Weakened by their own vast multitudes, they were ripe for the pestilence that came out of the north.
It was the same plague that Moses' God had inflicted on the Pharaoh of Egypt, the rinderpest, the peste bovine, a virus disease which attacks cattle and all other ruminants. The stricken animals were blinded by the discharge of thick mucus from their eyes. It poured in ropes from their gaping jaws and nostrils to contaminate the pastures and infect any other animal that passed over them.
Their emaciated bodies were wracked by spasms of profuse diarrhoea and dysentery. When at last they dropped, the convulsions twisted their heads back upon their tortured necks, so that their noses touched one of their flanks, and they could never rise again.
So swift was the passage of the disease that a herd of ten thousand great homed black beasts was wiped out between dawn and sunset. Their carcasses lay so thickly that they touched each other, and the characteristic fetid odour of the disease mingled with the stench of rotting flesh; for although the vultures gorged, they could not devour one thousandth part of this dreadful harvest of death.
Swiftly, carried by the vultures and the blundering, bellowing herds, the plague swept southwards towards the Zambezi river.
On the banks of that mighty river Tanase stood beside another watch-fire and repeated the prophecy of the Umlimo: 'When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime 'When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise Thus she cried, and the people of the Matabele listened and took new heart and looked to their steel.
The End
