Mazooku explained that he had bought the rig-out for three pound ten from a second-class passenger, as the weather was growing cold.
“Do not wear them again. I will buy you clothes as soon as we get to England. If you are cold, wear your great-coat.”
“Koos!”
“How is ‘The Devil’?” Ernest had brought the black stallion on which he had escaped from Isandhlwana home with him.
Mazooku replied that the horse was well, but playful. A man forward had been teasing him with a bit of bread. He had waited till that man passed under his box, and had seized him in his teeth, lifted him off the ground by his coat, and shaken him severely.
“’Good! Give him a bran-mash to-night.”
“Koos!”
“And so you find the air cold. Are you not regretting that you came? I warned you that you would regret.”
“Ou ka Inkoos” (“O no, chief”), the Zulu answered, in his liquid native tongue. “When first we came upon the smoking ship, and went out on to the black water out of which the white men rise, and my bowels twisted up and melted within me, and I went through the agonies of a hundred deaths, then I regretted. ‘O, why,’ I said in my heart, ‘did not Mazimba my father kill me rather than bring me on to this great moving river? Surely if I live I shall grow like a white man from the whiteness of my heart, for I am exceedingly afraid, and have cast all my inside forth.’ All this I said, and many more things which I cannot remember, but they were dark and heavy things. But behold! my father, when my bowels ceased to melt, and when new ones had grown to replace those which I had thrown forth, I was glad, and did eat much beef, and then I questioned my heart about this journey over the black water. And my heart answered and said, ‘Mazooku, son of Ingoluvu, of the tribe of the Maquilisini, of the people of the Amazulu, you have done well. Great is the chief whom you serve; great is Mazimba on the hunting-path; great was he in the battle; all the Undi could not kill him, and his brother the lion (Jeremy), and his servant the jackal (Mazooku), who hid in a hole and then bit those who digged. O yes, Mazimba is great, and his breast is full of valour; you have seen him strike the Undi down; and his mind is full of the white man’s knowledge and discretion; you have seen him form the ring that spat out fire so fast that his servants the horsemen were buried under the corpses of the Undi. So great is he, that the “heaven above” smelled him out as “tagati,” as a wizard, and struck him with their lightning, but could not kill him then.’ And so now my father wanders and wanders, and shall wander in the darkness, seeing not the sun or the stars, or the flashing of spears, or the light that gathers in the eyes of brave men as they close in the battle, or the love which gleams in the eyes of women. And how is this? Shall my father want a dog to lead him in his darkness? Shall his dog Mazooku, son of Ingoluvu, prove a faithless dog, and desert the hand that fed him, and the man who is braver than himself? No, it shall not be so, my chief and my father. By the head of Chaka, whither thou goest thither will I go also, and where thou shalt build thy kraal there shall I make my hut. Koos! Baba!”
And having saluted after the dignified Zulu fashion, Mazooku departed to tie up his split trousers with a bit of string. There was something utterly incongruous between his present appearance and his melodious and poetical words, instinct as they were with qualities which in some respects make the savage Zulu a gentleman, and put him above the white Christian, who for the most part regards the “nigger” as a creature beneath contempt. For there are lessons to be learned even from Zulu “niggers,” and among them we may reckon those taught by a courage which laughs at death; an absolute fidelity to those who have the right to command it, or the qualities necessary to win it; and, in their raw and unconverted state, perfect honesty and truthfulness.