“The wife of Sikulumè comes in the early morning with her sick child. She has held it to her breast for many days and nights. It eats not. It gets thinner day by day. It coughs from the rising of the sun to the falling of the darkness, and again until day comes.”
Here he gathered up the bones and again flung them to the ground.
“The delight of the child before it got sick, was to play with fire. The ‘imishologu’ (ancestral spirits) meant the child to be one who would sport with danger.”
Here he again gathered up the bones, waved them to and fro, and scattered them on the ground. Madilenda sat gazing with wide eyes. Her features were drawn and set. She held the child, which once more slept, tightly to her bosom. The witch-doctor continued:
“The ‘great wife’ of Sikulumè had anger against the child in her heart. She dreamt a dream which made her fearful. Then she went to the wise woman of the Vinyanè, who told her that this child would overcome the sons of her house as the autumn fires overcome the grass.”
Madilenda sat like a statue with eyes aflame. Lotuba threw the bones again, and continued:
“She told her husband of this, and he too feared for the sons of his ‘great house’. In the night they talked over the matter, and they determined that the child should die, so they buried the magic medicines that draw the poison-lizard to the side of the sleeper, in the floor of the hut of the child’s mother. Soon afterwards the child sickened. He will die before the coming of the spring rains, for no skill can save him.”
Madilenda waited for no more. She arose, left the hut, and walked down along the pathway by which she had come, clasping little Tobè to her breaking heart.
After walking a few hundred yards she turned abruptly to the right and ran swiftly along another footpath which led over a saddle to the next valley, in which her brother, Galonkulu, dwelt.