of the troops stationed there. There was great jubilation
in the encampment after the arrival of the newcomers, old friendships
were renewed and new ones made. But the happiest men were those of the
troop that was to be relieved.
The next morning they started away, and as they were forced upon the
parade ground we prisoners were marched from our quarters and lined up
before them. A couple of long chains were brought, with rings in the
links every few feet. At first I could not guess the purpose of these
chains. But I was soon to learn.
A couple of soldiers snapped the first ring around the neck of a
powerful white slave, and one by one the rest of us were herded to our
places, and the work of shackling us neck to neck commenced.
The colonel stood watching the procedure. Presently his eyes fell upon
me, and he spoke to a young officer at his side. The latter stepped
toward me and motioned me to follow him. I did so, and was led back to
the colonel.
By this time I could understand a few words of their strange language,
and when the colonel asked me if I would prefer to remain at the post
as his body servant, I signified my willingness as emphatically as
possible, for I had seen enough of the brutality of the common soldiers
toward their white slaves to have no desire to start out upon a march
of unknown length, chained by the neck, and driven on by the great
whips that a score of the soldiers carried to accelerate the speed of
their charges.
About three hundred prisoners who had been housed in six prisons at the
post marched out of the gates that morning, toward what fate and what
future I could not guess. Neither had the poor devils themselves more
than the most vague conception of what lay in store for them, except
that they were going elsewhere to continue in the slavery that they had
known since their capture by their black conquerors—a slavery that was
to continue until death released them.
My position was altered at the post. From working about the
headquarters office, I was transferred to the colonel’s living
quarters. I had greater freedom, and no longer slept in one of the
prisons, but had a little room to myself off the kitchen of the
colonel’s log house.
My master was always kind to me, and under him I rapidly learned the
language of my captors, and much concerning them that had been a
mystery to me before. His name was Abu Belik. He was a colonel in the
cavalry of Abyssinia, a country of which I do not remember ever
hearing, but which Colonel Belik assured me is the oldest civilized
country in the world.
Colonel Belik was born in Adis Abeba, the capital of the empire, and
until recently had been in command of the emperorl’s palace guard.
Jealousy and the ambition and intrigue of another officer had lost him
the favor of his emperor, and he had been detailed to this frontier
post as a mark of his sovereignl’s displeasure.
Some fifty years before, the young emperor, Menelek XIV, was ambitious.
He knew that a great world lay across the waters far to the north of
his capital. Once he had crossed the desert and looked out upon the
blue sea that was the northern boundary of his dominions.
There lay another world to conquer. Menelek busied himself with the
building of a great fleet, though his people were not a maritime race.
His army crossed into Europe. It met with little resistance, and for
fifty years his soldiers had been pushing his boundaries farther and
farther toward the north.
“The yellow men from the east and north are contesting our rights here
now,” said the colonel, “but we shall win—we shall conquer the world,
carrying Christianity to all the benighted heathen of Europe, and Asia
as well.”
“You are a Christian people?” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise, nodding his head affirmatively.
“I am a Christian,” I said. “My people are the most powerful on earth.”
He smiled, and shook his head indulgently, as a father to a child who
sets up his childish judgment against that of his elders.
Then I set out to prove my point. I told him of our cities, of our
army, of our great navy. He came right back at me asking for figures,
and when he was done I had to admit that only in our navy were we
numerically superior.
Menelek XIV is the undisputed ruler of all the continent of Africa, of
all of ancient Europe except the British Isles, Scandinavia, and
eastern Russia, and has large possessions and prosperous colonies in
what once were Arabia and Turkey in Asia.
He has a standing army of ten million men, and his people possess
slaves—white slaves—to the number of ten or fifteen million.
Colonel Belik was much surprised, however, upon his part, to learn of
the great nation which lay across the ocean, and when he found that I
was a naval officer, he was inclined to accord me even greater
consideration than formerly. It was difficult for him to believe my
assertion that there were but few blacks in my country, and that these
occupied a lower social plane than the whites.
Just the reverse is true in Colonel Belikl’s land. He considered whites
inferior beings, creatures of a lower order, and assured me that even
the few white freemen of Abyssinia were never accorded anything
approximating a position of social equality with the blacks. They live
in the poorer districts of the cities, in little white colonies, and a
black who marries a white is socially ostracized.
The arms and ammunition of the Abyssinians are greatly inferior to
ours, yet they are tremendously effective against the ill-armed
barbarians of Europe. Their rifles are of a type similar to the
magazine rifles of twentieth century Pan-America, but carrying only
five cartridges in the magazine, in addition to the one in the chamber.
They are of extraordinary length, even those of the cavalry, and are of
extreme accuracy.
The Abyssinians themselves are a fine looking race of black men—tall,
muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline
distinctly toward Semitic mold—I refer to the full-blooded natives of
Abyssinia. They are the patricians—the aristocracy. The army is
officered almost exclusively by them. Among the soldiery a lower type
of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses.
These men are recruited, so the colonel told me, from among the
conquered tribes of Africa. They are good soldiers—brave and loyal.
They can read and write, and they are endowed with a self-confidence
and pride which, from my readings of the words of ancient African
explorers, must have been wanting in their earliest progenitors. On the
whole, it is apparent that the black race has thrived far better in the
past two centuries under men of its own color than it had under the
domination of whites during all previous history.
I had been a prisoner at the little frontier post for over a month,
when orders came to Colonel Belik to hasten to the eastern frontier
with the major portion of his command, leaving only one troop to
garrison the fort. As his body servant, I accompanied him mounted upon
a fiery little Abyssinian pony.
We marched rapidly for ten days through the heart of the ancient German