To show me off to his visitors. I had not such a very bad time of it. I
used to make myself as useful as I could. I had been a handy sort of
chap, and fond of carpentry, and I made a shift with what native tools I
could get to turn out tables and chairs, and cupboards, and such like.
All this time I was wondering how I was ever to get back again. I used
to share a hut with another slave who had been captured in war. They
generally sell them to the Arab slave-dealers to take down to the coast,
but this man was the son of a chief who had gone to war with the fellow
who owned me, and had been killed; and he kept this chap as his slave as
a sort of brag, I think. "We got on very well together, and of course by
the time we had been there six months I got to talk their lingo, and we
agreed at last that we would try to make a bolt of it together. So one
night--when it happened that there was a great feast in the village--we
slipped away as soon as it got dark, and made south, our object being to
strike one of the Portuguese stations. We armed ourselves with bows and
arrows, and spears; and as many yams as we could carry. It would make a
book, lads, if I was to tell you all we went through before we got
there. We travelled chiefly by nights; sometimes killing a deer,
sometimes getting a few yams or heads of corn from the fields of the
villages we passed. We had one or two skrimages, but fortunately never
ran against any strong bodies of natives. By myself I should have died
before I had been gone a fortnight but Mwango was up to every dodge. He
knew what roots were good to eat, and what fruit and berries were safe.
He could steal up to a herd of deer without frightening them, and was a
first-rate hand in making pitfalls for game. "I didn't keep no account
of time, but it was somewhere about six weeks after we had started when
we came down on the banks of a biggish river. We followed it down until,
two or three days later, we came on a village. There we stole a canoe,
and paddling at night and lying up in the day, we came after about a
week to a Portuguese post. There we were kindly received, and stopped
for a month; and then I went down the river with some traders to the
coast, while Mwango took service with the Portuguese. Six weeks later I
was lucky enough to get a ship bound for the Cape, and there shifted
into another for England. So that,
