EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
“Take me to your chief,” said von Harben.
“That is what I intend to do, Get in here. Our masters will know what to do with you.”
Von Harben and Gabula climbed into the dugout, so awkwardly that they almost overturned it, much to the disgust of the black warriors, who seized hold of them none too gently and forced them to squat in the bottom of the frail craft. This was now turned about and paddled along a winding canal, bordered on either side by tufted papyrus rising ten to fifteen feet above the surface of the water.
“To what tribe do you belong?” asked von Harben, addressing the leader of the blacks.
“We are barbarians of the Mare Orientis, subjects of Validus Augustus, Emperor of the East; but why do you ask such questions? You know these things as well as I.”
A half hour of steady paddling along winding water-lanes brought them to a collection of beehive huts built upon the floating roots of the papyrus, from which the tall plants had been cleared just sufficiently to make room for the half dozen huts that constituted the village. Here von Harben and Gabula became the center of a curious and excited company of men, women, and children, and von Harben heard himself and Gabula described by their captors as spies from Castra Sanguinarius and learned that on the morrow they were to be taken to Castrum Mare, which he decided must be the village of the mysterious “masters” to whom his captors were continually alluding. The blacks did not treat them unkindly, though they evidently considered them as enemies.
When they were interviewed by the headman of the village, von Harben, his curiosity aroused, asked the blacks why they had not been molested if all of his people believed, as they seemed to, that they were enemies.
“You are a citizen of Rome,” replied the headman, this other is your slave. Our masters do not permit us barbarians to injure a citizen of Rome even though he be from Castra Sanguinarius, except in self-defense or the battlefield in time of war.”
“Who are your masters?” demanded von Harben.
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