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?”