Mavakala, accompanied by many of the men and lads of the town, was led to the bare top of a neighbouring hill, where a rough shanty of palm fronds was built. The accused was pushed into this, and told to stretch out his arms, and not to touch anything. The ordeal-giver pushed a stone towards the poor wretch, with twenty-seven pieces of nkasa bark on it; and then he ground each piece of bark and slowly fed Mavakala with the powders.
During the process the accused man vomited three times, and should therefore have been set free and carried back to the town with shouts of honour; but was not the omen against him? and besides, was he not obnoxious to his jealous and superstitious neighbours?
Consequently, when the ordeal-giver proposed that further tests should be applied, there were none to lift up their voices in protest against the injustice of continuing the cruelty.
Mavakala was dazed with the narcotic effects of the drug that had been forced on him, and his wits were dulled and muddled. He was taken with rough hands from the temporary hut and made to stand by himself, a swaying, lonely, pathetic figure--a type of all those who have been persecuted or have laid down their lives for the sole crime of being in the vanguard of their generation.
While Mavakala stood swaying there, six twigs in rapid succession were thrown at his feet, and he as quickly had to name the trees to which they belonged. This he did successfully, and then he was told to name the birds and butterflies that were sailing by. Again he unerringly gave each its proper name; but now, just when he wanted his eyes to be at their keenest, he could feel them becoming blurred with the dregs of the drug he had been forced to take. His tormentors called on him to name the ants crawling at his feet. He faltered, stammered confusedly, and in stooping, that his poor, hazy eyes might have a better chance to recognize them, he fell, with a moaning cry, to the ground.
In an instant the heartless, superstitious crowd was on him; sticks and machets, knives and guns, soon did their work on the poor mangled body. None was too poor or mean to kick his carcass and spit in his face, and his bruised, gory corpse was left unburied upon the bare hill-top--a feast for the beasts of the forests and the birds of the air.
By and by the stars peeped out, half ashamed to look on a world where such tragedies were enacted, and as they looked they saw that thing there upon the bare hill-top. It was covered with wounds, and every wound had a tongue that cried to its God, and to their God: “How long, how long, shall darkness cover the land, and gross darkness the people?”
Chapter VIII
Visitors Arrive
The dulness and pettiness of native life--Arrival of two visitors--Bakula questions them about the white man--They relate the little they know about him--Old Plaited-Beard stirs the people up against the white man--They exchange their views about him--They agree to oppose him--The white man is seen approaching--He is driven from the town and has to sleep in the bush.
The excitement of the funeral festivities, and of the hunt for and murder of the witch had passed away, leaving a deadly dulness on the town. The men suspiciously snarled at one another, and the women quarrelled with monotonous regularity. Their lives were petty, mean, and there was not enough dignity in a whole village to supply one man. For generations they had lived on a low level, with their eyes, thoughts, and hearts on the ground, and apparently the art of looking into the infinite spaces of God above and around them had been lost in their animalism.