The great man smiled. “Thou art not altogether right, Macumazahn,” he said; “I have plotted in my time, but it was not ambition that led me to my fall; but, shame on me that I should have to say it, a fair woman’s face. Let it pass. So we are going to see something like the old times again, Macumazahn, when we fought and hunted in Zululand? Ay, I will come. Come life, come death, what care I, so that the blows fall fast and the blood runs red? I grow old, I grow old, and I have not fought enough! And yet am I a warrior among warriors; see my scars”—and he pointed to countless cicatrices, stabs and cuts, that marked the skin of his chest and legs and arms. “See the hole in my head; the brains gushed out therefrom, yet did I slay him who smote, and live. Knowest thou how many men I have slain, in fair hand-to-hand combat, Macumazahn? See, here is the tale of them”—and he pointed to long rows of notches cut in the rhinoceros-horn handle of his axe. “Number them, Macumazahn—one hundred and three—and I have never counted but those whom I have ripped open,3 nor have I reckoned those whom another man had struck.”
“Be silent,” I said, for I saw that he was getting the blood-fever on him; “be silent; well art thou called the ‘Slaughterer.’ We would not hear of thy deeds of blood. Remember, if thou comest with us, we fight not save in self-defence. Listen, we need servants. These men,” and I pointed to the Wakwafi, who had retired a little way during our indaba (talk), “say they will not come.”
“Will not come!” shouted Umslopogaas; “where is the dog who says he will not come when my Father orders? Here, thou”—and with a single bound he sprang upon the Wakwafi with whom I had first spoken, and, seizing him by the arm, dragged him towards us. “Thou dog!” he said, giving the terrified man a shake, “didst thou say that thou wouldst not go with my Father? Say it once more and I will choke thee”—and his long fingers closed round his throat as he said it—“thee, and those with thee. Hast thou forgotten how I served thy brother?”
“Nay, we will come with the white man,” gasped the man.
“White man!” went on Umslopogaas, in simulated fury, which a very little provocation would have made real enough; “of whom speakest thou, insolent dog?”
“Nay, we will go with the great chief.”
“So!” said Umslopogaas, in a quiet voice, as he suddenly released his hold, so that the man fell backward. “I thought you would.”
“That man Umslopogaas seems to have a curious moral ascendency over his companions,” Good afterwards remarked thoughtfully.
II
The Black Hand
In due course we left Lamu, and ten days afterwards we found ourselves at a spot called Charra, on the Tana River, having gone through many adventures which need not be recorded here. Amongst other things we visited a ruined city, of which there are many on this coast, and which must once, to judge from their extent and the numerous remains of mosques and stone houses, have been very populous places. These ruined cities are immeasurably ancient, having, I believe, been places of wealth and importance as far back as the Old Testament times, when they were centres of trade with India and elsewhere. But their glory has departed now—the slave trade has finished them—and where wealthy merchants from all parts of the then civilized world stood and bargained in the crowded marketplaces, the lion holds his court at night, and instead of the chattering of slaves and the eager voices of the bidders, his awful note goes echoing down the ruined corridors. At this particular place we discovered on a mound, covered up with rank growth and rubbish, two of the most beautiful stone doorways that it is possible to conceive. The carving on them was simply exquisite, and I only regret that we had no means of getting them away. No doubt they had once been the entrances to a palace, of which, however, no traces were now to be seen, though probably its ruins lay under the rising mound.
Gone! quite gone! the way that everything must go. Like the nobles and the ladies who lived within their gates, these cities have had their day, and now they are as Babylon and Nineveh, and as London and Paris will one day be. Nothing may endure. That is the inexorable law. Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go. In this ruined and forgotten place the moralist may behold a symbol of the universal destiny. For this system of ours allows no room for standing still—nothing can loiter on the road and check the progress of things upwards towards Life, or the rush of things downwards towards Death. The stern policeman Fate moves us and them on, on, uphill and downhill and across the level; there is no resting-place for the weary feet, till at last the abyss swallows us, and from the shores of the Transitory we are hurled into the sea of the Eternal.
At Charra we had a violent quarrel with the headman of the bearers we
