“When the war was over I went back to look for Jacob and kill him at sight. But the devil had got the best of me. Jacob’s neck had been broken by the capsizing of a wagon... I often hear that laugh of his... Some day I’ll hear it in hell.”
Chapter Five.
The Seed of the Church.
“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”
Tertullian.
One
Matshaka sat on a stone on the highest south-eastern spur of the Intsiza Mountain, just overlooking the Rodè Wesleyan Mission Station, one Sunday morning in the month of November 1880, and listened to the faint throbbing of the church bell. Beyond the mission, the broken hills of Pondoland, divided by the winding Umzimvubu—“the river of the sea-cows”—stretched away towards the ocean until they merged with the sky in an opaline haze. Around the Intsiza and on the surrounding mountain ranges the air was clear; and the distant features of the landscape looked unnaturally near—an almost certain sign of imminent rain.
It was the season of thunder-storms. The sun beat fiercely into the glowing valleys, but on the mountain-tops the air was cool. Already the heavy cumulus clouds were curdling over the distant Drakensberg, and raising their white and shining masses over the near Xomlenzi range. In the course of a few hours they would unite and sweep over valley and mountain, with shoutings of thunder and wind, and volleys of lightning, hail, and rain.
Along the almost invisible footpaths the people could be seen approaching the church from many directions. They suggested ants slowly creeping to a nest. Matshaka looked at them and thought deeply. The light breeze that almost invariably streams for hours against an approaching thunder-storm carried to his ear the clear notes of the bell. The beats grouped themselves in sets of three: what was the bell trying to say? It seemed as if a word were being repeated over and over again in the ringing. At length he found it—“Intsiza, Intsiza, Intsiza;” that was the word. “Intsiza” in the Kafir language means “refuge.” The mountain was so called on account of its broken and involuted valleys which, in the oft-recurring inter-tribal wars between the Pondos, the Bacas, and the Xesibes, afforded a refuge to the vanquished. And now the church bell tolled out the word so clearly that Matshaka wondered how the thing could ever have puzzled him—“Intsiza, Intsiza, Intsiza.”