And when I have accomplished the matter and my Honour
is made clean, I shall return thanks unto God, the
Holder of the Scale of the Law, and I shall sleep.
From the night, through the day, and into the night
again I shall sleep; and no dream shall trouble me.
And now, O my brother, the tale is all told.
AHI! AHI! ALGHIAS! AHI!
See the pale martyr with his shirt on fire.—PRINTER’S
ERROR.
THEY tell the tale even now among the groves of the
Berbulda Hill, and for corroboration point to the
roofless and windowless Mission-house. The great
God Dungara, the God of Things as They Are, Most Terrible,
One-eyed, Bearing the Red Elephant Tusk, did it all;
and he who refuses to believe in Dungara will assuredly
be smitten by the Madness of Yat—the madness
that fell upon the sons and the daughters of the Buria
Kol when they turned aside from Dungara and put on
clothes. So says Athon Daze*, who is High Priest
of the shrine and Warden of the Red Elephant Tusk.
But if you ask the Assistant Collector and Agent in
Charge of the Buria Kol, he will laugh—not
because he bears any malice against missions, but
because he himself saw the vengeance of Dungara executed
upon the spiritual children of the Reverend Justus
Krenk, Pastor of the Tubingen Mission, and upon Lotta,
his virtuous wife.
[Transcriber’s Note: The “e”
in Athon Daze has an acute accent.]
Yet if ever a man merited good treatment of the Gods
it was the Reverend Justus, one time of Heidelberg,
who, on the faith of a call, went into the wilderness
and took the blonde, blue-eyed Lotta with him.
’We will these Heathen now by idolatrous practices
so darkened better make,’ said Justus in the
early days of his career. ‘Yes,’ he
added with conviction, ’they shall be good and
shall with their hands to work learn. For all
good Christians must work.’ And upon a stipend
more modest even than that of an English lay-reader,
Justus Krenk kept house beyond Kamala and the gorge
of Malair, beyond the Berbulda River close to the
foot of the blue hill of Panth on whose summit stands
the Temple of Dungara—in the heart of the
country of the Buria Kol—the naked, good-tempered,
timid, shameless, lazy Buria Kol.
Do you know what life at a Mission outpost means?
Try to imagine a loneliness exceeding that of the
smallest station to which Government has ever sent
you—isolation that weighs upon the waking
eyelids and drives you by force headlong into the
labours of the day. There is no post, there is
no one of your own colour to speak to, there are no
roads: there is, indeed, food to keep you alive,
but it is not pleasant to eat; and whatever of good
or beauty or interest there is in your life, must
come from yourself and the grace that may be planted
in you.
