Driftwood Spars: The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who Strangely Met Upon the Sea of LifeWren, Percival Christopher
History
Driftwood Spars: The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life
Wren, Percival Christopher
India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction
Moussa Isa was again the slave of an ivory-poaching, hide-poaching,
specimen-poaching, slave-dealing gang of Arabs, Negroes, and Portuguese
half-castes, led by a white man of the Teutonic persuasion. He could
feel the smiting heat, see the scrub, jungle, and sand shimmering and
dancing in the heat haze. He could see the line of porters, bales on
heads, the Arabs on horseback, the white man in a litter swinging from a
long bamboo pole beneath which half a dozen Swahili loped along. He
could see the velvet star-gemmed night and the camp-fires, smell the
smoke and the savoury odours of the cooking, hear the sudden shrieks and
yells that followed the roar of the springing lion, feel the crushing
crunch of its great teeth in his arm as it seized him from beside the
nearest fire and stood over him.... Yes, that was the night when the
fair Sheikh from the North had showed the mettle of his pastures and
bound Moussa Isa to him for ever in the bonds of worshipping gratitude
and love. For, while others shrieked, yelled, fled, flung burning brands
and spears, or fired hasty, unaimed, ineffectual shots, the fair Sheikh
from the North had sprung at the lion as it stood over Moussa Isa and
driven his knife into its eye, and as it smote him to the earth, buried
its fangs in his shoulder and started to drag him away, had stabbed
upward between the ribs, giving it a second death-blow, transfixing its
heart. Thus it was he had earned the name by which he was known from
Zanzibar to Berbera, "He-who-slays-lions-with-the-knife," had earned the
envy and hatred of the fat white man and the Arabs, the boundless
admiration of the Swahili askaris, hunters and porters, and the deep
dog-like affection of Moussa Isa....
And then Moussa's spirit returned to his body and he saw but the picture
of a lion on a High School wall. He commenced to draw again and suddenly
had an inspiration. Deliberately he broke the point of his pencil and,
rising, marched up to the dais, whereon, at a table, sat Mr. Edward
Jones.
Mr. Edward Jones had been shot with bewildering suddenness from
Cambridge quadrangles into the Indian Educational Service. Of India he
knew nothing, of education he knew less, but boldly took it upon him to
combine the two unknowns for the earning of his living. If wise and
beneficent men offered him a modest wage for becoming a professor and
exponent of that which he did not know, he had no objection to accepting
it; but there were people who wondered why it should be that, out of
forty million English people, Mr. Edward Jones should be the chosen one
to represent England to the youth of Duri, and asked whether there were
no keen, strictly conscientious, sporting, strong Englishmen available;
no enthusiastic educational experts left in all the British Isles, that
Mr. Edward Jones of all people had come to Duri?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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