Soon arose from Tongwana’s kraal a weird, long-drawn cry. By this time the chief and every native in the immediate neighbourhood of the camp—except Elvesdon’s servants—had disappeared. The cry was echoed, then taken up by many voices till it tailed off into a kind of strophe-like chant. Then from the distant kraal a broad dark stream was issuing, its blackness relieved as it drew nearer, by many a patch of white. Suddenly the chant changed to a lower key, and its sombre thunder-notes harmonised to the measured tread of the marching warriors.
These, for their parts, offered a perfect spectacle of wild picturesqueness. Each and all had discarded any article of European clothing, and were arrayed in the fantastic, if spare adornments of native apparel; the mútya of cat-tails and cow-hide, beads and bangles, jackal teeth necklaces, flowing tufts of cow-hair, and other gimcrackery of the kind. Then too, the points of bright assegais gleamed wickedly in the sunshine, and the variegated faces of broad shields, lent colour to the wild array.
The column advanced, marching four deep. The rapping of assegai hafts against shield sticks, beat a weird accompaniment to the war-song, which, now risen to a deafening roar, ceased, with a suddenness that was almost startling, as the whole array spreading out into crescent formation, halted, and flinging the right hand aloft, shouted, as one man:
“Amakosi!” (“Chiefs!”)
“They ought to have given the Bayéte, to a representative of Government—confound their cheek!” murmured Elvesdon, who was filling his pipe. “That’s the salute royal, you know, Miss Carden.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” was the answer. “They look grand—grand, but a little alarming. Still I’m so glad we came.”
“Don’t know about a couple of hundred,” remarked Thornhill. “More like six or seven.”
Now again the song and dance was renewed. So catching was the latter that the European spectators found themselves beating time with their feet. The stamping of the excited warriors shook the earth, sending up long streams of yellow dust into the sunlit air. Young warriors would dart from the ranks, and leaping nearly their own height from the ground volley forth a torrent of words as they went through an imaginary pantomime of their prowess, their eyeballs white and rolling, seeming to burst from their faces, the flash of their bright blades like zig-zagged lightning. Then, with an appalling roar, the crescent extended itself on either side, and charged full speed up to the spectators hemming them now in a complete circle. Evelyn Carden gave a little cry of alarm and she felt herself growing pale.
“It’s all right. It’s part of the show,” said Elvesdon reassuringly, puffing at his pipe.
“Is it? Well, it’s rather startling,” she answered, reassured however, by the fact that the rest of the party, including Edala, remained unmoved.