Our heroes are captured by bestial savages. What’s next? Who knows? I do, and you could, too, if you but read a little further.
“But these croc-men can’t help their origin,” James protested. “They deserve an unbiased judgement. Remember: no one civilization is inherently superior to another. The idea of comparing a race or people to another and calling one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad’ is the imposition of race-hatred and anathema to science.”
Bellows’s eyes flickered from James to Avery. “What do you think, lad?” he asked, and Avery sensed that more than James’s opinion was at stake here.
Avery was quiet for a moment. “I stand by James,” he said at last.
Bellows was not to be deterred. “I say we exterminate the brutes.”
“What about educating and uplifting?” James interjected.
“When it’s possible. These are clearly unrepentant savages, beyond the help of white men. The best thing we can do for them is grind them under our heels.”
“Your logic dizzies me,” James said.
“Can you honestly say these degraded beasts are men?”
James rubbed his chin. “I agree that they exhibit some symptoms of isolated populations, such as overadaptation and inbreeding. I noted that many of them have the epicanthic folds indicative of the syndrome described by Doctor John Langdon Down – a common trait among so-called ‘degenerate’ peoples.”
“It’s like a Haggard story,” Avery said. “A lost peoples, fallen to barbarism…”
“Again, that is a scientific inaccuracy,” James said. “Barbarism and degeneracy are neither vices nor virtues. Mr. Bellows here seeks to assign moral values to the toss of genetic dice; dangerous, foolish, and scientifically absurd!”
“They’re monsters,” Bellow said bitterly.
Larsen spoke up, surprising them; they had forgotten the Swede’s presence. “I agree with Mr. Blankenship. I may not know much about ethno-anything, but I’ve traveled the world, and mixed with Kanakas, Venezuelans, Tahitians, the clean-limbed and able men of Vanuatu and Papao and Brisbane, stout men and true, Russians, Cubans, Chinese, Floridians by way of New York and Reykjavik, cutthroats from Sao Paulo, sinners from Madagascar, scoundrels and saints in skins of white, black, red, yellow, and every shade of brown, and I know one thing for sure. Folks can be reasonable once you learn how to talk to them. I learned a bit of Confucius from a Manchoo exile on a sealing schooner, and he told me the mark of a true gentleman: all within the four seas are his brothers.”
Silence hung over them for a moment. Avery broke it with a slow clap. “Well said, mate.”
The temple door crashed open and ten croc-men entered, led by a tall and powerful-looking specimen who wore a crown that, Avery realized with a shudder, was crafted of human bones and studded with human teeth. Around his neck he wore a small leather pouch on a string. They approached the cage, unlocked the door, flung it open, and grabbed Larsen, who happened to be closest, and pulled him from the cage while keeping the other men at bay with their spears. Avery would have rushed them and given his life if he thought it would free the others; perhaps the croc-men sensed this, and so most of the spears were directed his way. They closed the gate and left a youngling at guard.
Larsen struggled but made no cry, until he saw the knife. It was a single long piece of jagged flint, and the king wielded it viciously. The croc-men forced Larsen down on the altar and tore his shirt open. “They’ll kill him!” Avery said.
“We are witnessing some degradation of an eons-old Atlantean ritual,” James said. “I am fascinated even while I am mortified.”
“Sucks to that! I’m getting us out of here,” Avery said, and he put words into action; his mighty arms shot between the bars of the cage and snared the guard around his thick throat. Avery choked his enemy’s alarum to a gurgle, squeezing him between granite-hard forearms and the sturdy cage. The croc-man kicked and struggled without weakening; Avery could not squeeze the half-human’s windpipe through the armored skin.
Bellows appeared at his side. “Here, lad,” he grunted, and, reaching past Avery, sawed at the croc-man’s throat with the penknife. It opened in an incarnadine spray, and the croc-man expired after a frantic thrash. Avery dropped the corpse after taking the knife and spear.
The remaining croc-men were absorbed in their ritual. Fortunately for Avery (unfortunately for Larsen), Avery had assaulted the guard at the precise moment the king sank his knife into Larsen’s abdomen; Larsen’s tortured screams and the Stygian cackling of the croc-men covered the sounds of the scuffle.
“They’re removing his liver,” James said. “You know, the Egyptians considered the liver, rather than the heart, the seat of emotion. That’s another point in favor of my theory of a prehistoric pan-Mediterranean culture.”
With his fallen foe’s flint knife, Avery hacked at the cage lashings. A bar loosened, and he knocked it from the cage, weakening the structure and allowing him to work more effectively.
Avery reduced the cage to poles, splinters, and shreds of ancient rope, and burst free. He took the dead croc-man’s spear, brandished it, and addressed the king and his company with a ferocious yell: “Now you will know the price of slaying a helpless man!”
He leapt among his enemies and laid to. Cold fury possessed him; he would see Larsen’s murderers slain and allow no weapon to touch him before that happened. He killed three or four before he had his next thought. Avery put his spear through the soft underbelly of the king, rammed the butt into an oncoming croc-man, and delivered a vicious sideways kick to Red Stripe. He pulled the spear from the king’s belly and plunged it into a croc-man’s eye, then withdrew it with a fatal twist. He noted Bellows holding a croc-man off with the flint knife; in one smooth movement, Avery scooped a broken chunk of marble from the floor and hurled it at Bellows’s opponent, knocking him to the ground. Bellows jumped on him, knife-first, and then Avery’s attention was occupied by Red Stripe, who slashed diagonally with his spear, the point nicking Avery’s square chin.
“Let’s settle this like men,” Avery said. He dropped his spear and put his fists up. The croc-man stood nonplussed for a moment, then, comprehending, relinquished his weapon and charged at Avery, claws outstretched. Avery sidestepped his charge, tripped him, put a knee on Red Stripe’s back as he rolled on the ground and wrapped his arms around Red Stripe’s huge jaws. He pushed down with his knee and jerked back. Bones crunched.
“Well done, lad!” Bellows cried.
Avery glowered at him. “I killed a man. I don’t want congratulations.”
“Aye, you killed him, and it was lovely. ‘Let’s settle this like men’ – what was that all about, then? Sometimes, you need to feel it – ” Avery had never noticed how yellow the whites of Bellows’s eyes were, as if they had become stained along with his teeth in a half-century of hard living.
Abruptly, Avery said, “Jim, what’re you doing?” James had his magnox in a hundred pieces and was tinkering furiously.
He looked up, his eyes refocusing as his mind came back from the realm of the purely technical. “I’m sorry – I wanted to be of some help, but – this infernal weapon!”
The temple door groaned open, revealing a dozen more warriors. “No time for that, Jim,” Avery said. “Better make peace with your Indifferent Providence!” The soldiers advanced, spears held high.
“The very idea is a paradox!” James said. “There!” He raised the magnox. “Anticipate antilepton annihilation!”
The torches snuffed out simultaneously, plunging the room into darkness. Blue-white lightning blazed from the magnox and struck the croc-men; in the blackness, Avery swore he saw their dancing skeletons for half a moment, and the electrified image lingered white-hot on his eyeballs after the croc-men fell. The torches burst back to life, revealing the croc-men, dead and steaming, at their feet.
After a few moments’ silence, James said, “I didn’t expect it to work so well. I must say I’m shocked.”
“Not half so bad as them, mate!” Bellows said, and Avery burst into laughter. James laughed, and Bellows joined in. They laughed until their sides hurt.
“To digress,” James said, wiping tears from his eyes, “we’re trapped deep underground, likely under the surface of the lake. We’re surrounded by hundreds of hostile beast-men, probably alert and bloodthirsty, and however many thralls they can set against us. We must evade them and find a way to reach the surface.”
“I say we exterminate the brutes!” Bellows said, slamming his fist into his palm. “Come on, lads. You saw what they did to Larsen. They are creatures without compassion, without conscience. You can’t call them humans anymore than you can call a gorilla a bicycle tire.”
Avery was doubtful. “I don’t know, sir. They walk on two legs, and, as Jim says, they’re descended from humans…”
“Bollocks!” Bellows said. “They’re monsters. I address your attention to poor Larsen.” Avery did not look. “What do you say, Jim?”
James scratched his temple with the magnox. “I withhold my opinion on their humanity. I do not enjoy the slaughter of animals, monsters, or men. But they have placed themselves between us and liberation, and we cannot be responsible for the consequences. That said, I would avoid shedding blood however we can.”
Avery shook his head. “I feel on the first step to something dark and unfathomable,” he said, “but I must agree. We’ll do what is needed, and we’ll breathe British air again!”
Bellows grinned and hefted his spear. “That’s the spirit, my son! Let’s skewer these bastards!”
#
The croc-men charged again, and, like the last wave, they fell twitching and smoking as bolts of electricity cooked their flesh and burst their eyeballs. James was the conductor, the magno-ray his baton, and the screams and snarls of their enemies the many-voiced requiem. The blue bolt cut a swath through the croc-men and their armed slaves, and where it touched it left smoking ruin.
“I say,” said Avery, “I haven’t seen so much scorched flesh since my last holiday on the seaside!”
James laughed and replied, “Fortunately for them, the magnox delivers a relatively swift death, though that death is terribly excruciating in recompense for its brevity. An unintentional quirk of its construction, I assure you.” He blasted a squadron of murderous croc-men as they lifted their spears to throw. Their blackened corpses crumpled to the ground.
Meanwhile Bellows and Avery worked with their spears, killing any croc-men who slipped past James’s electric web of death. Though the croc-men were stronger and tougher, they lacked skill; for years, they had fought nothing fiercer than an obstinate slave, and it told on their poor coordination and virtually nonexistent tactics. Avery had no difficulty turning their strength into clumsiness, and his superior agility allowed him to overcome multiple croc-men at once.
A croc-man of great size broke the ranks and ducked a magno-beam. His size bespoke many years, and his animal eyes gleamed cunningly. He beat his scaly chest and howled a tirade at them; Avery listened for a moment, fascinated, then ran his spear through the roof of the croc-man’s mouth, lifting him upward with the tip and ramming the flint head into his foe’s septum pellucidum, via the frontal lobe and gyrus cinguli.
“What was he saying?” Avery asked, as he struggled to withdraw his spear.
“That he remembered the golden days of Crocodopolis, when man lay with croc in peace and harmony, and learning was revered above all – a golden era, when philosopher-crocs walked with gods in the many-tiered gardens, and all was light and goodness, a civilization against which Athens was an anthill and Troy a pigpen.”
“A right shame, that,” Avery said. “Look sharp, Jim, there’s a whole troop of the buggers!”
The blue lightning crackled, and fifteen more of the croc-men fell dead. By the size of their jaws and number of teeth, Avery guessed that some of them were mere adolescents.
“I haven’t seen so many butchered reptiles since turtle soup night at the Savoy!” Avery said jovially.
#
“The problem of our escape remains,” Avery said, after the croc-men were scattered and fleeing. “We’re under more tons of stone than Samson in the temple, and under more fathoms of water than Sir Francis Drake. Can you rig us up a bathysphere? Or perhaps a bathyscaphe?”
James shook his head. “I have no salvage from which to work. The only post-Stone Age implement I’ve found amongst these sad degenerates is the king’s pouch, and it contains nothing more than… a whistle.” James piped it disconsolately.
As the shrill sonorations of the whistle faded away, Avery heard a low rumbling roar from the end of the chamber, the end through which they had entered a few hours ago. An alien sensation gripped him; a second later he realized that, for the first time in his life, he was experiencing fear – for the rumbling roar heralded the arrival of none other than Eustace, king of beasts!
The leviathan came rampaging into the room, jaws open. Avery’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of those teeth, measurable in handspans, and he braced himself to fight as best he could. Under normal circumstances, he would welcome this contest, but he was poorly armed, and, after personally dispatching almost a hundred mutant croc-men, slightly fatigued. Still, he would not go quietly. Eustace would work for his dinner.
The monster was almost upon him.
James blew the whistle again.
Eustace stopped inches before his saberlike fangs rammed into Avery’s skull. His jaws gaped. He seemed to be waiting for something.
“By Gad!” Avery crowed. “Jim, you’ve hypnotized him, like a Delhi snake charmer!”
“Impossible,” James said. “Reptiles have no true ears; they sense vibrations in the ground. It’s the waving motion of the charmer’s flute that hypnotizes, not the actual sound.”
“Yet we’re unchewed! After all, he’s trained to carry men to and from the surface. We’ll just step inside and away we go. By Gad, Jim, I knew you’d get us out of this somehow!”
“Yes, well… genius, you know.”
“I’m not chomping at the bit to do this, exactly.” Avery tentatively stepped onto Eustace’s slippery tongue. “But it seems our only escape. Gentlemen, kindly step inside the crocodile.”
Bellows shook his head. “I never thought I’d hear that again. All right, lads, old men first.” Bellows stepped into Eustace’s maw; a spasm of the enormous tongue, and he was gone.
“Take a deep breath and hold it,” Avery said. “I’ll see you topside, mate!” He threw himself into the pink throat.
#
Blinking and dripping, they emerged from Eustace’s gorge and into the bright sunlight on the Tanganyika lake shore. Avery patted the crocodile’s snout.
“Thanks, old boy. To think I wanted to shoot you, you magnificent animal. Jim, think how clever he must be to play the cabman! What training, and what brains behind this scaly skull! It just goes to show, even the roughest-looking creatures can be almost like people at times. So long, chum!” Eustace slid back into the water.
“You might have said ‘see you again,’” James said. “I intend on returning to this place, better prepared and better equipped, and wresting its secrets. We have much yet to learn from Crocodopolis.”
“And the Royal Geographic Society will be happy to help, lad,” Bellows said. He extended his hand. “Or should I say Fellow Blankenship?”
“I say,” James murmured, dumbfounded, as they shook hands. “Quite an honor, quite an honor.”
“Now,” Avery said, “just where are we? He didn’t deposit us at our camp, for sure. We must be a fair piece south.”
“Judging by the flora,” James said, studying a blade of grass on the bank, “I’d say we’re on the Congo shore.”
“Aye,” agreed Bellows. “And these corpses bear the paint and jewelry of the Bakongo. We must be on the Congo side.”
They followed his gesture; the grassy land stretching away from the shore was thick with fresh corpses, perhaps sixty of them. Blood covered the grass so thickly that the stalks bent with its weight. Judging by the screams and moans, not all the men, women, and children were quite dead yet. A few very tall men, whom Bellows identified as highland cannibals, walked among the Bakongo with machetes, hacking off hands and stuffing them in pouches.
“For currency,” Bellows explained. “They can give the severed hands to the Belgians instead of meeting their rubber or ivory quotas. A good system, practical and efficient.”
A white man approached them warily. He was dressed in khakis and carried a rifle. Bellows gave a cry of joy at seeing him. “Henry Morton Stanley, I presume?” he said, his hand outstretched.
“Why, yes,” said the fellow, in a Welsh accent. “Pleased as hell to see you, Bellows.” They made introductions. “But, pray tell, what are you doing in the Congo?”
“Oh, a little field work for the Royal Geographic Society. You?”
“Working for the Belgians now. His Majesty Leopold the Second owns all the lands between the lake and the western branch of the Congo River, where the Frogs are. Administration sent me out here to stop an uprising. They were turning violent, these Bakongo, and His Majesty won’t take any chances with the rubber quotas. So administration gave me a detachment of these cannibals to put them down before anyone was hurt.”
“And thank God for that,” Avery said.
Stanley glanced at Avery, then back to Bellows. “Nasty business, sometimes, but it’s all for their own good. The International African Association’s bringing money into the region, money, and doctors, teachers, and missionaries. They provide the rubber and ivory, and we’ll do our part to bring them into the nineteenth century.”
“God’s work,” Bellows said.
“This is a damned frightful country,” Avery said.
“I was not always convinced of the wisdom of interfering with foreign cultures,” James said. They strolled through the field of massacre as he pontificated. “But if the experience of the past two days has taught me anything, it’s that these savages will enslave, butcher, or sacrifice each other in weird liver-excising rituals. They need a guiding hand, and if it needs be European, it may as well be Belgian! I always liked the Belgians – smart, efficient fellows, hard workers and good organizers. I’m pleased to see the Congo in good hands, Mr. Stanley, and I daresay it augurs well for this country’s future, and other nations lucky enough to fall under European influence! I see nothing but good things to come for Africa!”
The End
Hahaha… oh, man. That’s rough. But, seriously, colonialism is one of the worst crimes perpetrated by man, and Leopold II’s Congo is the ugliest example. (Elucidation is a wiki search away, dear readers… oh, fine, I’ll do your work for you.)
Anyway, if you’d like to argue about this buggaroo of an ending, send me an email and we’ll talk about it. See you next week!
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