The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

bad-looking, lazy, and stupid. The folk I saw at first were poorer-class peasants, slaves, and provincials, both men and women wearing simple loin-cloths or sarongs, but occasionally we encountered one of the better-off, being toted about in a sedan – no rich or aristocratic Malagassy will walk a hundred yards, and there’s a multitude of slaves, bearers, and couriers to carry ’em. The nobs wore lambas – robes not unlike Roman togas, although in Antan’ itself their clothing was sometimes of the utmost outlandish extravagance, like my commandant. That’s the extraordinary thing about Madagascar – it’s full of parodies of the European touch gone wrong, and their native culture and customs are bizarre enough to start with, G-d knows.

For example, they have their markets at a distance from their villages and towns – nobody knows why. They hate goats and pigs, and will lay babies out in the street to see if their births are “fortunate” or not;³⁴ they are unique, I believe, in the whole world in having no kind of organized religion – no priests, no shrines or temples – but they worship a tree or a stone if they feel like it, or personal household gods called sampy, or charms, like the famous idol Rakelimalaza, which consists of three dirty little bits of wood wrapped in silk – I’ve seen it. Yet they’re superstitious beyond belief, even to the extent of dispraising those things they value most, to avert jealous evil spirits, and believing that when a man is dying you must stuff his mouth with food at the last minute – mind you, that may be because they’re the most amazing gluttons, and drunkards, too. But, as with so many of their practices, you sometimes feel they are just determined to be different from the rest of the world.

      I noticed that the soldiers who escorted our chain-gang were of a different stamp from the rest of the people – tall, narrow-headed fellows who marched in step, to a mixture of English and French words of command. They were brutes, who thrashed us along if we lagged, and treated the populace like dirt. I learned later they were from the Queen’s tribe, the Hovas, once the pariahs of the island, but now dominant by reason of their cunning and cruelty.

      I’ve endured some horrible journeys in my time – Kabul to the Khyber, Crimea to Middle Asia, for a couple – but I can’t call to mind anything worse than that march from Tamitave to Antan’. It was 140 miles, and it took us eight days of blistered feet and chafing chains, trudging along, at first over scrubby desert, then through open fields, with peasants stopping in their work to stare at us indifferently, then through forest country, with the great jungly mountains of the interior coming slowly closer. We passed mud-walled villages and farms, but at night our captors just made us lie and sleep where we stopped; they carried no rations, but took what they wanted from unprotesting villagers, and we prisoners got the scraps. We were sodden by rain, burned agonizingly by the sun, bitten raw by mosquitoes, punished by blows and welts – but the worst of it was ignorance. I didn’t know where I was, where I was going, what had happened to Elspeth, or even what was being said around me. There was nothing for it but to be herded on, like an animal, in pain and despair. After the first day or so I was beyond thought; all that mattered was survival.

      To make matters worse, there was no road to travel – oh no, the Malagassies won’t have ’em, for fear they might be used by an invader. Examine the perverse logic of that, if you like. The only exception is when the Queen travels anywhere, in which case they build a road in front of her, mile by mile, twenty thousand slaves grubbing with picks and rocks, and a great army following, with the court; why, every night they build a town, walls and all, and then leave it empty next day.

      We were privileged to see this, when we reached the high plain midway on our journey, The first thing I noticed was dead bodies scattered about the place, and then groups of wailing, exhausted natives along our line of march. They were the road-builders; there were no rations provided for ’em, you see, so they just fell out and died like flies. This was the Queen’s annual buffalo-hunt, and ten thousand slaves perished on it, inside a week. The stench was indescribable, especially along the road itself – which cut perversely across our line of march – where they were lying in rows, men, women, and children. Some of them would haul themselves up as we passed, and crawl towards us, whimpering for food; the Hovas just kicked them aside.

      To add to the horrors, we passed occasional gallows, on which victims were hung or crucified, or simply tied to die by inches. One abomination I’ll never forget – five staggering skeletons yoked together at the neck by a great iron wheel. They put them in it, and turn them loose, wandering together, until they starve or break each other’s necks.

      The Queen’s procession had passed by long before, up the rough, rock-paved furrow of the road which ran straight as a die through forest and over mountain. She had twelve thousand troops with her, I learned later, and since the Malagassy army has no system of supply or rations they had just picked the country clean, so in addition to the slaves, thousands of peasants starved to death as well.

      You may wonder why they endured it. Well, they didn’t, always. Over the years thousands had fled, in whole tribes and communities, to escape her tyranny, and the jungles were full of these people, living as brigands. She sent regular expeditions against them, as well as against those distant tribes who weren’t Hovas; I’ve heard it reckoned that the slaughter of fugitives, criminals, and those whom her majesty simply disliked, amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand annually, and I believe it. (Far better, of course, than wicked colonial government by Europeans – or so the Liberals would have us believe. G-d, what I’d have given to get Gladstone and that pimp Asquith on the Tamitave road in the earlies; they’d have learned all they needed to know about “enlightened rule by the indigenous population”. Too late now, though; nothing for it but to hire a few roughs to smash windows at the Reform Club – as though I care.)

      In the meantime, I’d little sympathy to spare; my own case, as we finally approached Antan’ after more than a week of tortured tramping, was deplorable. My shirt and trousers were in rags, my shoes were worn out, I was bearded and foul – but strangely enough, having plumbed the depths, I was beginning to perk up a trifle. I wasn’t dead, and they weren’t bringing me all this way to kill me – I was even feeling a touch of light-headed recklessness, probably with hunger. I was lifting my head again, and my recollections of the end of the march are clear enough.

      We passed a great lake along the road, and the guards made us shout and sing all the way past it; I later heard it was to placate the ghost of a dissolute princess buried nearby – dissolute female royalty being Madagascar’s strong suit, evidently. We crossed a great river – the Mangaro – and steaming geysers bubbling out of pools of boiling mud, before we came out on a level grass plain, and beyond it, on a great hill, we beheld Antananarivo.

      It took my breath away – of course, I didn’t even know what it was, then, but it was like nothing you’d expect in a primitive nigger country. There was this huge city of houses, perhaps two miles across, walled and embattled in wood, and dominated by a hill on the top of which stood an enormous wooden palace, four storeys high, with another building alongside it which seemed to be made of mirrors, for it shimmered bright as a burning-glass in the sunlight. I stared at it until I was almost blinded, but I couldn’t make out what it was – and in the meantime there were other wonders closer at hand, for as we approached the city across the plain which was dotted with huts and crowded with village people, I thought I must be dreaming – in the distance I could hear a military band playing, horribly flat, but there could be no doubt that the tune was “The Young May Moon"! And here, sure enough, came a regiment in full fig – red tunics, shakos, arms at the shoulder, bayonets fixed, and every man-jack of them black as Satan. I stood and fairly gaped; past they went in column, throwing chests, and shaping dooced well – and at their head, G-d help me, half a dozen officers on horseback, dressed as Arabs and Turks. I was beyond startling now – when a couple of sedans, draped in velvet, passed by bearing black women done up in Empire dresses and feathered hats, I didn’t even give ’em a second glance. They, and the rest of the crowds, were moving across the front of the city, and that was the way our guards drove us, so that we skirted the city wall until we came presently to a great natural amphitheatre in the ground, dominated by a huge cliff – Ambohipotsy, they call it, and there can be no more accursed place on earth.

      There must have been close on a quarter of a million people thronging the slopes