how the Basoko, many years- ago, were alarmed by
reports of a powerful tribe who were descending the
Congo past the Yakusu, commanded by a man with a
face as pale as the moon. “ In our waters,” they said,
“ we never heard of' a tribe moving down with many
canoes, unless it came for war. So when we heard of
this tribe, we moved out of our river to fight it, but it
turned against us just at the meeting of the waters,
and though the strangers did not have many canoes,
when we bore down on them they dropped our people
level with fire and soft iron, which tore us to pieces,
that we could not stand against them. They then
pursued us and fought us in our own town, and we
could not even see what it was they threw at us,
except our dead, who fell down and never rose again.
And the tribe went away down the river, and we
never heard what became of it until the other morning,
while it was quite dark, we heard the dread sound,
‘ boom, boom, boom,’ which is like the thunder of the
sky in our ears, and we felt the flash of the flairie in our
faces. Waking up from our sleep, we rushed out from
our houses, and the darkness was lit up by a thousand
jets of fire; and a crackling noise was heard, louder
than a burning plain makes, and more terrible than
the most prolonged'thunder. There was whizzing and
buzzing, as of flying stones, in our ears, and many of
our people, on coming out into the light of the burning
houses, were struck dead by these things. The same
fear came upon us as when we first heard the loud
thunder shot at us from the strange tribe, years ago,
on the river, and we ran for our very lives into the
depths of the woods, where, in the thickest parts, we
lay with our faces in the ground, afraid to lift our
heads up, lest we might be hit by those iron balls that
sang over us and crashed into the trees from our
village. When we heard our women and children
cry out, we thought we would do something. From
our coverts we looked out. We saw that some of our
houses were still on fire, and we heard again the long
shrieks of our women and cries of our children, and
again we heard the startling boom that those long
hollow tubes, such as your people make, and again
were we frightened and threw ourselves down into the
thick bush. By-and-bye there was a deathly stillness ;
we got a little bolder, and crept out to see for ourselves
what had happened, and when we came to look upon
Mokulu, more than half of it was burnt to the ground,
as you can see to-morrow ; and as for our women and
children, we lost hundreds of them.”
This was the story Yumbila had gathered, or some
of it, which was only completely told when he induced
his new brothers to repeat to him again some of its
most prominent points. Yumbila had fully succeeded
in convincing them that we could not have known of
this massacre and ruthless deed of darkness.
“ Who were these people? Where did they come
from ? Where are they now ? By what river did
they come to you ? ”
“ Ah, we know not. We were all asleep when they
came, and they departed, no one knows where, in
Mokulu.