“Nay, O Chia’gnosi, he would not; for it was the Great One himself who ordered me to come to thee,” replied ’Mfuni. “He gave me to thee; and the king does not go back from his word.”
“Very well. In that case thou mayst remain, and glad shall I be to have thee,” said I. “And now, let me look at thy hand; I must see what can be done to heal the hurt that the sword inflicted upon thee.”
The gash seemed to be a rather severe one, practically incapacitating the member for the time being, and it took me the best part of half an hour to extract the splinters of bone and bind up the wound, during which time I must have inflicted a good deal of pain upon the poor fellow, for the perspiration streamed down his face like rain. Yet all the time he sat motionless and impassive as a statue, never moving a muscle or shrinking in the least.
Before I had finished with my surgery, Mapela and the rest of the chiefs turned up, in response to my invitation to call at the wagon to receive the gifts which I proposed to distribute among them; and I soon gathered, from their conversation, that ’Mfuni’s story was perfectly true, and that the king had indeed given the man to me as a present.
To distribute gifts to nearly one hundred chiefs proved to be a somewhat lengthy business, also it made a pretty severe inroad into my stock of “truck”; still, it had to be done, and I could only hope that, in the long run, my generosity would not be without its reward. I treated them all alike, or practically so, giving each man a yard of thin copper wire, a gill measure of mixed beads, and either a bandana handkerchief or a yard of printed calico.
And while the distribution was proceeding my visitors chatted volubly with me, and still more volubly with each other, the principal topic of interest, I soon discovered, being the festival which was to commence one hour after daybreak on the morrow, and to last all through the day and well on into the hours of the succeeding night. The chiefs conversed with the utmost freedom in my presence and hearing, but at the outset I was too much engrossed in the business of distributing gifts to pay very much attention to what was said, a stray word or two here and there being all that I caught at first. At length, however, it began to dawn upon me that the so-called “festival” promised to be anything rather than festive, if I had not completely misunderstood the trend of certain of the remarks which had attracted my attention, and accordingly I pricked up my ears, and began to ask a few questions. And then I learned, to my horror, that the first feature of the festival, namely, the “smelling out” of the king’s secret enemies by the witch doctors, was more likely to resemble closely an orgy of wholesale murder than anything else that I could imagine.
The ceremony, I gathered, was somewhat as follows. The “witch doctors” or magicians of the nation—numbering in all something over a hundred—all of whom were then in Gwanda for the purposes of the ceremony, would assemble at sunset that same evening in a sort of fetish house; and there, under the leadership and direction of one Machenga, the head or chief witch doctor, would perform certain mysterious rites, and submit themselves to a certain mysterious form of treatment, lasting the entire night, which, it was generally understood, would enable them infallibly to “smell out” or detect every individual who might harbour evil thoughts or designs against the king. And these unfortunates, it appeared, would, upon detection, be haled forth and summarily executed there and then! I learned, further, that while the king put the most implicit faith in the infallibility of the witch doctors, and especially in that of Machenga, the head or chief of them, a few of the indunas who were then talking to me held rather strongly to the opinion that the selection of victims was not so much the result of supernatural guidance and wisdom vouchsafed to the witch doctors, as it was—at least in the case of the more important and distinguished victims—governed rather by Machenga’s personal hatred, or his cupidity; a few of the shrewder observers having noticed, each year, that the chosen victims invariably included certain men toward whom the head witch doctor was well known to cherish a feeling of strong enmity, while other victims comprised those chiefs who were numbered among the richest men in the community—the law being that, while the property of the alleged traitors was forfeited to the king, half of it was surrendered to the head witch doctor, as his fee for the detection of the criminals. Mapela, “the Wise One”, was one of the strongest upholders of the above theory, and in support of the soundness of it he whispered to me:
“You see that tall induna yonder, talking with two others? Yes, the man with the necklace of lions’ teeth. He is Logwane, reputed to be the most wealthy induna. For a number of years he has paid heavy tribute to Machenga, thus purchasing immunity from being ‘smelled out’; but during this last year he has become a favourite of the Great, Great One, and presuming upon this, I understand that now he has refused to pay further tribute to Machenga, and has defied him. Mark my words: he will be among those smelled out to-morrow!”
“You think so?” I whispered back. “And, if so, what will be his fate?”
“Chiele (slain)!” answered Mapela tersely, accompanying the word with an expressive movement of his right hand, imitative of a man stabbing another.