United States or Panama ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As for their brother, Black Windows, whom I have captured, he must be sacrificed, since I have sworn it, unless you yield, when I will plead for his life to the god, with what result I cannot tell. Yield, then, and I will not even slay the Abati; they shall live on and serve the Fung as slaves and minister to the glory of Harmac." "It may not be, it may not be!"
When the ambassadors had gone, at first there was silence, a very heavy silence, since even the frivolous Abati felt that the hour was big with fate.
Just then a rotten egg thrown by some sweet Abati youth landed full on the bridge of his nose, and dispersing itself into his mouth and over his smoked spectacles, cut short the Professor's eloquence, or rather changed its tenor.
This warmed us a little, though I do not think that a bottleful would have raised our spirits. Higgs, whom we all loved, was gone, dead, probably, by that time; the Abati had lost or deserted us, and we three white men appeared to have wandered into a savage stronghold, where, as soon as we were seen, we should be trapped like birds in a net, and butchered at our captor's will.
Half-an-hour or so went by in this fashion, and still there were no signs of the Abati or of our missing pair. Quick began to fumble among his clothes. I asked him what he was doing. "Can't help thinking I've got a wax match somewhere, Doctor.
So, having roped the camels into a long line, we went on alone, truly thankful to be rid of them, and praying, every one of us, that never in this world or the next might we see the face or hear the voice of another Abati.
They carried us all out of the cave; Japhet was with them. They took the Child of Kings one way and us another, that is all I know." Shortly afterwards the Abati servants arrived, bearing food more solid than the soup, and with them came one of their doctors, not that old idiot of a court physician, who examined us, and announced that we should all recover, a fact which we knew already.
"Yes, Prince," I answered, for by now my temper was roused. "But I would have you understand something also that we are men of a high race whose arm stretches over half the world, and that we differ from the little tribe of the Abati, whose fame is not known to us, in this that we are jealous of our own honour, and do not need to hire strangers to fight the foes we fear to face.
In short, being very frightened, for a time they forgot their hatred of us foreigners. So a scheme of operations was agreed upon, and some law passed by the Council, the only governing body among the Abati, for they possessed no representative institutions, under which law a kind of conscription was established for a while. Let me say at once that it met with the most intense opposition.
Several of those who had conspired with him to betray us to the Fung were also deprived of their possessions and condemned to the army, which was their form of penal servitude. Thus amidst a mighty wailing of those concerned and of their friends and relatives ended this remarkable trial, of which I give some account because it throws light upon the social conditions of Abati.
Word Of The Day