“Oh! he will not leave me.”
“Do you think he is as fond of you as I am?” replied Stasch somewhat impatiently.
All further conversation was interrupted by the approach of Kali, who brought the slain zebra with its young one, which had been bitten to death by Saba. It was a lucky thing for the bulldog that he had followed Kali, and had therefore not been present at the routing out of the snake, for the dog would have followed it, and had he come within its reach would have been squeezed to death in its coils long before Stasch could have come to the rescue. He received a box on the ears from Stasch for having torn to pieces the young zebra, but he did not seem to take this very much to heart, for he did not even put in his tongue, which had been hanging out ever since he came from the chase.
Meanwhile Stasch gave Kali to understand that he intended to arrange a dwelling-place in the tree, and told him what had happened when smoking out the tree-trunk, and what the elephant had done to the snake. The thought of living in the giant tree, which not only served as a protection against the rain, but also against wild animals, pleased the negro very much, but, on the other hand, the elephant’s behavior did not at all meet with his approval.
“The elephant is stupid,” said he, “and therefore he threw the ‘nioka’ (snake) into the rushing waters, but Kali knows that ‘nioka’ is very good to eat, and so he will fish it out of the water and roast it, for Kali is clever—and a donkey.”
“Yes, you are a donkey, all right,” answered Stasch. “You surely do not want to eat a snake.”
“Nioka is good,” said Kali.
And pointing to the dead zebra, he added:
“Better than this nyama.”
Then they both walked toward the baobab-tree and began to arrange the house. Kali took a flat stone, the shape of a large sieve, from the bank of the river, laid it down inside the tree-trunk, and put more and more burning wood on it, taking care that the rotten wood in the inside of the tree did not catch fire, which would have set the entire tree ablaze. He said that he did this so that nothing could bite the “Great Man” and the little “Bibi.” It was soon apparent that this was no unnecessary precaution, for no sooner had the wreaths of smoke filled the interior of the tree and rushed out than all kinds of vermin began to creep out of the broken bark—black and cherry-colored beetles, plum-sized hairy spiders, caterpillars covered with finger-long prickly hairs, and all sorts of horrible poisonous vermin, whose bite might even cause death. From what was taking place on the exterior of the trunk, it could readily be imagined that many similar insects were meeting their fate in the clouds of smoke within, and the insects which fell to the grass from the bark and the lower branches were unmercifully killed with stones by Kali, who all the time stared fixedly at the two openings in the hollow trunk as if afraid that some strange creature would appear at any minute.