Part 10 (1/2)

The chief who had many oxen must slaughter them, and throw the bodies to the wild beasts. The clansman who had a little store of corn must straight way destroy it. Even the kraals, which gave shelter from the elements, were to be burned down, as if an enemy were being pillaged.

Otherwise the new heaven would not appear; while the starry heaven above, would fall and destroy the disobedient.

'When I heard of the movement,' Sir George Grey narrated, 'I at once hurried north to grapple with it. I could not have believed it so serious, until I was actually on the spot. Kaffraria was in a ferment, and a wave of destruction might roll from it across Cape Colony. Here were nearly a quarter of a million of Kaffirs, a large proportion of whom were busy acting upon the advice of the prophetess. They were destroying their cattle and produce, and looking forward eagerly to a triumph over the whites.

'I went among the chiefs, although warned that I endangered myself unduly, hoping to check the movement. However, it was useless to talk to natives aflame with superst.i.tion and pa.s.sion. Those who doubted the prophetess, would do nothing to keep within bounds the majority who accepted her as a divinity. Yet, the chiefs invariably received me with kindness, and thanked me for the counsel I gave them. Simply, they could not accept it.'

The Governor adopted every means to place the borders of Cape Colony in a state of military security. As one detail he had to ensure that, in the event of war, the frontier settlers should not be ma.s.sacred. A line of men was drawn across country, so as to make a b.u.t.tress against any advance by the crazy Kaffirs. Each picket had charge of a stretch of ground, and in the morning soldiers would ride sharply to right and left, covering it. They could tell, by footmarks on the dewy gra.s.s, whether any Kaffirs had been about in the night. The chief military officer was for falling back upon a less extended position, where he believed he could be more secure. He sought the Governor's authority for the step, which fact well indicates the critical nature of the whole situation. Sir George scribbled an emphatic 'No,' and resumed the scanty sleep from which he had been aroused.

'I had several reasons,' he explained, 'for declining to permit of any change of our military position. First, it would have been an encouragement to the Kaffirs to attack us, for they would have supposed us in retreat. Second, we should have been leaving open, country where there were European families. Again, the appearance of weakening, on our part, would have driven over the Kaffirs who hesitated, to the side of those who clamoured to attack us. I made it a rule always, and in all things, only to take a step after the most careful and mature thought; but once it had been taken, never to go back upon it. It's a very bad business when you begin to retreat.'

Nothing happened in the manner Nongkause and the wily Umhlakaza had foretold, unless the destruction of Kaffir stock and grain. Two blood-red suns did not flame in the east; neither did the moon, in any of her humours, light the ancient chiefs along, the now precious cattle with them. A mist came up of an afternoon, but no day of darkness followed.

Breezes blew, cheering the hot air to freshness; never a hurricane which should break the lintels of the white man's doors. It was weary to wait and starve, with a Governor on the flank, plucking all guidance out of an insurrection.

If the G.o.ds of Nongkause had excited a less perfect trust, there might have been a rush on Cape Colony. As it was, the belief lived long enough in the Kaffirs to defeat its own purpose. Their suffering grew acute, nature a.s.serted itself over superst.i.tion, and their one cry was 'Give us to eat.' They dug up roots, and they strove for the supplies which the Governor threw into the country, when famine drove Nongkause's nostrum out. Desperate crowds of the hungry surged over hill and plain, while strength lasted, and then lay down to die. No question remained of keeping a mad Kaffraria at bay. The whole effort was to rescue, as far as was possible, the Kaffirs from death by want.

Civilisation drove forward in a mortuary cart; but it was civilisation.

The spirit of Kaffraria had been quenched; it was a last wild stand. Sir George Grey meditated on the means, so unexpected, so beyond man's control, which had enhanced the securities for peace in South Africa. He could do that, believing Providence to be an all-wise, if often inscrutable ruler, and at the same time declare: 'There was a heroic element in the action of the Kaffirs, for we see what they were willing to endure at the bidding, as they believed, of their ancestors, and in the interests of themselves as a people.'

It was in Sir George's mind that Nongkause, by a queer irony, was the one member of her family who survived the visitation.

XIV A SAVIOUR OF INDIA

It touches the imagination to have a dark Africa put forward as light for a Bible scene; namely, that where Jacob, instructed by Rebekah, obtains the blessing which the blind Isaac thinks himself to be conferring on his eldest son Esau.

'This scene,' said Sir George Grey, 'did not live wholly to me, until I met with an incident while hunting in South Africa. Coming upon a young spring-buck, which had been exhausted by the pursuit, I lifted it into the saddle before me, and carried it home. All the way, the velvety skin of the little fellow was brus.h.i.+ng against my clothes.

'These were not worn again for some time, and when I did take them out, I was struck by their delicious smell of herbs and gra.s.ses. The scent had been communicated by the spring-buck, accustomed to make its home among the sweet growths of nature. It was the hunter's fragrant smell which, in part, caused Isaac to mistake Jacob for Esau.'

While trekking through Cape Colony, to see everybody and everything for himself, Sir George was often able to be the keen sportsman. Before his camp was awake, of a morning, he would make a bowl of black coffee, shoulder his rifle, and start off, with a couple of bush-boys for gillies. He would return in the forenoon, deal with his work as Pro- Consul until the evening, and then, perhaps, seek another shot. Or, if his people were on the move, he might sally from them at one point, and rejoin them later. Deer of various sorts were not scarce, and he kept the camp larder furnished with fresh meat. The Mahomedans, among his motley following, ate with relish the product of his rifle.

'They trusted me,' he dwelt on that, 'to say ”In the name of the Lord,”

when a beast was killed, so observing the Mahomedan rite. They would not have eaten of its flesh, had they not known that their belief was expressed, ”You are not to destroy one of the Creator's creatures, except by His permission.” Whenever Mahomedans were with me, I undertook to observe the rule, nor did I ever fail.'

One. sees, in that fact of chance mention, another evidence of how Sir George came to be such a force among the raw men of the earth. He had the genius for taking pains to understand them, and thus, even unwittingly, made them his disciples. Just, he touched the spot.

In his reign at the Cape, the lion was still rampant far south of the Zambesi. Twice, while hunting, he got on the trail of the monarch, but he never slew him. A leopard would skulk into the demesne of Table Mountain itself, and be ingloriously trapped. The lion made other sport, lying on a high place while it was day, and going forth to roam at dark. Sir George went to the Bible for the character sketch of the lion, in particular to the Psalms:

Thou makest darkness, and it is night; Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.

The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their meat from G.o.d: The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, And lay them down in their dens.

There was a hill, with a wide outlook of plain, and from it, the lesser wild animals at feed, might be marked for the gloaming. It was covert wherein the lion could abide, to lie in wait, a secret lurking-place. Up the back of this hill climbed Sir George, eye and ear on the alert, for one suspected to be about. He was about, but already bounding down the rocky face of the ridge, in a hurry to be clear of the hunter. Sir George mounted his horse, eager to cut him off, and rode, break-neck, the path he had already climbed. There the lion galloped, at a kingly swing, heading for the thick bush in the distance. As he neared it, Sir George aimed a forlorn shot, which proved a farewell salute. He dismounted, and waded through the growth, to the concern of his Kaffir boy, but the lion was tracked no more.

These excursions of a leisure hour sent Sir George fresh, vigorous, full of resource to the alarums that arraigned him in South Africa. The greatest of them was not South African, but blew across the Indian Ocean.

On an August morning, a steamer drew wearily into Table Bay with a message for the Governor. It was an express from Lord Elphinstone at Bombay, red-bordered, in that it told of the tremendous affair now calmly fixed in history as the Indian Mutiny. Here was an earnest cry, 'Come over and help us,' addressed to the potent British satrap nearest in the Seven Seas.

'Yes,' Sir George mentioned, 'the despatch was in no wise positive as to the outlook in India. Trouble there had been and would be; that was certain. But was India merely face to face with a disturbance which she could manage herself, or was it a widespread mutiny? I was really left to form my own view upon the situation, and I decided that things were very serious. Apparently, religious motives were at the bottom of the affair, and I could fancy how fanaticism, bred thereon, might sweep India. My responsibilities in South Africa were great, for the mad Kaffir movement had hardly been stayed; nay, my whole surroundings were as a thicket of thorns, in their possible complications. But India, which might be lost to us, outweighed everything else, and I felt it my duty to contribute a.s.sistance to the utmost limit of my resources.'

He would s.h.i.+p troops, guns, munitions, specie, everything South Africa could give, off to India. While he was doing it, a more splendid thing happened--his masterful laying hands upon the troop-s.h.i.+ps pa.s.sing the Cape for China, and his sending of them to India instead. 'I have;' he recorded the act at the time, 'directed that all vessels arriving here with troops for China, shall proceed direct to Calcutta instead of to Singapore.' They are laconic words, but their place is over the front door of the British Empire. To it they brought a service, not ordinary in its annals, as they marked a man willing to put all to the touch. A nation and a personality are in the incident, and, remembering that, let us trace it out.