“And now he was told he was to be henceforth one of the slaves of the River God, of which slaves there were in the cavern quite a goodly company, and all, like himself, as blind as so many mouldwarps; and that he should labour constantly to get gold for the River God’s treasure. “And so it befell; for in that noisome cavern he abode for nigh upon two yeares, labouring always to get treasure for his master the Demon of the River. “Some days he would sit on the ground working a small bellows beside a furnace, and constantly driven with a whip whenever he flagged. Some days he laboured with a greate pestle, crushing the ore in a mortar, and other days he was led with divers of his fellow captives up the ladders out into the sweet air and into a canoe or raft on the pool. “Here he would drive the craft forward with a long pole, or dredge along the bottom with a small metal buckett on a rope and empty into a large brass pan, which they carried in the canoe, the mudde that came up in the said buckett; which mudde, Almeida declareth, was nearly pure gold dust, especially that from near the fountain in the great rock. “When the pan was filled with the mudde Almeida and the other slaves would bear it along on a pole, back to the cavern and lower it into the vault or under-cavern. Then the slaves would wash the mudd in gourd shells, while their taskmasters gathered out the gold, which Almeida believeth was afterwards melted in the furnaces and cast into shapes for the God’s treasury. “And so Almeida abode in the cavern, as he sayeth, for nigh two yeares. Then on a certaine day he was brought forth, but instead of being taken to the pool he was bound by a rope and an iron collar to some other of the slaves, and led away on a journey. And as he journeyed he learned that the King of Asantay was at war with the King of a nation called the Denkeras and that he was making many offerings to his Gods. So Almeida and the other slaves conceived that they were to be sacrificed to these Gods, whereat they rejoiced in that their miseries should be soone put an ende to. But on the third day of their journey a great tumult arose, and it presently appeared that the keepers of the slaves had been attacked and overwhelmed by a bande of these same Denkeras, who, when they had slain the Asantays, carried the blind slaves away with them to their country. Here the King of the Denkeras, having compassion upon Almeida for that he was a white man and had suffered such grievous wrongs at the handes of the Asantays, caused him to be sent to the coaste and delivered into the handes of the Commandant of the Castle of St. Anthony at Axim. And there he abode until some shipp should take him away from the accursed land of the negroes, and so he was brought to oure shipp as hath been related. “Such is the story of José d’Almeida as he hath declared it to me, Barnabas Hogg, and by me faithfully writ down from his very wordes.”