Chapter Fifteen.
“The Tooth.”
In announcing his hearty desire to bid good-bye to the Igazipuza kraal as soon as possible, John Dawes had stated no more than the barest truth, but its fulfilment seemed destined to be postponed indefinitely, failing the conversion to his views of the Igazipuza themselves. They, apparently, did not share his aspiration. They were not nearly so anxious to part with him as he was to part with them, and objected most strenuously to all and every suggestion to that end. In sum, he and his companion and servants, and all their possessions, were practically prisoners. Ingonyama’s motives in thus holding them in restraint they were up till now at a loss to fathom. It was not trade, for they had long since bartered everything negotiable. It certainly was not friendship, for the chief’s manner had become sullen and distrustful, not to say gruff. John Dawes, who understood natives thoroughly, and knew that they are nothing if not practical, confessed himself utterly baffled, failing a motive.
Once they had actually inspanned, but before they had trekked half a mile from the kraal they were met by a large force of armed warriors, and deliberately turned back. There was no help for it. Might was right, and comply they must. But, after that, under pretence that the chief had forbidden any grazing within a certain radius of the kraal, all their trek-oxen were driven away to a small outlying kraal in a distant corner of the hollow. No obstruction was placed in the way of them looking after the animals, counting them occasionally, and so forth. But any attempt at inspanning was very promptly frustrated.
As with the chief, so with his followers. Taking their cue from him, these had become more and more insolent, ruffianly, and bullying in their demeanour. They would swagger around the waggons, hustle and annoy Sintoba and the other native servants, pull things about, and behave in general in such fashion as would almost put to the blush a crowd of the worst kind of British yahoos. Once, indeed, yielding to an uncontrollable impulse of exasperation, Gerard had given one of these sportive young savages a sound thrashing. It was an imprudent not to say a perilous thing to do. But again a bold attitude answered, and the Igazipuza became a little more respectful.
Days had merged into weeks, and weeks had almost lengthened into months, and still no chance of getting away. Taking Sintoba into complete confidence the pair would, on such few occasions as they could find themselves absolutely and entirely beyond the reach of prying eyes and ears, discuss the situation earnestly and in all its bearings. The only motive either Dawes or Sintoba could guess at was that an Anglo-Zulu war was imminent, if it had not actually broken out. This would supply a sufficient reason for their detention. Ingonyama was holding them as hostages. In the event of hostilities with the British, his intention was probably to carry them captive to the king’s kraal. Or he might be keeping them with the design of sacrificing them to the manes of such members of his clan who might eventually be slain. This aspect of the case was not a pleasant one.
Seldom indeed could they feel sure they were out of hearing of their gaolers, out of sight never. The latter were ever around them, on one pretext or another. If they so much as strolled down to a water-hole to take a swim, a group of armed warriors was sure to start up at some unexpected point, and hover around them until their return. If they rode out to see how their stock was getting on, it was the same thing, a band was sure to make-believe to be proceeding in the same direction, and they had long since ascertained that the sole entrance to the place was indefatigably watched and strongly guarded day and night. Now, all this surveillance, at first galling and irksome in the extreme, eventually became more serious in its results. It told upon their nerves. It was ominous—depressing. They were as completely shut away from the outer world in this wild and remote fastness of the Igazipuza as though shipwrecked on a desert island. Those grey cliff walls that encircled them became hateful, horrible, repellent. They were even as the walls of a tomb.
“Well, Ridgeley, I own this is getting serious,” said Dawes, one morning as they sat on the waggon-box moodily smoking the pipe of bitter reflection. “And the worst of it is I see no way out of it. I’ve been in a queer corner or two in my time, but never did I feel so thoroughly like a rat in a trap as now. There’s no way of climbing these infernal cliffs; leastways, not with our horses, and without them, we might almost as well stop here, for we should be overhauled and lugged back to a dead certainty. The way we came up is no go, either.”
“No, it isn’t,” agreed Gerard, despondently. “I don’t want to croak, Dawes; but it strikes me the tenure of our lives is not worth a great deal to any one who thought to do a good spec by purchasing it.”
The suspense, the daily, hourly apprehension under which they lived, had made its mark upon Gerard, and even his cheerful spirits and sunny good humour had begun to fail him. He thought of his young life, and the joy and exhilaration of living which until lately had been his. He thought of those he had left behind him in the Old Country. But, most of all, full oft and continually—and he had plenty of time for thinking, little else, in fact—he thought of May Kingsland, and that bright golden day and happy peaceful evening he had spent in her society. How would she feel, he wondered, when she came to hear of his death—God grant it might not be a barbarous and lingering one—at the hands of cruel and merciless savages?
“Don’t lose heart, Ridgeley, whatever you do,” said Dawes, looking at him earnestly. “The situation is pretty black, but, please Heaven, we’ll get through to talk over it snug and safe at home one of these days. The worst of it is that it’s all my doing you’re in this fix at all. That’s what I blame myself for, my lad.”
“Then don’t think of doing that,” returned Gerard, with all his old alacrity. “Aren’t we in it together, share and share alike, risks as well as good times. Come now, Dawes, if I think you’re bothering over that, it’ll go far towards knocking the bottom out of me. Hang it all, can’t we get on the horses some dark night, and make a dash for it?”
“We can’t, Ridgeley, and for this reason. It would simply be the death warrant of all our people if we succeeded, and of ourselves if we didn’t. I’m not a more straight-laced chap than most, but, you see, I can’t exactly bring myself to slope off and leave Sintoba and the rest of them in the lurch. No. We must either march out as we came, with all the honours of war, or—stay here.”
“I never thought of it from that point of view, I admit,” said Gerard.
“There is another scheme I’ve been plotting, but it don’t pan out overmuch,” went on Dawes. “If one could manage to smuggle you out, by hook or by crook, you might find your way to Ulundi, and lay the case before the king, always provided there’s no such thing as a British war, of course. But, bar that event, Cetywayo would soon bring Master Ingonyama to book. He’s a straight man, is Cetywayo, and well-disposed towards Englishmen, though we have been badgering him more than enough of late. But he’d never allow a couple of British subjects to be put upon in this outrageous manner by one of his own subordinate chiefs.”
“By Jove! that is an idea,” said Gerard. “But would it be better than knocking up a rescue expedition among our own people—in Natal for instance?”
“Rather. About five hundred per cent, better. Why such an expedition would mean a young war, and do you think Government would embark on that for the sake of a brace of poor devils of traders? Not much. It’d say we travelled at our own risk, and if we’d got into difficulties we must get out of them on the same terms. Even if otherwise, just think of the red tape! No. My plan is the best, and, I’m afraid, the only one.”
For a few moments both men sat puffing at their pipes in silence. Gerard felt his pulses beginning to throb already with the excitement and prospect of such an adventure. Then he said—
“It won’t do, Dawes; I’m not going to leave you. We must go out together or not at all.”
“That’s no sort of good sense,” was the other’s rejoinder. “I shall be all right here, and it’s the only way out of the difficulty.”
“But, on your own showing, they will take it out of you,” urged Gerard, speaking quickly. “Didn’t you give that as a reason just now for not leaving Sintoba and the others behind? You go, and leave me to take my chance here.”
“Yes; but the cases are different, I can manage them better. You see, I understand them thoroughly, and you, after all, are a good bit of a novice. Still, you know enough of the country and people to get along among them, and find your way to Ulundi as quick as possible; but if you were left here on your own hook you’d likely make a mess of it. Tell the first you meet you are the bearer of a message to the king, and they will be bound to help you. They dare not refuse. We must pan out the thing, though, with every care. The main difficulty will, of course, be that of getting you clear out of this place, in the first instance. The rest is simplicity itself in comparison.”
In the dead of night, by the light of a lantern, the two would sit in the waggon-tent, while Dawes, with surprising accuracy, drew from memory, and in as small a compass as possible, a map of that section of the Zulu country which comprised their present place of captivity and the king’s capital and night after night, with their heads together, they would sit studying this rough plan, while Dawes pointed out the general features of the country—the lay of the mountains and the most convenient and least frequented route to be chosen. With extra good luck, he reckoned Gerard might make Ulundi in a little over two days—with ordinary luck it might take him four. But that Cetywayo would order their immediate release he never entertained or uttered the smallest doubt.
One day Gerard saddled up his pony, and started off alone to see how their stock was getting on. And, indeed, it really seemed that he was alone, for strange to say, none of the Igazipuza offered to accompany him, nor did he meet with a soul on the way. But between seeing nobody and being himself seen by nobody, he well knew there lay a wide difference, and he must be careful accordingly; indeed, he almost began to fear that this unwonted immunity from surveillance concealed a trap—was designed to draw him into some indiscretion, which might be turned into a reason for his destruction.
The intense longing to escape, however, soon overweighed all prudential consideration to the extent of causing him to scan for the fiftieth time every cranny and crevice in the face of the cliffs, which might by any chance afford exit. Surely there was some such—a cleft, a gnarled tree, a concealed passage. Hardly could he believe there was not. But, even as heretofore, he could not find it, and despondently he once more turned his horse to ride back to the waggons.
Suddenly the animal shied, and dropping his nose to the ground sniffed at something and then backed away, snorting. The white round object which had caused the alarm needed no second glance. It was a human skull.
Yet another lay there, its fleshless eye-holes staring upward from the grass. Scattered around were fragments of broken bones.
Gerard looked up. In his meditative fit he had ridden abstractedly, not seeing where he was going. Now he found himself at the foot of a great rock, and a cold shiver ran through his frame, for he recognised it as the rock called Izinyo, “The Tooth.” It was the rock of slaughter—“the tooth that eats,” as Vunawayo had grimly put it.
For various reasons he had always avoided this locality. He had no sort of an inclination to explore it—very much the reverse—and he feared lest in doing so he might unconsciously be offending the superstitions of the people. Now, thus brought by chance to its very base, he looked up at it with a cold, creepy sensation of shuddering awe. He contemplated it much as a Liberty, Equality and Fraternity “citizen” during the thick of the Reign of Terror, may have contemplated the guillotine, as an institution with which he might any day be called upon to cultivate a much closer acquaintance.
He looked down at the shattered bones, then up at the cliff. This was the mode of death then. The victims were taken to the summit of this latter-day Tarpeian rock and hurled therefrom. But as he looked something seemed to be flapping softly against the face of the cliff high overhead. Ropes? Reims? Were people then hanged from the brow—not merely thrown over? Hanging was not a Zulu method of slaughter. Gerard was more mystified than ever.
And with this mystification came a great and growing curiosity. As he was here he determined to explore further. He would take advantage of being alone and unwatched to ascend the rock. A horrible fascination, which was more than mere curiosity, seemed to beckon him on, and with it ran an instinctive feeling that the knowledge thus gained might possibly be of use to him. Acting upon this impulse he rode round to the other side and began the ascent.
The latter was not difficult. Precipitous only on its front face, the further side of the pyramid, though steep, was smooth enough to enable him to ride nearly to the top. Here, however, he was obliged to leave his horse and ascend on foot by a rough-hewn but well-worn path.
The summit was large enough to hold about fifty persons. It was smoothly rounded, with a hollow depression in the centre. And as Gerard’s glance fell upon this, every drop of blood within him seemed to turn to ice.
A sharp, tough stake, pointed at the top, rose upright in the centre of the hollow, and upon this stake, in a sitting posture, shrivelled, half mummified, was impaled a human body. The head lay over on the shoulder, and on the features, drawn back from the bared teeth in a grin of ghastly torment, was the most horrible expression of fear and agony. The eyeballs, lustreless and shrunken, stared upon the intruder with a stare that might haunt him to his dying day, and gazing upon the grisly contortion of the bound and trussed limbs—the terrible attitude—the foetid odour of the corpse—for in this dry atmosphere decomposition had been a long and gradual process—it seemed to the petrified and unutterably horror-stricken spectator that the tortured wretch must still have life in him.
Recovering by a strong effort of will some degree of self-possession, for the horrid sight had turned him sick and faint, Gerard drew nearer to the corpse. The stake, burnt and hardened to a point, was of the umzimbili or iron-wood. This was clearly not the first time it had been so used, and now as he remembered the skulls and bones lying beneath, he thought with a shudder on the numbers of wretches who might have suffered this most hideous of deaths. Heavens! and might not he himself, and Dawes, be called upon to suffer in like fashion, at the mercy, as they were, of this horde of cruel barbarians?
He turned his face outward to look over the valley. The sweet golden sunshine, now declining, shed a softened and beautiful light upon the verdure of the bush, toning down the angles of the grey cliffs. Blue smoke clouds curled lazily upward from the great circle of the kraal, lying below in the distance, and the sound of far-away voices floated melodiously, pleasingly upon the clear still air. It was a lovely scene, a scene that many might travel any distance to look upon, but to him who now gazed upon it from this grim and horrid Golgotha it was darker, blacker than the Tartarus of Dante.
Then another sight arrested Gerard’s attention. Along the brow of the cliff was a row of stout pegs driven firmly into the ground, and round each was tied a reim, or raw-hide rope, whose other end dangled over into space. These were what he had seen flapping overhead when he was below. With a shuddering loathing he drew up one of them. Its end was not a running noose as he had expected, only a loop, so small that he could not even put his hand through it. What new horror did this represent?
And then a quick, deep-toned ejaculation behind made him start—start so violently in the sudden unexpectedness of the interruption in the then state of his nerves, that he was within an ace of losing his balance and pitching headlong over the height. Recovering himself, however, he turned to confront a tall Zulu who stood contemplating him with an expression of ironical mirth, and recognised the great frame and evil countenance of Vunawayo.
“Ha, Umlúngu!” said the latter. “So you have come to look at the point of The Tooth?”
“Yes,” answered Gerard, as composedly as possible. “But, Vunawayo, what is that?”
“This?” said the savage, reaching up his hand to the point of the stake. “It is the point of The Tooth—the part it eats with.”
“No; that, I mean,” pointing to the impaled corpse.
“Hau! That is—its last morsel,” replied Vunawayo, with the laugh of a demon. “When The Tooth bites, it bites hard. Wizards—and such people. I told you it did.”
“What, then, are these used for?” went on Gerard, showing the raw-hide rope which he had drawn up.
“These? Ha! not all who come here to be eaten by The Tooth are bitten by its point. This loop you see was tied round a man’s wrists. He was then flung over to the full end of the rope, and his arms being fastened behind him, were broken by the jerk. He dangled there until he dropped loose. The last to suffer in this way was a woman who had been a captive, and was taken to wife by the chief. She killed her newborn child, saying that she would die rather than increase the strength of the Igazipuza. She did die—but she took a long time about it—a long, long time.”
“And who was the man who was impaled, Vunawayo? What did he die for?”
“Be not too curious, Umlúngu,” was the answer. “Have patience. There may soon come a time when you shall attend at the ‘eating of The Tooth.’ Have patience.”
To Gerard, in his then frame of mind, it seemed that the other’s tone was fraught with grim irony, with fell significance.
“Let us go down,” resumed Vunawayo. “Ha! our meeting up here has been short and unexpected. But it may be that we shall meet again upon the point of The Tooth, and then our meeting will be a much longer one. Oh yes; we shall meet again up here,” added the savage, with a sinister laugh, as he turned to lead the way down.
And Gerard, unnerved by these evidences of the sickening barbarities practised by this ferocious clan, could hardly bring himself on his return to tell Dawes what he had seen.