If Valerie looked innocent, apprehensive and intimidated, Kate weary, but resentful, then Joanna seemed to be content by contrast. All wore the mask of exertion and misery, sweat dripping from their brows furrowed in the effort to keep the heavy wooden baulks aloft while walking in their mutual and intimately chained line of suffering. Yanked along the road to a place they didn't want to go, the dolorous threesome suffused with the rosy hued colour of their labour, punctuated by their sharp cries of pain when urged on by slashes of rhino pizzle whips, dutifully followed the chain lead in the hand of terrible fate and an African slave trader. Joanna staggered along at the end of the misfortunate line. Her cheeks jounced pleasantly but for the shock waves of stinging whips, which she felt with some frequency. Her sharp cries were a constant reminder to Valerie and Kate accompanied by the occasional blaze of fire scored on their naked bottoms to keep pace. Her small pointed breasts quivered only slightly despite her quick short-legged gait. Her small stature belied her ability to carry her burdensome yoke and to take the additional steps she was required to take in order not to be dragged along by her chained neck ring and shackled ankle. The expression of her agony and effort was curiously softened by a rapturous look of pleasure as she lived a nightmare version of a recurring dream she had had since adolescence. She dreamt both awake and asleep of being carried off by some brutish black man, violated, tortured and forced to submit to a lifetime of sexual servitude and grovelling slavery in a dungeon-like harem with other misfortunate white girls in the thrall of abject sexual slavery. She revelled in masochistic anguish; the intensity of her pleasurable pain seeped in liquid abundance from between her legs. She couldn't believe her good fortune. Her academic interest in slavery was motivated by her erotic imaginings, now apparently fulfilled in a painful reality so intense she wished she could witness her suffering as well as experience it. Joanna wanted to stand aside and watch as the three of them sweated in chained and whipped torment, scourged by whip and the dreaded anticipation of a dismal future while bent under the oppressive dominance of their slave yokes and the future, lowering like the late afternoon African sky, as the sun set on their freedom and straining nudity. She had mental orgasms as she followed the promise of the chain from her collar to the back of the yoke Kate struggled under in front of her.

The road turned sharply to the left after what seemed an interminable trek in their nude helplessness. Their destination appeared in menacing immediacy before them. They had walked only slightly more than half a mile. After the first turn in the dusty track, they had been paralleling an unseen river behind the trees and verdure on the left verge of the road. Beyond the river, over a dune on its far bank, the ocean lapped at a hidden shore, its dull hollow roar quieted by a hot offshore breeze. Thinking they had been taken inland, they were in fact at the coast. The air was no cooler, but the sight of the river and ocean made it seem so.

Immediately after turning left, a wide area to the right of the road opened up, pushing the trees and undergrowth back some way. It was wider than it was deep and a large wooden scaffold-like structure rose against the background of sandy soil and scrub beyond it. They merely passed it by, continuing down the mildly sloping road toward the riverbank. As they descended, a smaller cleared area on their left, with concrete benches and tables, appeared as the ocean disappeared behind the rising dune of the opposite bank. Small groups of men sat around the tables watching them go by. They were led over a square pattern of concrete blocks set in the sandy soil as a ramp for launching small boats. One boat was tied up in the stream to their left. They were led right into the cool shallow water up to their knees. The water gently swirling around their legs and the cool sandy bottom felt good underfoot after the strenuous forced march struggling under burdensome slave yokes.

Looking curiously like a group of weary water nymphs, the three girls awkwardly turned toward the bank of the river. Swinging the heavy beam across their shoulders, bent under its weight, they looked to the shore where their escorts remained watching. The men held their pain-laden whips lax in their fists, idle, but poised to blaze agony across their naked bodies. Three of the half dozen men who had risen from the benches waded into the river, canvas buckets in hand. Unceremoniously, as if bathing dumb animals, they scooped water from the river and thoroughly doused the young women, throwing water over their heads. Spluttering and blinking from the water in their eyes, wet hair straggling in medusan strands from their plastered skulls, they stood in bedraggled beauty while the other three men wiped the sweat and grime from their nude bodies with rags. After another drenching, the slaver holding Valerie's lead chain led them out of the river. For the first time they noted the cool breeze blowing up the river. The water slick nudity of the three slave-girls showed gooseflesh and stiffened nipples, flinty hard and protuberant at the tips of their swaying, quivering breasts. Although their involuntary reaction was to the cold, nevertheless the bare breasted exposure they were forced to maintain and display on their heaving chests as they emerged dripping from the water drew the eyes of all the men. Raucous comments and humiliating jibes accompanied the three girls as they struggled back up the boat ramp. Unable to conceal their jutting nipples, responding to the yank of the chain at Valerie's collar and the ensuing tug on those behind her, they docilely followed one behind the other, suffering the double burden of the oppressive beams on their shoulders and the taunts of the men as they straggled up the incline back to the area where the platform stood.

It was with some difficulty that the newly enslaved white girls were hauled up the steep steps to the platform. The platform was only a metre high, but the steps were high and, coffled as they were, carrying the weighty yokes, unable to use their arms for balance; it was a strenuous and awkward task to mount them. The chains connecting their ankles rasped and clinked on the stairs, their thighs and calves bulged hard to raise themselves and the heavy baulks they bore, but the insistent draw of their neck chains forced them to climb the steps until they stood on the platform in full view of all the men below. The cool and refreshing evaporation of water on their nude bodies diminished and the oppressive heat of early evening, despite the lowering of the sun, bore down on them as before, adding cruelly to the crushing burden of their slave yokes. Valerie didn't stand quite so tall, Kate sagged in humiliation and weariness, while the petite Joanna looked more worried than elated. The coffled march had sapped their strength in spite of their youth. It was meant to; it made them more docile and less able to resist. There would be demands placed on them the next day. Their bone crushing weariness would, in part, overcome their refusal to accept these demands, the natural recalcitrance one might expect of educated white women experiencing slavery for the first time.