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When at length we paused to take breath Omar, panting, said: "At last we are free again. Betea will not seek us, for he naturally believes we were killed by the gree-gree. If Zomara favours us we shall yet live to enter Mo and lead our hosts into the country of Samory."
In the priests' inner chambers, dark dens filled with foul odours, to which we entered with Betea, we found not only the whole apartment smeared with blood, but bones and portions of human remains lying about openly, or wrapped in rags to serve as charms.
Betea, the Ocra, bending low, was whispering to the King, when the latter suddenly took the nut from his mouth and said: "So it is upon Omar, son of my enemy the Naya of Mo, that my eyes rest! Let him stand forth with his white companion." Obedient to the command of the King, the executioners allowed Omar to rise, and in a few moments we both stood before the royal stool.
The earth quakes when he speaks, and his enemies are paralysed by fear. Betea has spoken."
Betea, the most powerful of the King's Ocras, seemed to delight in making our lives a burden to us, for amid luxurious surroundings we were beaten, starved, and ill-treated, until even death under the executioner's knife seemed a preferable fate. Six months passed; six weary months of slavery and wretchedness.
Suddenly the chief executioner took one of his knives which had a human skull upon the hilt, and holding it up, commanded silence. Then spoke the Ocra Betea, who, rising from his stool, waved his hand across the veritable Golgotha, crying: "Behold! Tremble! The King makes the great yam custom. The death-drum beats, and to the fetish we offer sacrifice.
At first we thought some poor wretch was being sacrificed, but again and again it sounded, and all turned pale, even the royal Ocra himself. "What's that, I wonder?" I asked Omar, who, bearing our master's sword, was walking at my side. "The gree-gree!" he gasped, looking round in fear, while at that moment there sounded two ear-piercing blasts upon a horn. "Hark!" cried Betea himself, trembling.
"Your queen-mother," he said, "has times without number sent her armed hordes over the border to raid our villages, and it is the fetish that has delivered you, her son, into our hands. The fetish has not sent you hither as a sacrifice, but as a hostage. Therefore your life shall be spared together with that of your white friend, but you shall both be given as slaves to our trusted Ocra Betea.
This no doubt was another trick of the priests to frighten the superstitious natives, and at the same time wreak vengeance upon those who had offended them. Once again the notes of the horn rose weird and shrill, and died away. Then Betea, himself affrighted, turned to us saying: "Fly! fly for your lives. If the gree-gree catches you you will be struck upon the brow.
When he had gone I cast myself upon the ground in the shadow beside Omar, saying: "After all, it would have been better if we had died in the woods than to endure this torture of waiting for execution." "Yes," he answered, gloomily. "That Ocra who has just inspected us was Betea, a bitter enemy of my mother. He is certain to revenge himself upon us."
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