He nodded more gravely. “I believe I can,” he said.
“I shall tell you a little story that seems to me singularly arresting and tender. True, I believe that it may arrest me because it occurred in a village—or perhaps I should say a town—which I have visited but once though I have often tried to get back to it again. Now I shall never go. Very likely it is for that reason, then, that it lingers in my memory as a place of great beauty, though in my opinion there are other causes. However, let me begin by describing it to you.
“From the slopes of Kilimanjaro you can look westwards to Mweru, a still active volcano little known and rarely visited, and from Mweru a chain of heights runs west once more till they end abruptly almost in a precipice that descends to the plain. At its foot rises a small river, bubbling up from half a dozen springs in a slight depression, and flowing swiftly off, very clear and cool, towards the great lake which is visible on the horizon from the mountain behind. Just below the pool of the source, on the right bank, shaded with trees, ringed with giant aloes and set in fields of millet and maize, stands a somewhat remarkable native town. There is stone in the hills, and the natives have drawn and worked it for their huts—not a usual thing in tropical Africa. They may, of course, have learned the lore themselves, or some wandering Arab traders may have taught them; but I have another idea, as you shall hear. Be that as it may, there the neat houses stand—grey walls, brown thatch, small swept yards of trodden earth before them within the rings of neat reed fencing. Great willows grow along the bank and trail their hanging tendrils in the water, and the brown kiddies swing from them and go splashing into the stream with shouts of delight. The place is remote, and in a corner out of the path of marauding tribes. Not too easy to find, its folk are peaceable, and I can see it again as I saw it on my first visit when, from the height of the precipice behind, I could make out the thin spires of smoke rising on the evening air and just perceive the brown herds of cattle drifting slowly homewards to the protecting kraals.
“The tribe is a branch of the Bonde, iron workers and a settled folk. How they came to be there, so far north and west of the main stock of their people, I do not know, but of course one comes across that kind of thing fairly commonly and the explanation is nearly always the same. Fear of some kind drove out a family who wandered, like Abram from Charron, until they found a promised land. These folk knew that they came from the south and east a long long time ago; more they neither knew nor cared to know. They were not many in number, and although Arab safaris had passed by, they were not enough to tempt a permanent trader to cross the barren lands north and south, or dare the mountain way from Mweru. The chief’s oldest councillor spoke to me of a slave-raid that had been defeated when he was a young man, but since then they had dwelt in peace. No European had been there within living memory.
“Such was, and may be still, the town of Mtakatifuni, as I shall call it. Do you know Ki-Swahili?”
I shook my head.
“Then the name will do, and not spoil my tale. Let me but tell you how I came to be there and I will make haste about it. I was exploring. Ah, but once in all the years have I been able to explore! Usually we missionaries hurry from place to place on an unending round till the circle is as big as we can possibly manage. Then a new centre must be made, and it was because my Order had determined on a new centre that my opportunity came. The Vicar Apostolic was doubtful as to the direction in which we should expand. He sent me, therefore, west beyond Mweru to see what could be seen, and another farther south on the same errand. The folk were few about Mweru, but I heard a rumour of Mtakatifuni, much exaggerated, and set out to find it. Foolishly I went west until supplies were so low that it would have been fatal to turn back over the bare mountains by which we had come, and our only hope lay in pushing on. And so I reached my hidden town, stayed a while, and returned another way, to find that the other explorer had a report to make of more peopled and easier lands which found greater favour with his lordship. And rightly. When labourers are so few and the field is so big, it is necessary to settle where the work offers most prospect of large returns. So was I permitted to see, but not to enter in.”
He leant forward to knock out his pipe, blew down it, refused more tobacco, and re-settled himself. “Ah, well,” he said philosophically, “le Bon Dieu knows best. I do not believe He has forgotten Mtakatifuni.
“Where was I? Oh yes, I remember. We saw the place then, in the evening, and next morning journeyed early towards it. You must understand that we were spent. I cannot recall better water than that at the source of that little river, and the roasted mealies they gave us, and sour milk, how good it all was! The chief had sent word that we were to be fed and given an empty house, and after I had eaten I went to see and thank him. I put on my cassock and with it my beads about my waist, and I carried my breviary in my hand, for I thought he might keep me waiting in the native fashion and that I could say my office in the meantime.
“But he received me at once. The ground rose a little and was built up too before his group of huts, terraced roughly and faced with stone, with steps at one end. A big block of stone stood near the edge of it, so that standing behind one looked east over the town to the mountains, and it was there, after a little, that I offered the Holy Sacrifice each remaining day of my stay. There was little linen in the place, and he stood to greet me at the top of the steps, clad in prepared skins, a youngish man and a fine figure of a savage king. He gave me later the twisted iron spear of state that he carried that day. It hangs in our church of the Holy Cross now, behind the altar of the Sacred Heart. Surely the Good God will not forget Mtakatifuni.