“Gaze and be happy! The good Msimu is sitting over there in the white hut on the back of the large elephant, and the large elephant obeys it like a slave obeys his master and a child obeys his mother. Oh, neither you nor your fathers have ever seen anything like this——”
“No, no! We have never seen anything like this! Yancig! Yancig!”
The eyes of all the warriors turned to the “hut,” in other words, to the palanquin.
And Kali, who in the course of the religious training he had received on Linde Mountain had been told that faith can move mountains, was quite convinced that the prayer of the white “Bibi” was all powerful with God, and so he continued to speak, as he thought truthfully, about the good Msimu.
“Listen! Listen! The good Msimu is riding on the elephant to that country in which the sun rises out of the water behind the mountains. There the good Msimu will tell the Great Spirit to send you clouds, and these clouds will, in seasons of drought, water your millet, your manioc, your bananas, and the grass in the jungle, so that you will have plenty to eat, and your cows will have good fodder and will give rich milk. Do you, oh people, need food and milk?”
“He! We need it! We need it!”
“And the good Msimu will tell the Great Spirit to send you a wind which will blow away from your village that sickness which honeycombs the body. Do you, oh people, want it to blow the sickness away?”
“He! Let it blow it away!”
“And at the prayer of the good Msimu the Great Spirit will protect you from attacks, from slavery, from damage to your fields, from lions, from panthers, from snakes and from locusts——”
“He! Let him do it!”