“My chief,” replied Dogolwana; “Philip, with your wife and children, is sleeping in the next hut on the left.”
Songoza gave one frightful shriek, and rushed forth as if driven by fiends.
Chapter Three.
Gquma; Or, The White Waif.
“A sun-child whiter than the whitest snows
Was born out of the world of sunless things
That round the round earth flows and ebbs and flows!”
Thalassius.
One
The fish had been biting splendidly since midnight, and when at dawn we ran the boat into a little creek which branched from the main lagoon between steep, shelving, rocky banks overhung with forest, we counted out eleven “kabeljouws,” the lightest of which must have weighed fifteen pounds, while the heaviest would certainly have turned the scale at fifty.
We laid them out, ’Nqalatè and I, on the smooth, cool rock shelves. The fish more recently caught were yet quivering, and the lovely pink and purple flushes still chased each other along their shining sides. ’Nqalatè, like all Kafirs, hated having to touch fish; he regarded them as water-snakes with a bad smell superimposed upon the ordinary-ophidian disadvantages. After cleansing the “kabeljouws” under my directions, he washed and re-washed his hands with great vigour; but, to judge by the expression of his face when he smelt them afterwards, the result of the scrubbing was not satisfactory.