"Tobacco," said another.
"Hark to them!" said a third scornfully. "You bring news, is it not so?
We heard sounds of a fight. Our people have fled, and we are free!"
"Ay, there was a big fight, and our people have won."
"You gabble, old woman! Our men have no stomach for fighting. They can only talk."
"Noenti, how you chatter! If our folk have won, they will be feasting and dancing."
"Oh, your news is old like yourself, mother," said Noenti. "We saw the fighting, and our people won; but it was because of the stranger who led them--a great man."
"Oh, well, if you know everything I will return; when I was a girl I always listened to what my elders had to say. So you saw the fight and the great chief. I could have told about him, but you already know."
"Tell us!" they all cried together. "Catch her, hold her fast!" and, running round the fire, they came full tilt against Sirayo.
"Yinny!" they cried, and bolted like rabbits for the hut, while the old dame laugh shrilly.
Presently they peeped out, and after much giggling emerged once more, and came and peeped up at Sirayo, and walked round him.
"What say you, my children, have I not done well? Here is the great chief himself."
The girls shrieked with laughter, and then, under the direction of Noenti, brought out meat and thick Kaffir beer.
Hume left them seated round the fire, chattering like children all together, and sat at the mouth of the kloof, gazing idly before him.
And as he sat there watching the stars in the east he heard footsteps approaching stealthily, so he stepped gently from the rock, crouching down in the shadow.
As the group at the fire laughed while the girls filled the calabash, seeing how much their magnificent visitor could drink, Hume appeared within the circle of light with a man in his grasp.
"Here is another visitor," he said.
"Yoh!" exclaimed one of the girls, "it is our master;" and she ran frightened away, while the old dame seized a brand from the fire, and held it before the malignant face of the same man who had led the Zulus to the ruins.
"Soh! it is you," said Sirayo; "you are welcome; come, sit by me;" and, seizing the man by the leg, he jerked him over the fire to his side.
"The beer is good--drink, man, drink."
"Nay," cried the old dame, "drink he shall not."
"Drink," said Sirayo, with a frightful grimace; "for it is the last your lips will touch. Since you have walked into the den, you will not leave it alive."
"No, chief," said Hume; "you must not take the blood of such a creature."
"As you say, Hu-em. Let us leave him to the old woman; but this tuft on your hair let me have it, and this necklet of teeth, and this bag of old bones;" and Sirayo stripped from the cowering man all the ornaments and trappings of his office. "Now, Noenti, fix them on me; I will to-night play the part of witch-doctor."
"There is a place in the hut here for you," she said.
"Keep it warm for me, then, but to-night I will cross the river and listen to their talk. Is it not well, Hu-em?"
"No, the plan is wild; they will detect you at once."
"I will crouch under a blanket and keep in the shadow. Moreover, I see there is a good time for me if I can keep them on their side. I will frighten them with a tale of the spirit of the snake; and is it not said among the tribes that in council Sirayo is as cunning as the jackal?
though it is a mangy beast. Yes, I will go."
"If you will go, warn them that when the sun is up they must collect the dead on the field, and bury them well and deep, lest a pestilence strike them."
"Ho, ho! I see you would work by the rock. Good! I will say the spirit is offended by the dead."
Noenti having finished fixing on the witch-doctor"s belongings, Sirayo bounded over the fire, and was in a moment out of sight, while the old dame, with the willing help of the girls, bound the despoiled rascal tightly, and thrust him into a hen-coop with unnecessary violence.
Whether the man died of fright, or whether some darker fate befell him, Hume never found out, but in the morning he saw that the coop was empty.
Before daybreak Sirayo returned, cool and uninjured, with the report that the people had already set out to bury the dead, and that they fully believed that he and Hume had fled. Then he rolled himself in his blanket and slept soundly till morn, when he awoke to eat heartily, and then to play and talk with the girls, who were merry enough, no matter what part they might have taken in the disappearance of the witch-doctor.
They remained within the shelter of their retreat through the day, and in the night, with the laughing help of the girls, they made strange noises by the river, and bore aloft on poles weird globes of light to frighten the natives and imbue them with respect for the sanct.i.ty of the deserted side of the valley. Those mysterious, pale, and ghostly globes that flitted in the air were but the rinds of hollowed pumpkins, luminous from the light of burning tinder within; but they produced a great sensation on the people, who on the following day crossed the river with presents of food which they placed round the Golden Rock.
This was, however, an unwelcome sign of respect, and when the darkness once brought down hundreds of people to the river to watch for the globes of spirit-light, they saw suddenly a horrid face literally blaze out of the night, with a tongue of flame and fiery eyes, while a slow, solemn, thunderous voice bade them keep to their huts, lest they should be driven into the water. That lesson was enough for the credulous folk; the hollowed pumpkin with the punctured eyes and mouth was put away, Sirayo dallied with the girls, and Hume, with the crowbar he had carried from the waggon, slowly bored into the carved rock.
In the still nights when the wide valley was hushed in silence, except only for the melancholy howl of a jackal, he laboured to destroy that old, old work of human hands, done in a time long past. It was eerie work, and there were times when he would lay down his tool and stare at the menacing head of the great snake, then take a slow look around him.
It was very quiet, and the darkness shut him in like a wall, but that still, erect head he could always see outlined as he sat, against the stars, and one night suddenly he thought of the lone hermit of the river and shivered. It seemed that there were strange forms peering at him also, undefined, shadowy shapes with m.u.f.fled faces. He stood up, looked around him fiercely, as though he would invite his fancies to take shape so that he might confront them, then he ran blindly away. In the daylight he smiled bitterly at his fears, but that night again the forbidding phantoms crowded thick and thicker on his imagination, until, without accomplishing a stroke, he once more fled from his task.
"You have seen," said Sirayo, as he looked at Hume"s face by the light of the fire. "What have you seen?"
"I am a child again, chief. I am frightened by shadows."
"See," said the old woman solemnly; "I said they would come."
"Yebo!" said Sirayo, "a rock is a rock, and it cannot speak; but when men have breathed into it, have put themselves into it, have taken it into their inmost thoughts, it is no longer a rock. No man has said that I fear, but yet if, not knowing of it, I came on that rock in the night, I should be afraid. Leave it, my friend, lest the spirit take possession of you, and you start and mutter, and grow wild-eyed."
"I have bored three holes," said Hume; "to-morrow I will split it without doing more work."
"It is true: white men are never content. They have been bitten by the water-beetle, and never rest."
The next night the people in the kraals saw once again the pale globe flitting about, and as they marvelled there was a flash of fire and a dull rumbling report. The next morning, when they looked across, they saw that the Golden Rock was no more, and, with a sense of something old and familiar gone from their lives, they wailed in their sorrow.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.
BETTER THAN GOLD.
When Sirayo saw that no harm befell Hume for the act of sacrilege, he helped him bring the scattered fragments of the rock to the hidden valley, and when the ma.s.s of now shapeless ore was stored up, with its threads and veins of gold gleaming yellow, preparations were made to break it up. From the crowbar, after much labour about a roughly-made furnace, Hume made two great hammers, and for days he and Sirayo battered at the hard quartz, reducing it by slow degrees to small fragments. This work they had done on a wide flat rock, banked in so that nothing should be lost, and next, with native-made shallow dishes of baked clay, they began on the less arduous and more exciting business of washing for gold-dust. So alternately washing and crushing from week to week, they at last succeeded with their primitive methods in rescuing a vast amount of gold-dust, coa.r.s.e grains, and large pellets from the ma.s.s of rich ore.
At one time they were threatened with trouble, a prying witch-doctor having braved the unknown dangers by crossing the river and surprising the little party at work. Sirayo and the old woman, setting their wits to work, managed, however, to detach Inyame, who moved over with his entire regiment, and placed himself under the chief. A fierce conflict was prevented by a meeting between Sirayo and Umkomaas, and by the time Webster was expected back a new kraal had been built about the shattered rock, and herds of cattle grazed on the rich gra.s.s.
Sirayo was now a respected chief with a royal household, the lively Noenti being the head wife.
Gradually Hume"s face regained some of its comeliness, but he seemed to live in an atmosphere of gloom, and spent much of his time alone, looking to the west for the return of his friend. The interest which had kept him up so long as there was a lump of quartz to crush had failed him. He was listless, silent and moody, so that the children shunned him, and the women turned away when he came near. They thought he was possessed; and so he was--by a melancholy of the mind and irritability of nerves, severely shaken by the hardships he had undergone. He had succeeded, so he told himself. He had alone won the Golden Rock and by indomitable energy broken it up, but this gave him no pleasure. Nay, he grew to doubt whether he had done right. What right had he to destroy that carved image, that masterpiece of ancient workers, to shed blood for its possession? So he brooded gloomily in his loneliness, and the only comfort he derived was the spectacle of growing crops on the land that was formerly shunned.
And Webster would not return. Why should he? He had, no doubt, crossed the ocean with her, and by this time they would be married, for sailors were always quick in their loves. But he would wait. And yet while these thoughts ran always in his mind he would look towards the west, growing thin, haggard and unkempt.