Now I saw that the speaker had fallen into one of those divining trances I knew so well, and in which all she foretold had come to pass. Dingane, too, began to see this, and asked eagerly, yet not without awe in his tone:
“And when shall this be, sister?”
“Hearken to no idle counsels. Heed no false magic,” she answered, with meaning. “I, and I alone, can see into the future. Be led by me if this nation would live.”
With these words, I, who looked, saw the vision pass away from Lalusini’s countenance, and her eyes were as those of one who awakens out of a deep sleep. The King, too, must have seen it, for he forebore to question her further. Then he spoke, low at first, but raising his voice in a black and terrible burst of wrath.
“Now of yon impostors I will make an end. Take them away, ye black ones.” And he pointed with his spear at Tola and his following.
At the word of the King, the slayers sprang forward. But the witch doctors fled howling, and keeping in a compact body, broke through all who stood in their path, and the lower end of the kraal became full of the kicking, tumbling bodies of men. But the slayers were among them; and the people barring their way to the lower gate, they were seized and dragged, howling and shrieking, without the kraal. And as the knobkerries fell with a heavy thud upon their cunning and bloodthirsty brains, a murmur of fierce delight escaped all who heard, for the people hated these wolves of izanusi, and rejoiced that they themselves should taste the death they loved to deal out to others.
There was one, however, who did not so rejoice, and that was Tambusa; indeed at first he had made a movement to stay the word, which was that of doom to the izanusi; but the look on the face of Dingane was so fell and deadly, that even the boldness of Tambusa quailed before it.
And I—Whau!—I rejoiced that I still lived, and that Tola was dead. But Tambusa did not.