“What can I do, Udolfu?” answered the chief helplessly. “Majendwa is a bull that roars louder than I, and he has the ear of the Great Great One himself. It is to Majendwa you must talk.”
“Majendwa?” repeated the white man, with a scowl as though the very name was unpalatable to him—and, indeed, it was—“Majendwa? Au! his kraal is far enough away. But here, you are chief, you, Mawendhlela. And for some days the people have been talking of the coming of Iqalaqala! Well, he must not come.”
They looked at each other for a little while in silence. Then the chief spoke.
“I can do nothing, Udolfu,” he repeated. “But you—au! you white people can do everything. And I do not want a white man who only brings trade for women.”
“Then you leave it to me?” said the trader, reaching over the square bottle and replenishing the calabash.
“It is nothing to me,” said Mawendhlela, carefully extracting a cockroach which had fallen from the thatch into his liquor, and throwing it into the fire. “No more than that—” as the insect crackled up.
Dolf Norbury chuckled, and took a big drink himself. The life of another man, a fellow countryman—or, it might be of two men—was no more to him than that of the burnt insect. They understood each other.
It may be asked how I am able to reproduce a dialogue between two persons sitting together alone in a hut—alone mind—and I many miles away at the time. Well, passing over the question as to whether anyone ever really is alone—especially in a Zulu kraal—rather than that the veracity of this my narrative be in any wise impugned, I would remind the reader that at an earlier stage thereof I took him into confidence so far as to explain that I was wont to derive a considerable amount of information from native sources, and that such information was surprisingly accurate. So—there it is, you see!
The while we were trekking by slow and easy stages. There was a restlessness among the people as to which there could be no mistake. They were moving about in bands of ten or twenty instead of singly or in pairs, and fully armed, and now and then two or three men would come up hurriedly to the waggon, and hardly troubling to drop their weapons as required by etiquette, would start on again after a few words of inquiry as to our destination. In short the country seemed about as settled as an ant’s nest the top of which has just been kicked off; and more than one rumour had it that armed collisions had occurred with the grazing Boers beyond the Luneburg and Utrecht borders. Towards ourselves the behaviour of the people was rather offhand and independent, the young men especially being inclined to treat us to quite an unnecessary display of swagger. This was a source of anxiety to me, in that it involved a continuous strain upon my moral influence to keep Falkner Sewin from his favourite pastime of head punching, and this was difficult.