Now, as Tyingoza spoke, I looked longingly down into the valley on the other side. Away, where it wound beneath a towering cone, I could make out a film of smoke, and was wondering whether it was too soon after my last visit to send my horse down along the ten miles of rugged bush path between it and where we sat—in something over the hour. I could get back at midnight, or soon after, and time was no object to me in those days. I had spent enough of it among savages to have acquired something of their indifference to it. It mattered nothing what time I slept or woke. If I felt sleepy I slept, if I felt hungry I ate—if I felt neither I did neither—and that about summed up my rule of life, as, in those days, it did that of many another circumstanced like myself. But of making a point of turning in or turning out at a given time—no. I had long parted with anything of the kind; indeed the fact that there was such a thing as a watch or a clock on the place was the merest accident.
Tyingoza produced his snuff-box—his Zulu conservatism had restrained him from learning to smoke—and handed it to me. Then he helped himself.
“They will not be here long,” he said presently.
“No? Why not?” I answered, knowing to whom he referred.
“Their feet are planted on strange ground. They have built a house where it cannot stand. Au! They are even as children these Amangisi.”
I did not resent the mild suggestion—“Amangisi” meaning English—because I knew that the speaker did not include myself, practically a son of the land, using the word as applicable to the newly imported emigrant.
“They do not understand the people,” he went on, “nor do they try to. They treat the people as though they were soldiers under them. Now, Iqalaqala, will that do?”
I agreed that it would not; in fact I had more than once ventured to hint as much to Major Sewin—but that veteran, though a dear old man, was likewise a stiff-necked one, and had not taken my well-meant advice in good part.
“A nigger, sir,” he had answered with heat, “is created to work. If he won’t work he must be made to—and, damme, sir, I’m the man to make him.”
I had ventured to remind him that there were about four hundred thousand of the said “niggers” in the colony of Natal, and that we stood in a precious deal more need of them than they did of us. But, as the last thing in the world I wished was to quarrel with him, I fear I did so half-heartedly.