CHAPTER XVI
THE ISLAND OF SNAKES
The native writhed and twisted, the eyes bloodshot with terror at the threat.
Ashati and Neram came a step nearer with menace in their eyes, and the captive subsided again, gasping and groaning beneath the pressure of Bomba’s knee upon his chest.
“Do not kill me! Only do not kill me!” he jabbered. “I will answer you! You have only to ask.”
“Then listen to me, and listen well.” The fierce, impatient note was in Bomba’s voice again. “Nascanora, the great chief, the chief with a black heart, is the man I want to find. Give me news of him and you shall go free.”
A gleam of hope came into the prisoner’s eyes.
“Yes, yes, I will tell. I will tell you anything I know. But you must not let Nascanora know that I have told, or he will cut my heart and fry it over a fire.”
“Nascanora shall not know,” broke in Bomba, as he lightened somewhat his pressure on the man’s chest and bored him through and through with his eyes as though to wrench the truth from him. “But if you speak with a forked tongue your place will be with the dead.”
“I will make straight talk,” asseverated the native. “I do not want to die.”
“Where is Nascanora? Quick!” demanded Bomba.
“In two days’ time,” replied the trembling native, “he will pass this spot on the other side of the river.”
“I thought he had already passed,” said Bomba.
“He has,” returned the native. “But he turned back to burn another village and take some more captives. He will move slowly, for he has other enemies that he wants to capture near Snake Island, where lives the old witch, Sobrinini——”
Bomba cried out in astonishment and quick hope.
“You know Sobrinini?” he asked eagerly.
The native marked his change of tone, and seemed encouraged by it. His terror abated, and he spoke so swiftly that the words stumbled over each other and Bomba could scarcely make out what he said.
“I know of Sobrinini. Who does not know of her who lives near the Giant Cataract?” he cried. “But I do not go near her island, for it is full of snakes and Sobrinini is a woman of evil whose frown means death.”
“Where is this island?” Bomba asked in a fever of eagerness.
“It is called Snake Island. But to go there is to die.”
The native shivered with a superstitious terror as he spoke the words.
Bomba glanced at Ashati and Neram, who had been listening with absorbed interest to the story of the native and on whose faces was reflected the same look of fright.
Bomba released his hold upon the prisoner and arose to his feet.
“There are two things I must know,” he said.
“Command, and you shall be obeyed,” returned the native humbly.
“Was there a white man among Nascanora’s captives?”
“I cannot say. He had many captives and he will return as I have said. That is all that the jungle has told me.”
“How do you go to this island where the witch woman, Sobrinini, lives with her snakes?” asked Bomba, feeling that the native had spoken the truth.
The native looked at him with curiosity dawning in his reddened eyes.
“You will not go there?” he cried in horror. “I tell you it would be better for you to go to the giant anaconda and let him wind his coils about your body than to seek out Sobrinini on her island that lies under the curse of the gods. I tell you again that to go there is to die.”
“That is for me to say,” replied Bomba. “I do not fear Sobrinini. I do not fear her snakes. I have come a far way to see her and I will see her. Tell me what I want to know. Bomba does not like to ask a thing twice.”
In response to this imperative demand, the native jabbered out directions, telling Bomba the course he must take to reach Snake Island if he did not wish to be swept to destruction by the rapids of the River of Death.
When Bomba had extracted all the information he could, he motioned the native to rise to his feet.
“Listen!” he said. “If I were Nascanora I would kill you, so as to be sure that your tongue would be still. But Bomba’s heart is not black like that of the chief of the headhunters. I am going to let you go free. But if you tell anyone that you have seen me you will find that Bomba’s knife is sharp and his vengeance is swift. Go now and remember what I say.”
After the man had disappeared, Bomba wasted little time in discussing the matter with his companions. For if he were to accomplish all he hoped to before Nascanora should pass that way, he would have to work hard and fast.
He was in a ferment of eagerness to visit Sobrinini and wrest from the strange woman the secret of his birth. He was sure she knew. Jojasta had said she could tell him. Casson’s queer actions when the name of Sobrinini had been mentioned and his statement that “Nini would know” had further confirmed his conviction.
As for the terrors that, according to the native, barred access to her, he cared not at all. He was used to meeting and overcoming danger. He would face anything rather than once more be balked in learning what to him was almost as much as life itself.
With the aid of Neram and Ashati, he cut down one of the smaller trees near the river bank and began the work of hollowing out a portion of the trunk in the form of a small canoe.
It was hard work and slow, even with the aid of his companions, who were skilled in that kind of work, and when the evening shadows fell along the banks of the River of Death the canoe was only half done. Impatient as he was, Bomba was forced to wait till morning for the completion of the work.
At the break of dawn Bomba was at work again. Ashati helped him, while Neram went off in search of jaboty eggs so that they could conserve their remaining supply of meat.
Some time later he returned, triumphantly displaying six large eggs.
“There were more there, but I could not carry them,” he said, as he built a fire with which to prepare breakfast. “I saw a tapir, too, but could not kill him because I had gone out without my bow and arrows.”
“Foolish one to hunt without weapons,” reproved Ashati, looking up for a moment from his work. “Ashati would know better.”
“The next time Ashati shall do the hunting,” returned Neram, and went on stolidly with his preparations.
By the time the sun was high in the heavens the crude canoe was finished. A paddle was then fashioned from a sapling, that for all its slenderness was strong enough to breast the current of even that raging river.
Their temporary captive had explained to Bomba that he must launch his boat at some little distance up the river, where the current was not so strong. From there he could let himself go with the rushing waters until he came to a place where the waters widened out and were not so tumultuous.
When he reached this portion of the stream, the native had said, he would see at a distance a long island, the shape of a finger, extending into the river. After he had reached and passed this on the eastern side, he would find himself in a place more easily navigable for his small craft.
Up this calmer stretch of water Bomba had been directed to paddle until he should come in sight of Snake Island, half hidden behind a jutting point of the mainland.
Bomba had taken it for granted that Ashati and Neram would accompany him. There was room for the three of them, and there would be less danger of capsizing if the canoe were well weighted down.
But though they helped him willingly to carry the canoe to the portion of the river where it would be safe to launch it, they seemed so terrified when Bomba spoke of his eagerness to reach Snake Island that the lad stared at them with amazement.
“You are afraid to go?” he asked.
Poor Ashati and Neram flinched before his accusing gaze and hung down their heads. For a long moment there was silence, and then Ashati answered:
“This Sobrinini is a witch and her island is full of snakes. If she is a witch, she can make the snakes do her bidding. Did not the caboclo say that to go there was to die?”
Bomba pondered for a while, staring at his companions. He had not their superstition, but he could put himself in their places and understand their feelings.
“You have not the reason to seek out Sobrinini that I have,” he conceded. “Perhaps that is what makes me blind to dangers that you see. Bomba will go alone. You stay here till I get back.”
At this they cast themselves at his feet, crying out that they would go with him in spite of their dread of Sobrinini and her island of snakes.
But Bomba would not accept such a sacrifice on their part, and persisted in setting off alone.
They dropped the canoe into the water, and almost before Bomba had time to get into it the current caught the frail bark and sent it dancing out upon the swirling waters like a feather caught in the wind.
The jungle boy needed all his skill to keep the tossing craft on an even keel and set a straight course down the river. When he could at last look back, he could see Neram and Ashati standing on the bank like bronzed statues, looking after him. He knew that in their hearts they never expected to see him again.
On he went down the river, the canoe caught now by one current, now by another, sometimes dipping to one side at so sharp an angle that it seemed it must capsize, then righting itself and dancing on again over the frothing black water—a frail barrier between Bomba and destruction.
Once the canoe was caught in the iron grip of a cross-current and rushed at a furious speed toward the rocks that at that point lined the shore.
Bomba had need of all his strength. Putting all his force upon the paddle, he grazed the murderous rocks by the fraction of an inch, and slid lightly, gently into a stretch of calmer water.
The most dangerous part of his water journey was now over. All he had to do now was to avoid the rocks that at places pushed their heads above the water and the snags formed by parts of the trunks of trees that had grown on what was dry ground before the stream had extended its borders and swallowed them up.
But there were other “snags” too—living snags! The rough, gnarled bodies of great alligators that swam or floated lazily about, their backs just showing above the surface. Many were wholly or half asleep, others turned red and evil eyes on the solitary boatman as he sped by. Bomba, remembering his last experience with the ferocious brutes, shuddered to think of what would happen to him if by some evil chance his canoe should be overturned.
He found the island that was shaped like a finger, and worked his craft about the further end of it, heading upstream as the native had directed.
This was more tedious work than his progress downstream had been, but far less perilous. Bomba paddled with a will, his heart beating high with hope as he thought that every stroke was bringing him nearer to Sobrinini and the secret whose answer he was so eager to know.
If he shared to some extent the fears that had taken such strong possession of Ashati and Neram in regard to Sobrinini and her island of snakes, his eagerness to learn from the lips of the old witch woman those facts about his parentage that had been so long denied him drove all other feelings from his mind.
But as time passed and still each bend of the river failed to disclose any island answering to the description given by the native, Bomba became anxious and quickened the long, sweeping strokes of his paddle.
Could the native have deceived him? Was the fellow chuckling at that very moment at the way he had deceived the white boy who had waylaid him?
Bomba hardly thought so. The man had spoken under the fear of death, if he spoke falsely. He knew how indefinite was the native idea of distance. He had heard Casson say in the old days that when a caboclo said a place was “not far” he might mean just beyond a bend of the road or twenty miles away.
Bomba’s first uneasiness came with the lengthening of the evening shadows. Even if the native had not misled him and his course was the true one, Bomba did not relish the idea of approaching the island in the dark, or even at early dusk.
But even as these thoughts troubled his mind and the shadows grew deeper, he rounded another bend of the river and saw before him the object of his search. He could not be mistaken. The position and shape of the island were exactly as the native had described them.
As Bomba, with quickened pulse, drove his canoe among the heavy rushes that half concealed the land from anyone upon the river, the sound of singing came to him.
It was not one of the tribal songs of natives with which he was familiar.
It was singing such as he had never heard before, and the voice of the singer was so thin and eerie and unearthly in that solitary spot that Bomba felt the hair rise on his scalp.
“Sobrinini!” muttered the lad, and with a trembling hand parted the bushes from before his eyes.