“The dark places of the earth are full
Of the habitations of cruelty.”
Psalm lxxiv.
“Whose graves are set in the sides of the pit.”
Ezekiel XXXII, 23.
The Death of the Chief
The old chief of the Amagamedse tribe lay dying in his hut. It was a warm summer’s evening, with a sense of moisture on the almost silent breeze, which was borne from the other side of the valley, over which a slight thunder-storm had passed.
Umsoala, the chief, lay on a mat under which some dry grass had been spread to ease his loosened bones. He was partially propped against the body of old Dogolwana, his faithful and tried attendant. Dogolwana sat with his left arm around his beloved master’s waist. He had bravely sustained for a long time a painfully strained position.
Sitting silently on the ground, against the circular wall of the hut, were a number of old men and a few women, all clad in blankets, their knees drawn up to their chins. Between the centre-pole and the dying man sat a young woman, who held a little boy of about five years of age in her arms. On a log of wood, near the dying man’s feet, sat the Magistrate of the district and the District Surgeon. They had been hurriedly sent for on the previous day when the paralytic stroke, which was putting a sudden period to the old chief’s existence, had fallen.
The dying chief was a man of enormous build. He was covered by a blanket to the middle, but his trunk and arms, gaunt and wrinkled with age, were bare. His chest did not heave, as he was breathing from the diaphragm. His face was grey and shrunken, and but for the eyes, which were bright and lively, one might have almost thought him already dead.
After his lips had been moistened with water brought by the young woman in a cleft calabash, the chief spoke, his voice at first broken and trembling, but gaining steadiness and volume under the stimulus of excitement as he proceeded:
“I am dying alone... alone... for a man is alone when his children desert him. Where are my sons? Have they not been sent for?”
Old Dogolwana replied in a low tone:
“Yes, my chief and father.”