“What place is that on the right, opposite the the hill?” I asked. “It seems to be all dotted with white things.”
“That is the cemetery, dear. Poor darling Dick is buried there.”
A grey veil seemed to come down before my face at that, and presently through blurred eyes I saw that the white things were indeed little crosses and headstones.
“I should like to get down,” I said in a low voice, as we reached a wide path that showed the way to the cemetery gate. “But don’t let this man come.”
“Oh, no, he won’t. He buried his wife here a few months ago,” was Judy’s strange answer.
I hoped she would let me go alone, but she expressed a wish to accompany me, so we stood together by my brother’s grave. There were no trees anywhere, and very few flowers, just one or two sturdy scarlet geraniums and some green runners clambering carelessly over the wooden fence. Lines of dusty graves lying in the brilliant light, coarse veldt grass growing about them, and above them the little white crosses, with the oft-repeated phrase, “Died of fever!”
There they lay, sleeping in the sunshine: Cecil Rhodes’s “boys!” The men who had helped to open up the country, light the first fires, and turn the first sods to let the malaria out of the ground for others to build towns on. Of such as these was written:
“Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet!
Where is our English chivalry?
Wild grasses are their burial sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.”
“Let us go quickly,” said Judy. “There is a funeral coming.”
So we went back to the cart, and drove slowly so as not to smother with dust a little cortège that passed us, taking a short cut over the grass. If Judy had not said it was a funeral I should not have recognised one, though I had seen many since I came to Mashonaland. The coffin was placed on a Scotch-cart drawn by two bullocks, and had a black cloth flung over it. But some kind hand had redeemed the sordid loneliness by putting a little bunch of wild flowers and a green branch on the black cloth. Three men followed behind, and a woman on horseback.