SLAVERY
The rocky hill seethed with jubilation as the prisoners were led downward and into the sheer-walled gash. More than one villainous fellow fingered his singa edge hopefully and cast questioning glances at Yuttal and Hadi-Mot.
“La!” growled Yuttal. “No! We have yet to find the missing machinery. You—Savage—will take us to it at once!”
“I’m not quite that simple,” Doc assured him in English. “Turning us loose was part of the bargain.”
“Nothing was said about turning you loose!” Yuttal snapped.
“That’s right—there wasn’t. Well, we’ll add that clause to the articles of contract.”
“Nix,” grated Yuttal, also reverting to slangy English.
“Suit yourself!”
Doc’s unconcern got under Yuttal’s plump hide. He squirmed, growling profanely in assorted Egyptian and English.
“All right,” he said finally, a wily look in his unpleasantly big eyes. “I give you my word. Show us the machinery, then we will release you.”
Monk snorted loudly. “His word! Did you hear that, Doc?”
“He was joking, of course,” Doc told Monk in mock seriousness. “He knows that we are aware his word is not worth anything!”
Yuttal’s big-featured face purpled with rage. He could not stand the hard-boiled calmness with which these men were taking their predicament.
Even Lady Nelia seemed not too greatly concerned. This last irked Yuttal most of all. He had hoped to see the pretty young woman reduced to such a state of dull hopelessness that she would accept his advances.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” he snarled. “Let you go and expect you to mail me a letter telling where the motor parts are?”
“We’ll figure out some way in the course of time,” Doc told him.
“And I,” Yuttal sneered, “am gonna give you a few reasons for workin’ fast!”
Just what Yuttal intended to do to make their servitude most unpleasant was soon evident.
Lady Nelia Sealing was taken to a small thatched hut and secured ignominiously to a post by a chain around her pretty neck. She was not, however, subjected to any worse abuse than this, except a copious number of threats.
Doc and the others were herded into a large shack and forced to denude themselves of clothing. The garments were burned in a bonfire.
Doc’s finger nails were pared very close, as were those of his men. This was to make sure no weird chemical was concealed there. Their teeth were examined.
From the rear of Doc’s jaws, an extra pair of molars were removed. These teeth were hollow shells containing two chemicals which, when mixed, produced a powerful explosive.
One of the brown devils, in investigating these contents, chanced to mingle the ingredients. As a result, there was a blast in which he almost lost his life, and did lose a hand.
It looked for a moment or so as though Doc and his friends would be dispatched forthwith, so great was the rage of Yuttal’s men over the mishap to their fellow.
Yuttal’s profane use of their mother tongue prevailed, however, and there were no casualties.
* * * *
Water and rank soap were produced, together with swabs made of rags tied on the ends of poles. Doc and his men received a washing. The captors were taking no chances of anything being concealed upon their bodies which might aid in an escape.
A bearded fellow manipulating a swab gave Monk an unnecessarily hard whack, which nearly precipitated a riot.
Doc himself interfered.
“You’d better not push ’em too far,” he warned. “They might get excited enough to think they can get along without us.”
“A wise decision, indeed!” sneered the sleek Hadi-Mot, who had overheard.
Fragments of none-too-clean cloth were thrown Doc and his companions to serve them as garments. These comprised little more than breechcloths.
Yuttal now ordered that they be taken to the diamond mine.
“You are going to do a little useful work!” he leered at Doc.
The big bronze man replied nothing, meekly allowing himself to be nudged out of the hut by the muzzle of an automatic rifle.
En route to the diamond pit, his eyes roved alertly, adding to his fund of knowledge about the place. The outlook was none too pleasant. Every one of their captors was heavily armed. Moreover, none of the fellows were ever far distant from one of the rattan cages used as a defense against the vampire bats.
“You have some of the bats left?” Doc asked curiously.
“Plenty of ’em!” Yuttal laughed harshly.
Doc had hoped the flock of the bats he and his men had disposed of the night before had comprised the entire supply.
The venomous vampires, he learned upon reaching the gem mine, were kept in a cave dug into the side of the diamond-bearing blue ground. The cave was deep, and its entrance so small that it had previously escaped his notice.
Inside were cages, the doors electrically operated from a distance by pressing buttons on an elaborate alarm system. Pressure on the buttons, which were situated at strategic points, also rang bells. These signals warned the guards to seek shelter in their rattan baskets.
The whole device might have seemed a bit comical, had it not possessed such deadly possibilities.
Any concerted uprising on the part of the unfortunate slaves would be disastrous, for the unarmed, chained men were helpless to fight off the darting, bloodthirsty attacks of the poisonous bats.
Doc and his men were handed picks and shovels and put to work in the murderous heat of the afternoon sun. Their task was that of loading blue ground into buckets and hauling it to the top of the pit, where other slaves added it to the vast quantity already lying there. It had been exposed to the sun for some weeks, until it was disintegrated. To hasten this disintegration, slaves were forced to sprinkle frequently the diamond-bearing earth with water, there being little rain in this arid region.
Other of the wasted, chained workers were sieving the weathered or “rotted” blue ground, then running it into revolving washing pans. The “concentrates” from these pans were then passed over pulsators with greased plates. The grease on the plates did the final trapping of the brilliants.
Altogether, it was a rather up-to-date plant.
* * * *
Doc and his friends found themselves the object of every conceivable indignity. They were cursed fluently. When they asked for water, the liquid was brought—and poured on the ground in front of their eyes.
A blacksmith came with iron collars and chains. Great pains were taken to make the collars fit too tightly.
“You’ll soon sweat off enough to make ’em loose!” Yuttal leered.
They were ordered back to the labor, and the abuse continued. They were forced to confine themselves to the sunny, hot side of the pit. The heat was sickening; the sun like a gas flame.
Doc’s bronze skin was showing little burn, but the others were turning red.
Doc and his gang did not take things with entire meekness, however. They did as little work as was humanly possible. Their deportment was an education in laziness.
More than once, when no one was observing, a guard would suddenly drop, knocked senseless by an accurately heaved clod of the blue ground. Their boyish enthusiasm for this form of exercise became so troublesome that the guards finally retreated a safe distance. This caused a let-up in the indignities.
They had been ordered not to speak to the other slaves. They disobeyed this order in fervent fashion.
Few of the chained unfortunates dared answer their questions.
“They beat and starve us!” one trembling wreck of a man whimpered. “But, worst of all, they do not give us water unless we obey.”
“Then we’re probably in for a long drought,” Monk muttered.
In two or three chained groups men were entirely unconscious, prostrated by the terrific heat. Sometimes they were taken from the toiling human linkage, but more often, they were left to be dragged about.
Whips were plentiful and in free use. The lashes were ghastly things of knotted wires, bringing crimson with their every stroke. Their use called forth screams and moans—piteous, blood-freezing cries.
Twice in the course of the first hour, slaves were beaten into unconsciousness for no greater offense than being unable to keep working.
“I vote a strike!” Ham said grimly.
Picking up handfuls of hard clods, Doc and his men rambled calmly, chains clinking, to the shade. They sat down, heedless of wrathful bellows from the guards. When the latter came near with their whips, they were met by a barrage of clods.
Yuttal and Hadi-Mot arrived and added their curses to the general benediction Doc and his gang were receiving. A few shots were fired for the sake of intimidation. But Doc’s crew could not be intimidated.
Nor did they do another lick of work.
* * * *
“We can’t keep this up indefinitely, of course,” Doc said as night approached and signs of knocking off for the day became evident.
Monk, for some time, had been industriously pegging rocks at the mouth of the cave which held the venomous bats. For lack of anything else to do, he was trying to wreck the electrical system whereby the hideous creatures were released.
In this he was not successful. Guards, braving a fusillade of clods, rushed in with whips flying. For the next few minutes, a fine free-for-all fight held sway.
Doc’s outfit, handicapped by being chained together, was driven to the opposite side of the pit, out of throwing distance of the bat cave.
Shortly after this, darkness stopped work in the mine pit.
Reaching the top, the mutineers engaged in fresh rowdyism. The day’s take of diamonds was in trays near the pulsators. Making a lumbering rush, Doc and his gang seized the gems, and after looking them over, threw some of them at guards and the rest back into the pit, where they would have to be mined again.
For this outrage they were all but shot. Only sweating efforts on the part of Yuttal and Hadi-Mot saved them.
“Sons of donkeys!” Hadi-Mot berated his men. “These prisoners are our only hope of finding the missing engine parts!”
At the points of fixed bayonets, Doc’s gang was urged toward the stockade.
They saw hunting for the absent machinery had been in progress. Here and there, the sandy ground had been dug up. They had not, Doc noted, excavated anywhere near the right spot.
Work was also going forward on the Aëromunde. A rigging crew had done considerable toward repairing the ripped gas ballonets.
The stockade floor was decorated with numbers of short posts, equipped with rings. To one of these, the human chain comprising Doc and his men was linked. Doc was given honor position next the post, without sufficient slack to sit or lie down.
“You’ll hang yourself if you try to sleep there!” Renny muttered uneasily.
“I haven’t the slightest intention of sleeping,” Doc assured him.
They were not given water. As a cruel gesture at food, several packages of very salty soda crackers were tossed at their feet. They knew better than to eat these thirst-increasers.
“These birds are old heads at the torture business,” Monk declared sourly.
Other slaves in the stockade, those who still had enough life left to show interest in anything, cast sympathetic glances at Doc’s outfit.
“Do you ever try to make a break?” Doc asked one of them.
“Many times,” the man said listlessly. “It is no use. If you get free, there is the jungle—and the bats!”
“Lady Nelia and the two men with her got away.”
“Yes. And Lady Nelia is back—and the other two dead!” the speaker mumbled. “Anyway, they had an advantage. Lady Nelia had the run of the place, and she was able to get the stuff to make a balloon. That won’t happen again. They’re keeping her chained.”
Doc said nothing more. It would be a waste of breath. These men were hopeless, resigned to their fate—for which they could not be blamed. This frightful servitude was enough to break the spirit of the strongest.
“How many of the original crew of the Aëromunde are alive?” Ham asked a neighboring vassal.
“Six or seven,” was the mumbled reply. “I don’t know for sure. We—we lose track of identities here.”
As a final gesture before the night began in earnest, a sentry brought Doc and his friends a large, clean jar filled with sparkling, delicious-looking water.
The water was saltier than any ocean brine. Absolutely undrinkable!