Edgar Wallace

Lieutenant Bones Edgar Wallace

There was a lawless group of villages set upon a wooded ridge at the confluence of B'suri and the Great River, and these villages were called by the name of the largest, M'fumbini-falapa. It had another name which I will not give, lest this story falls into the hands of innocent people who speak the B'mongo tongue, but it may be translated in a gentlemanly way as "Everlastingly nasty." It was neither clean within, nor picturesque from without. The huts straggled and strayed without order or symmetry. They were old huts, and patched huts, and many were uglified by the employment of rusty scraps of galvanized iron, for near by, cala-cala long ago, an optimistic British company had erected a store for the collection of palm nuts. The enterprise had failed, and the store had been left derelict, and in time the wild had grown round and over it. And the people of M'fumbini had in their furtive, foraging way taken scraps-they did nothing systematically or thoroughly-and had added abomination to abomination until their village was an eyesore and an offence to all beholders. Sanders had argued and ordered, held palaver after palaver, but all to no purpose. They were an isolated folk, for here the rivers run very swiftly together, and landing on the littered beach was attended by risks which their neighbours seldom cared to accept. So they lived alone with their skinny children and their indescribable wives, and were disowned both by the Isisi and the N'gombi, with whom they claimed tribal associations.