“If I can find out anything more of this curious
story I will let you know, but I doubt if I shall
be able to do so. Although fifteen years or so
have passed since Dingaan’s death in 1840 the
Kaffirs are very shy of talking about this poor lady,
and, I think, only did so to me because I am neither
an official nor a missionary, but one whom they look
upon as a friend because I have doctored so many of
them. When I asked the Indunas about her at first
they pretended total ignorance, but on my pressing
the question, one of them said that ’all that
tale was unlucky and “went beyond” with
Mopo.’ Now Mopo, as I think I wrote to you,
was the man who stabbed King Chaka, Dingaan’s
brother. He is supposed to have been mixed up
in the death of Dingaan also, and to be dead himself.
At any rate he vanished away after Panda came to the
throne."_
THE GIRL
The afternoon was intensely, terribly hot. Looked
at from the high ground where they were encamped above
the river, the sea, a mile or two to her right—for
this was the coast of Pondo-land—to little
Rachel Dove staring at it with sad eyes, seemed an
illimitable sheet of stagnant oil. Yet there
was no sun, for a grey haze hung like a veil beneath
the arch of the sky, so dense and thick that its rays
were cut off from the earth which lay below silent
and stifled. Tom, the Kaffir driver, had told
her that a storm was coming, a father of storms, which
would end the great drought. Therefore he had
gone to a kloof in the mountains where the oxen were
in charge of the other two native boys—since
on this upland there was no pasturage to drive them
back to the waggon. For, as he explained to her,
in such tempests cattle are apt to take fright and
rush away for miles, and without cattle their plight
would be even worse than it was at present.
At least this was what Tom said, but Rachel, who had
been brought up among natives and understood their
mind, knew that his real reason was that he wished
to be out of the way when the baby was buried.
Kaffirs do not like death, unless it comes by the
assegai in war, and Tom, a good creature, had been
fond of that baby during its short little life.
Well, it was buried now; he had finished digging its
resting-place in the hard soil before he went.
Rachel, poor child, for she was but fifteen, had borne
it to its last bed, and her father had unpacked his
surplice from a box, put it on and read the Burial
Service over the grave. Afterwards together they
had filled in that dry, red earth, and rolled stones
on to it, and as there were few flowers at this season
of the year, placed a shrivelled branch or two of
mimosa upon the stones—the best offering
they had to make.
Rachel and her father were the sole mourners at this
funeral, if we may omit two rock rabbits that sat
upon a shelf of stone in a neighbouring cliff, and
an old baboon which peered at these strange proceedings
from its crest, and finally pushed down a boulder
before it departed, barking indignantly. Her
mother could not come because she was ill with grief
and fever in a little tent by the waggon. When
it was all over they returned to her, and there had
been a painful scene.
