“If you will go, warn them that when the sun is up they must collect the dead on the field, and bury them well and deep, lest a pestilence strike them.”
“Ho, ho! I see you would work by the rock. Good! I will say the spirit is offended by the dead.”
Noenti having finished fixing on the witch-doctor’s belongings, Sirayo bounded over the fire, and was in a moment out of sight, while the old dame, with the willing help of the girls, bound the despoiled rascal tightly, and thrust him into a hen-coop with unnecessary violence. Whether the man died of fright, or whether some darker fate befell him, Hume never found out, but in the morning he saw that the coop was empty.
Before daybreak Sirayo returned, cool and uninjured, with the report that the people had already set out to bury the dead, and that they fully believed that he and Hume had fled. Then he rolled himself in his blanket and slept soundly till morn, when he awoke to eat heartily, and then to play and talk with the girls, who were merry enough, no matter what part they might have taken in the disappearance of the witch-doctor.
They remained within the shelter of their retreat through the day, and in the night, with the laughing help of the girls, they made strange noises by the river, and bore aloft on poles weird globes of light to frighten the natives and imbue them with respect for the sanctity of the deserted side of the valley. Those mysterious, pale, and ghostly globes that flitted in the air were but the rinds of hollowed pumpkins, luminous from the light of burning tinder within; but they produced a great sensation on the people, who on the following day crossed the river with presents of food which they placed round the Golden Rock. This was, however, an unwelcome sign of respect, and when the darkness once brought down hundreds of people to the river to watch for the globes of spirit-light, they saw suddenly a horrid face literally blaze out of the night, with a tongue of flame and fiery eyes, while a slow, solemn, thunderous voice bade them keep to their huts, lest they should be driven into the water. That lesson was enough for the credulous folk; the hollowed pumpkin with the punctured eyes and mouth was put away, Sirayo dallied with the girls, and Hume, with the crowbar he had carried from the waggon, slowly bored into the carved rock.
In the still nights when the wide valley was hushed in silence, except only for the melancholy howl of a jackal, he laboured to destroy that old, old work of human hands, done in a time long past. It was eerie work, and there were times when he would lay down his tool and stare at the menacing head of the great snake, then take a slow look around him. It was very quiet, and the darkness shut him in like a wall, but that still, erect head he could always see outlined as he sat, against the stars, and one night suddenly he thought of the lone hermit of the river and shivered. It seemed that there were strange forms peering at him also, undefined, shadowy shapes with muffled faces. He stood up, looked around him fiercely, as though he would invite his fancies to take shape so that he might confront them, then he ran blindly away. In the daylight he smiled bitterly at his fears, but that night again the forbidding phantoms crowded thick and thicker on his imagination, until, without accomplishing a stroke, he once more fled from his task.
“You have seen,” said Sirayo, as he looked at Hume’s face by the light of the fire. “What have you seen?”
“I am a child again, chief. I am frightened by shadows.”
“See,” said the old woman solemnly; “I said they would come.”
“Yebo!” said Sirayo, “a rock is a rock, and it cannot speak; but when men have breathed into it, have put themselves into it, have taken it into their inmost thoughts, it is no longer a rock. No man has said that I fear, but yet if, not knowing of it, I came on that rock in the night, I should be afraid. Leave it, my friend, lest the spirit take possession of you, and you start and mutter, and grow wild-eyed.”