Hardly had he given the signal, than smoke was seen rising from the huts, gathering in dense volumes, and, lo, from four different points simultaneously, bright flames broke forth, and as the whole huge kraal, now one vast sheet of leaping, devouring fire, gave forth in uninterrupted salvo its heavy crackling roar, there went up from the ranks of the king’s warriors, mustering in crescent formation to watch the completion of their errand of retribution, the thunder of a fierce war-song of victory and exultation.
“As lightning we smote them,
Where, where are they now?
The sons of the lightning,
The wizards of thunder?
Where, too, is their dwelling,
Their cattle, their cornfields?
“The bolt fell upon them,
The thunder-cloud smote them;
The might of ‘The Heavens’
In fury it burned them—
It smote and it burned them—
Its ruin destroyed them!
“The wizards are scattered
In blood and in ashes;
The roar of the Lion
In thunder pursued them;
The praise of the Lion
His children re-echo;
The praise of the Lion,
The Lion of Zulu,
The Lord of the Nations!”
The flames sunk low, sunk into red heaps of ashes pierced with bright and glowing caverns. A dense cloud of smoke overhung the hollow; and now the king’s impi, marching in companies, was moving up towards the ridge. The two waggons, with their full spans of oxen creaking up the rocky way, had already gained the entrance to the hollow, and their owners, riding on horseback, for both the steeds had been recovered too, paused for a moment on the ridge to look back. Their peril and captivity was at an end. They were being brought out in something like a triumphal procession. Far on in front, the dust was rising from the great herd of cattle and the crowd of captives. Behind, below, lay the gruesome and blood-stained hollow. The thunder of the war-song echoed from the slopes, and the rhythmic movement of the lines of shields of marching warriors was a fitting accessary to the lurid background of the picture, the amphitheatre of cliffs, “The Tooth,” the pyramid of Death in the centre, its dismal burdens still dangling against its face, and below, the great smouldering circle of blackening ashes, while the dense smoke cloud mounting to the heavens in the grey and murky noontide, as from the crater of a volcano, proclaimed to all, far and near, that the king’s justice had been executed, and that the power of the dreaded, indomitable, bloodthirsty Igazipuza had now become a thing of the past.
Chapter Twenty Five.
The Last of all our Friends.
Maritzburg again. Gerard, strolling through the busy streets, keenly enjoying the bustle and stir of civilised life after his wild experiences in savage lands, now no longer to him a sealed book, can hardly realise that it is the same place, that he is the same being. Could it be through those very streets that he hurried so eagerly in search of what might bring him a bare subsistence; returned so despondently from each successive failure? Now he felt himself the equal in experience and resource of pretty nearly every man he met. He felt his feet, so to say, and felt them firmly. He felt now that wherever he was put down he could make his way.
“A little civilisation doesn’t come amiss after the long spell of trekking we’ve had, eh, Ridgeley?” said John Dawes, as they sat smoking their pipes beneath the verandah of the Imperial Hotel towards the close of a hot day. “But the contrast of it! I suppose, now, you can hardly bring yourself to believe that old Ingonyama, Vunawayo, and the rest of ’em weren’t just so many chaps in a dream?”
“A dream!” echoed Gerard, vacantly. “Oh—ah! Yes, of course.”