Part 10 (1/2)
THE SENTENCE
We stared at Bausi and Bausi stared at us
”I am the Black Elephant Bausi,” he exclaimed at last, worn out by our solid silence, ”and I trumpet! I trumpet! I trumpet!” (It appeared that this was the ancient and hallowed for ont to open a conversation with strangers) After a suitable pause I replied in a cold voice: ”We are the white lions, Macumazana and Wazela, and we roar! we roar! we roar!”
”I can trahtily, though hoere to bite or do anything else effectual with nothing but a Union Jack, I did not in the least know
”What is that thing?” asked Bausi, pointing to the flag
”That which shadows the whole earth,” I answered proudly, a reh he did not at all understand it, for he ordered a soldier to hold a pal hi to the music box, ”which is not alive and yetof our people,” I said ”We sent it to you as a present and you returned it Why do you return our presents, O Bausi?”
Then of a sudden this potentate grew furious
”Why do you coainst the law of eetah, who cured me of sickness with a knife? I knoho you are You are dealers in men You come here to steal my people and sell them into slavery You had many slaves with you on the borders of my country, but you sent them away You shall die, you shall die, you who call yourselves lions, and the painted rag which you say shadows the world, shall rot with your bones As for that box which sings a war-song, I will sic shi+eld bewitchedoff his hair”
Then springing up onderful agility for one so fat, he knocked the round and after a little whirring grew silent
”That is right,” squeaked Iic, O Elephant Kill them, O Black One; burn thes were, I felt, very serious, for already Bausi was looking about hih to order his soldiers to , you eetah, a doctor of doctors, who cured you of sickness with a knife, and called him your brother Well, he is our brother also, and it was by his invitation that we have come to visit you here, where he will eetah is your friend, then you are my friends,” answered Bausi, ”for in this land he rules as I rule, he whose blood flows in eetah is no brother of slave-dealers, his heart is good and yours are evil You say that he will meet you here When will he meet you? Tell me, and if it is soon, I will hold my hand and wait to hear his report of you before I put you to death, for if he speaks well of you, you shall not die”
Now I hesitated, as well Iat our case fro us to be slave-traders, was not angry without cause While I was racking ht be acceptable to him and would not commit us too deeply, to
”Who are you, fellow?” shouted Bausi
”I a, as ai wounds upon his breast and to his cut nostril ”I a and ht you or any man whom you may name, and to kill him or you if you will Is there one here ishes to be killed?”
No one answered, for the hty-chested Zulu looked very formidable
”I areatest of doctors who can open the 'Gates of Distance' and read that which is hid in the womb of the Future Therefore I will answer your questions which you put to the lord Macureat and hite ether in many battles Yes, I will be his Mouth, I will answer The white eetah, who is your blood-brother and whose word is your word a the Mazitu, will arrive here at sunset on the second day from now I have spoken”
Bausi looked atthat Iand that it did not eetah will arrive here on the second day fro, I know not what, prompted me to allow that extra half-hour, which in the event, saved all our lives Now Bausi consulted a while with the execrable Imbozwi and also with the old one-eyed General Babe upon the issue
At length he spoke
”White men,” he said, ”Imbozwi, the head of the witch-finders here, whose hair you burnt off by your evil ic, says that it would be better to kill you at once as your hearts are bad and you are planning ainst my people So I think also But Babery because he did not obey my orders and put you to death on the borders of my country when he met you there with your caravan of slaves, thinks otherwise He prays me to holdyou and secondly because if you should happen to be speaking the truth-which we do not believe-and to have coeetah, would be pained if he arrived and found you dead, nor could even he bring you to life again This being so, since it matters little whether you die now or later, my command is that you be kept prisoners till sunset of the second day from this, and that then you will be led out and tied to stakes in the market-place, there to wait till the approach of darkness, by when you say Dogeetah will be here If he arrives and owns you as his brethren, well and good; if he does not arrive, or disowns you-better still, for then you shall be shot to death with arrows as a warning to all other stealers of men not to cross the borders of the Mazitu”
I listened to this atrocious sentence with horror, then gasped out: ”We are not stealers of , we are freers of men, as Tom and Jerry of your own people could tell you”
”Who are Tom and Jerry?” he asked, indifferently ”Well, it does not matter, for doubtless they are liars like the rest of you I have spoken Take them away, feed them well and keep them safe till within an hour of sunset on the second day fro us any further opportunity of speaking, Bausi rose, and followed by I hut We too, were uard coate of the kraal we halted and asked for the ariven; only the soldiers put their hands upon our shoulders and thrust us along
”This is a nice business,” I whispered to Stephen
”Oh! it doesn't uns in the huts I am told that these Mazitus are dreadfully afraid of bullets So all we have to do is just to break out and shoot our way through thein to fire”
I looked at him but did not answer, for to tell the truth I felt in no ument
Presently we arrived at our quarters, where the soldiers left us, to camp outside Full of his warlike plan, Stephen went at once to the hut in which the slavers' guns had been stored with our own spare rifles and all the a very blank indeed and asked him as the matter
”Matter!” he answered in a voice that for once really was full of disuns and all the ah powder left to make a blue devil”
”Well,” I replied, with the kind of joke one perpetrates under such circu any more”
Truly ours was a dreadful situation Let the reader iht hours ere to be shot to death with arrows if an erratic old gentleht be dead, did not turn up at as then one of the remotest and most inaccessible spots in Central Africa Moreover, our only hope that such a thing would happen, if hope it could be called, was the prophecy of a Kaffir witch-doctor
To rely on this in any as so absurd that I gave up thinking of it and setif there were any possible means of escape After hours of reflection I could find none Even Hans, with all his experience and nearly superhuest none We were unares, all of whom save perhaps Babemba, believed us to be slave-traders, a race that very properly they held in abhorrence, who had visited the country with the object of stealing their wo, Bausi, a very prejudiced felloas dead against us Also by a piece of foolishness which I now bitterly regretted, as indeed I regretted the whole expedition, or at any rate entering on it in the absence of Brother John, we had made an implacable enemy of the head medicine-man, who to these folk was a sort of Archbishop of Canterbury Short of a miracle, there was no hope for us All that we could do was to say our prayers and prepare for the end
Mavovo, it is true, re He offered to go through that divination process again in our presence and demonstrate that there was no mistake I declined because I had no faith in divinations, and Stephen also declined, for another reason, naht prove to be different, which, he held, would be depressing The other Zulus oscillated between belief and scepticism, as do the unstable who set to work to study the evidences of Christianity But Sammy did not oscillate, he literally howled, and prepared the food which poured in upon us so badly that I had to turn on Hans to do the cooking, for however little appetite we th by eating
”What, Mr Quater viands that our systehly assiht passed soht which heralded our last ot up quite early and watched the sunrise Never, I think, had I realised before what a beautiful thing the sunrise is, at least not to the extent I did nohen I was saying good-bye to it for ever Unless indeed there should prove to be still lovelier sunrises beyond the dark of death! Then I went into our hut, and as Stephen, who had the nerves of a rhinoceros, was still sleeping like a tortoise in winter, I said h, mourned over ave up the job in despair, and then tried to occupythe Old Testament, a book to which I have always been extree that I lit on described how the prophet Sa in pieces after Bausi-I mean Saul-had relented and spared his life, I cannot say that it consoled me very much Doubtless, I reflected, these people believe that I, like Agag, had ” save to follow the exa and walk ”delicately” to doo-how could he do it, I wondered-I set to work to make up the accounts of the expedition to date It had already cost 1,423 Just fancy expending 1,423 in order to be tied to a post and shot to death with arrows And all to get a rare orchid! Oh! I reflected to myself, if by soain in any land where these particular flowers flourish, I would never even look at theth Stephen did wake up and, as criminals are reported to do in the papers before execution, ood of worrying?” he said presently ”I shouldn't if it weren't for my poor old father It must have come to this one day, and the sooner it is over the sooner to sleep, as the song says When one coes in sleep, for that's the only time one is quite happy Still, I should have liked to see that Cypripedium first”
”Oh! drat the Cypripedium!” I exclaimed, and blundered fro I would punch his head
”Juht it of Quater his pipe
The reased,” as Sa sacrificed a kid to the spirits of their ancestors, which, as Saain, was ”a horrible, heathen ceremony much calculated to prejudice our cause with Powers Above”
When it was over, to ht, Babemba appeared He looked so pleasant that I juht the best of neith hi had pardoned us, or perhaps-blessed thought-that Brother John had really arrived before his time
But not a bit of it! All he had to say was that he had caused inquiries to bethe route that ran to the coast and that certainly for a hundred eetah So as the Black Elephant was growing s up of I's ceremony must be performed Indeed, as it was part of his duty to superintend the erection of the posts to which ere to be tied and the digging of our graves at their bases, he had just coain to be sure that he had not made any mistake as to the number Also, if there were any articles that ould like buried with us, would we be so kind as to point them out and he would be sure to see to the matter It would be soon over, and not painful, he added, as he had selected the very best archers in Beza Toho rarely missed and could, most of them, send an arrow up to the feather into a buffalo