“Give it to him, Maurice. Let us be glad,” said I, still laughing, and suddenly feeling, in spite of my sad thoughts of the last hour, extraordinarily light-hearted and happy.
One swift glance at the small black bone, and then Makupi’s lithe hand closed over it. He made a movement with both hands over his body and hair, and then his palms hung empty by his sides, and we never saw the charm again.
He looked at Maurice first, then his eyes came to me and rested there while he spoke a brief sentence in the pigeon-Makalika which he knew I understood.
“In the cave of the Umlimo in the Maloppos, there is a white man hidden. He wears blue charms in his ears.”
For one moment he watched the paralysing effect of his statement, gazing at me in astonishment as though he saw a spectre, and afterwards at Maurice who had risen from his seat and was holding to the tree as if for support. Then his eager voice continued. He poured out the strange story now in his own tongue, of which I only understood a word here and there. But I understood enough to make the blood fly rustling through my veins, leaping from my heart to my ears and cheeks. When he had spoken a few sentences he made a gesture towards me and waited for Maurice to translate. I kept my eyes averted from my husband’s.
“He says—that in the cave of the Umlimo a white man has been hidden and kept prisoner ever since the Matabele war—he is a man whom a party of Matabele warriors came upon just at the close of the campaign—alone in the bush, not far from the Shangani. He was wounded in the head, and had gone raving mad—was singing and laughing when they came upon hint—that is why they did not kill him. They are afraid to kill the mad—the mad are sacred. They took him prisoner and carried him to the camp where Lobengula lay dying.”
Makupi took up the tale once more.
“He says—that the King forbade them to kill the man, but to take him by out-of-the-way routes to the cave of the Umlimo who would get wisdom from his madness, and be able to advise the Matabele how to defeat the white men later, if they were beaten in the war. A wife of Lobengula who had skill in sickness took charge of him and after the death of the King he was taken by devious ways to the Matoppos, where he has been ever since.”
Maurice paused a minute moment. He seemed to be suffering. His lips twisted as with some agonised effort to produce words from a lacerated throat. Later, he took up Makupi’s tale. Unconsciously he adopted the boy’s chanting tone, and used the native phraseology.
“He says—the wound in the head took long to heal—only in the last few months has wisdom fully returned to the man—and since then the Umlimo keeps him in bonds for fear he should escape and tell of the things he has seen and heard in the cave where the Deity sits brooding over the fate of Matabeleland and Mashonaland. They are afraid to kill him, not only because Lobengula put the command on them not to, but because he is a great white man with strong eyes that make them afraid to strike—he sits all day with his hands bound—but when the stars come out and on nights that the moon shines he commands to be taken out, and he walks for many hours among the hills.”