The whole party was now on the move, led by Kalingalunga, bearing the sacred ashes.
“What on earth is he going to do with them?”
The chief heard this query, and looking back said gravely, “He take them to 'Milmeridien';” and the party followed Jacky, who twisted and zigzagged about the bush till, at last, he brought them to a fairy spot, whose existence in that rugged wood none of them had dreamed possible. It was a long, open glade, meandering like a river between two deep, irregular fringes of the drooping acacia, and another lovely tree which I only know by its uncouth, unmelodious, scientiuncular name—the eucalyptus. This tree, as well as the drooping acacia, leaned over the ground with long leaves like disheveled hair.
Kalingalunga paused at the brink and said to his companions in a low, awestruck voice, “Milmeridien.”
The glade was full of graves, some of them fresh, glittering with bright red earth under the cool, green acacias, others richly veiled with golden moss more or less according to their age; and in the recesses of the grove peeped smoother traces of mortality, mossy mounds a thousand years old, and others far more ancient still, now mere excrescences of green, known to be graves only by the light of that immense gradation of times and dates and epochs.
The floor of the open glade was laid out as a vast parterre—each grave a little flower-bed, round, square, oval, or rhomboid; and all round each bed flowed in fine and graceful curves little paths too narrow for a human foot. Primeval tradition had placed them there that spirits might have free passage to visit all the mighty dead. For here reposed no vulgar corpses. Here, their heads near the surface, but their feet deep in earth, sat the great hunters and warriors of every age of the race of Kalingalunga, once a great nation, though now a failing tribe. They sat there this many a day, their weapons in their hands, ready to start up whenever the great signal should come, and hunt once more, but without fatigue, in woods boundless as the sea, and with bodily frames no longer mortal, to knock and be knocked on the head, ad infinitum.
Simple and benign creed!
A cry of delight burst from the white men, and they were going to spread themselves over the garden of the dead.
The savage checked them with horror.
“Nobody walk there while him alive,” said he. “Now you follow me and not speak any words at all, or Kalingalunga will leave you in the bush.—Hush!”