Our fine new school-house was finished and opened at the end of the year. We had most successful opening services, at which the queen’s representative was present. He also handed the prizes to the 336 who had distinguished themselves in the examinations.
The congregations all over the district continued to keep up well; most of the churches were well filled at the Sabbath services. The attendance at these services was not in every case due to fervent piety or the desire for instruction. Many only desired to stand well with the local chiefs and the authorities. Still, whatever their motives may have been, it was well that they were there; for while they were in church they were at least out of the way of much temptation to evil, and they heard the Word of God, which was blessed to many who were led to see themselves as sinners, and to seek Him Who came to seek and to save the lost.
The congregations made most marked progress during that year in the grace of generosity to the cause of God, and for the support of the school teachers. The previous year, the twelve small churches under the charge of the trained evangelist had raised their share of his salary for the year—£4 16s.—in advance, the first time that such a thing had been done; but during that year the unprecedented sum of £30, equal to them to £150, was raised in the district a whole year in advance, to pay the people’s share of the salaries of six trained teachers settled among them, and four evangelists about to be settled. Such a thing had never been done before in the history of the island. We felt very pleased and thankful for what we had been able to teach the people to do; the more so, as we had the satisfaction of knowing that we were not only the first, but up till then, at least, the only missionaries in the island who had been able to persuade the Malagasy to raise such a very large sum a whole year in advance in order to pay their share of the salaries of their teachers and evangelists.
Now and then in some quarters there were signs below the surface of remnants of heathenism and semi-heathenism. We had some displays of this nature during the epidemic, when many were panic-stricken. We had one sad sample during that year of the heathenism still remaining brought to light by the death of the young wife of one of our trained teachers. Her parents, although they attended the village church occasionally, were evidently heathens at heart. Her father was a retired Hova governor, reputed to be rich. He made a great funeral feast, for which a number of oxen, sheep, and pigs were killed. The corpse of his daughter was rolled in thirty-four silk làmbas (plaids), while all the best and most expensive dresses and ornaments, &c., belonging to herself and her mother, were placed in the family tomb along with the corpse. Money to the amount of £2 4s., equivalent to £11, was put into her grave-clothes for expenses in the other world, while £3, equivalent to £15, was paid to the so-called musicians who made day and night hideous by their discordant noises from the time of her death to that of her burial, to keep the bad spirits at a distance, and little wonder if they did! In all, £83 2s. 9d., equivalent to £415 13s. 9d., was worse than wasted over the funeral of that poor girl by her heathen parents.
In my long journeys in Madagascar, I always suffered from the heat—a sort of mild form of something of the nature of heat-apoplexy I should suppose—and hence in our journeys from our station to the capital or back, we always started very early in the morning, generally at four, often at two o’clock, so as to get to the journey’s end before the hottest and most exhausting part of the day—about three in the afternoon. Though generally suffering from headache by the time I got in, a night’s rest as a rule set me right again.
Twice had that long weary journey home from the capital to be undertaken by moonlight. I got a lady’s palanquin—a long oblong box made of strips of sheepskin fastened to two long poles—and lay down in it with a rug over me to protect me from the dews of the night, covered my face with my helmet, and tried to sleep, but not with much success.
I arrived at home suffering from very severe headache, which lasted for the following four days. A night’s rest was enough to free me from headache from exposure to sunlight, but it took four days to do so from that of exposure to moonlight. I could not understand this at first, nor till the text came into my mind: ‘The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.’ The moon smites, in some senses, more severely than the sun, and the effects remain longer. Of course if the effects of the rays of the sun reach the point of sunstroke, the result is far worse than anything the moon can do.
CHAPTER XII
GATHERING CLOUDS
‘The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’—Habakkuk ii. 14.
An embassy was sent by the British government to Madagascar in the summer of 1880. The late Admiral Gore-Jones and his staff went up to the capital and spent some time there in interviewing the queen and prime minister and in interchanging courtesies. Ostensibly his mission was to remonstrate about the slave trade on the west coast, to offer assistance in putting it down, even to the carrying of Hova troops to be placed at stations along the coast. Some suspected at the time that that was but a blind, and that the admiral had a secret mission; and it has been asserted by those who profess to know that he was sent out to feel the pulse of the Madagascar government, and find out not merely whether any wish for a British protectorate existed, but to definitely offer one if there were any likelihood of its being accepted.