“Do not laugh at me,” said the old woman. “I am ugly now, but once I was young and beautiful as you are.”
The two sisters laughed at this, and ridiculed the old woman, and called her all the jeering names they could think of.
“Will you not bind up my wounds and give me water to drink?” asked the old woman.
But the sisters said that they had never heard of such impudence.
“Where are the bracelets and beads you have to give away?” asked the elder sister.
“Where are your mantles and kirtles with fringe?” asked the younger. “We come for these, not to waste our time on you. We must make haste and go home.”
“Indeed, I think you must,” said the old woman, “for this place is the home of a giant who comes in the form of wind and rain, and I hear him coming now!”
Then the hut sank under the waters, and the maidens found themselves standing on the bank without even their own beads to deck themselves with. That very moment they heard the wind and the rain sweeping through the trees, and they turned and ran as fast as their feet would carry them, back to their own village, while the wind and the rain howled behind them and the giant pelted them with stones.
All the people laughed and shouted over the ill fortune of the two selfish sisters. Nkunda, where she lay curled up at her mother’s side, fingered her beads and wondered if the youngest sister’s beads from beneath the waterfall could have been any prettier than these. In the part where the giant came in, the story sent delightful shivers down all their backs, for they could every one remember storms in which the great wind had shaken the trees like an invisible giant and the rain had come pelting down like stones. Sometimes, after a storm, the path of the wind through the forest looked like the track of a huge giant who had gone walking up and down, twisting off boughs and rooting up trees merely to show what he could do. During one of these storms the temperature often falls from thirty to forty degrees in half an hour.