On seeing these they had
fled inland in a hurry, leaving me for dead, but killing the wounded
before they went. The old woman herself had escaped by hiding among
some rocks on the seashore, and after the Arabs had gone had crept
back to the house and found me still alive.
"I asked her where my wife had been taken. She said she did not know,
but some others of our people told her that they had heard the Arabs
say they were going to some place a hundred miles inland, to join
their leader, a half-bred villain named Hassan-ben-Mohammed, to whom
they were carrying my wife as a present.
"Now we knew this wretch, for after the Arabs landed at Kilwa, but
before actual hostilities broke out between us, he had fallen sick of
smallpox and my wife had helped to nurse him. Had it not been for her,
indeed, he would have died. However, although the leader of the band,
he was not present at the attack, being engaged in some slave-raiding
business in the interior.
"When I learned this terrible news, the shock of it, or the loss of
blood, brought on a return of insensibility, from which I only awoke
two days later to find myself on board a Dutch trading vessel that was
sailing for Zanzibar.
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