By Veldt and Kopje

by W. C. Scully

A shudder passed through the crouching creatures; one or two of the women began to whimper and a few near the verge drew back with looks of terror. Mangèlè sprang to his feet.

“What is this?” he cried in an angry voice; “has ‘the sickness’ filled your heart as well as your bones with water, O ’Mpofu, my father? Is yours the voice that calls dogs thirsty for death back from the fountain? Was it not your word that made me the leader of this army of dead men who are yet alive—and will you now turn them back on the day of battle? Shame on you. Listen to me, oh, my brothers, and not to this old man whose heart shrinks because of a sound he heard on a day before we were born. I am young, and death is more bitter to the young than to the old. My kraal is full of cattle; the dowry has been paid for my bride, yet I stand here to-day and am not afraid to die. Listen now to a new word in a strange tongue, but a word which you nevertheless may understand if you will:

“For a long time I have known that my sickness was like your own—the sickness that no doctor can cure. Through the long nights, when others slept, I have sat alone under the stars, and the voices of the darkness have taught me many things. Now, the greatest and strangest of these things was this: that I loved you who have suffered through your long lives what I am but beginning to suffer, and it is out of that love that I have brought you here to-day to put an end to your pain. Out of the darkness came another strange word—a word which has taught me how to die, to die with my eyes open; but I could not bear to die and leave you helpless in the pain you have endured so long. All this is the wisdom which I have learned from those voices of which the darkness is full.”

When Mangèlè ceased speaking his hearers broke out into loud wailing. One of the women crept shrinkingly to the verge of the precipice, glanced over the edge, and drew back with a shriek. Then she covered her face with her blanket and lay upon the ground, grovelling. The others, who had silently watched her, broke into renewed and terror-stricken wails as she drew back. Mangèlè once more began to speak, a note of thunder in his voice; all at once shrank into silence.

“This will I do for the sake of the love I bear you, and for that ye know not your own minds, nor what is good for you; this will I do because my heart is strong where yours is weak: I will hurl you one by one over the rock and then follow you myself. Look your last upon the sun, oh my brothers and sisters whom I love, for you are about to die.”

At this the wretched creatures grovelled about Mangèlè’s feet, beseeching him to spare their lives. They would, they said, go to Emjanyana and live peacefully like cattle in the kraal of their father, the Government. Their hearts were full of water; they were old and weak. They would not have minded death by shooting, at the Residency, but this was an evil place which bore a bad name from the most ancient days. The House of Death was cold and the road to it, over the steep cliff and the sharp stone beneath, painful. Even though they were sick they still could feel the warmth of the sun. If he loved them, let Mangèlè leave them until Death came of his own accord and sought them out.

Mangèlè stood with bent head in the middle of the prostrate crowd and listened to their piteous pleadings. When at length he lifted his face a change had come over it—a wistful, transfiguring gentleness had taken the place of the look of stern indignation it had borne when he last spoke. Silencing the wailing creatures with a gesture, he said:

“Peace, peace; your words have made me weak. Live, then, since you fear to die.”

Mangèlè stepped from among the crouching throng and took his stand on the very verge of the cliff. The sun was just about to disappear; its last level beams swept across the world and seemed to search out and reveal every noble curve and graceful line in the ebon limbs and trunk of the splendidly proportioned man who was about to destroy his beauty to save it from loathsome decay—they lit the noble face and head until these took on a sublime look of leonine anguish and the sombre eyes seemed to glare a tremendous indictment against Nature and Fate.

“Farewell, brothers and sisters who have not been taught how to die. Tell the girl Nosèmbè that my thoughts were of her as I sped to the sharp rocks.”