“Their offence? Au! it is great. They have gone too near the Esibayaneni, the sacred place where the King, the Great Great One, practises mutt. What offence can be greater than such?”
The victims, their countenances set and stony with fear, were now seized and held by many a pair of powerful and willing hands. Then, with the blade of a great assegai, their ears were deliberately shorn from their heads. A roar of delight went up from the barbarous spectators, who shouted lustily in praise of the King.
“So said the Great Great One: ‘They had ears, but their ears heard what it was not lawful they should hear, so they must hear no more!’ Is he not wise? Au! the wisdom of the calf of Matyobane!”
Again the executioners closed around their victims. A moment more and they parted. They were holding up to the crowd their victims’ eyes. The roars of delight rose in redoubled volume.
“So said the Black One: ‘They had eyes, but they saw what it was not lawful for them to look upon. So they must see no more!’ Au! the greatness of the Elephant whose tread shaketh the world!”
There was a tigerish note in the utterance of this horrible paean which might well have made the white spectators shudder. Whatever they felt, however, they must show nothing.
“I shall be deadly sick directly,” muttered Blachland; and all wondered what horror was yet to come.
The two blinded and mutilated wretches were writhing and moaning, and begging piteously for the boon of death to end their terrible sufferings. But their fiendish tormentors were engaged in far too congenial a task to be in any undue hurry to end it. It is only fair to record that to the victims themselves it would have been equally congenial were the positions reversed. At last, however, the executioners again stepped forward.
“So said the Ruler of Nations,” they bellowed, their short-handled heavy knob sticks held aloft: “These two had the power of thought. They used that power to pry into what it is not lawful for them even to think about. A man without brains cannot think. Let them therefore think no more.”
And with these two last words of the King’s sentence—terse, remorseless in the simplicity of its barbarous logic—the heavy knob sticks swept down with a horrid crunch as of the pulverising of bones. Another and another. The sufferings of the miserable wretches were over at last. Their death struggles had ceased, and they lay stark and motionless, their skulls literally battered to pieces.