"There! That is Umzilikazi's grave," said Christian Sybrandt, pointing
out a towering pile of rocks some little way off, across the valley.
"Is it? Let's go and have a look at it then," was the prompt reply.
But immediately upon having made it, the second speaker knew that he had
spoken like a fool, for the first gave a short laugh.
"Go over and have a look at it?" he echoed. "Why we'd all be cut to
bits before we got within half a mile. It's holy ground, man; guarded,
picketed by armed _majara_, rigidly watched, day and night. You
couldn't get near it, no, not at any price."
"Well, I've a great notion to try," persisted the other, to the
imaginative side of whose temperament the place of sepulture of that
remarkable savage, the remorseless, all-destroying war-leader, the
founder and consolidator of a martial nation, irresistibly appealed, no
less than the mystery and peril enshrouding the undertaking did to the
adventurous side. "No white man has ever seen it close, I think you
said, Sybrandt?"
"That's so. And you won't constitute the exception, Blachland. You'll
never get there; and, if you did, you'd never get away."
"Yet it would be interesting to constitute that exception," persisted
the other. "I like doing things that nobody else has done."
"Well, even if you escaped the five hundred to one chances against you,
you wouldn't have the satisfaction of talking about it--not as long as
you are in this country, at all events; for let even so much as a
whisper get about that you had done such a thing, and your life wouldn't
be worth a week's purchase."
The two men were riding over the site of the old Mahlahlanhlela Kraal--
distinguishable by its great circle of nearly overgrown hut floors, and
sherds of rude pottery, erewhile the head-quarters of a favourite
regiment of the Great King, whose tomb they were viewing. There it
rose, that tomb, away on the right, a great pile standing boldly against
the sky--prominent from the outermost edge of the rugged Matopo, all
tumbled rocks, and granite boulders and scant tree growth; in front, an
undulating sweep, bounded by the Inyoka ridge, the site of old Bulawayo.
The two men were dressed in serviceable and well-worn buckskin, and
carried rifles. Following a little distance behind them came a group of
natives, whose burden, the meat and other spoils of a young sable
antelope bull, testified to the nature of the errand from which they
were returning.
The countenance of both, darkened by sun and exposure, wore the same
expression of blended repose and latent alertness which a roving
up-country life seems invariably to produce. Sybrandt--he had dropped
the original "Van"--was Dutch by birth, though English by sympathies and
associations. Trader, hunter, gold-prospector, adventurer all round,
his life had been spent mainly on the confines of civilisation, or far
beyond the same; and what he did not know about natives, from the
Zambesi to Durban, from Inhambane to Walfisch Bay, nobody else did. He,
for his part, was no less known to them. "U' Klistiaan," as they called
him, in adaptation of his baptismal name, stood to them as a white man
who commanded their respect and confidence far and wide. Of cool
courage and unflinching resolution, a firm friend, and, while enmity
lasted, a determined and dangerous foe, he stood as high in the
estimation of the Zulu-speaking races as these qualifications could
place him, which is to say at the highest. He was a man of about forty;
in outward aspect of medium height and of sturdy and powerful build, his
dark hair and pointed beard just turning iron grey. His companion, whom
we heard him address by the name of Blachland, was something of a
mystery. Nobody knew much, if anything, about him, except that
originally he was an English importation with some years of up-country
experience, and that he came and went sporadically, disappearing for a
time, and turning up again as if he had been away about a week,
perfectly unexplanatory, uncommunicative, as to his doings in the
interim. He was a tall dark man, who might be any age compatible with a
hardy frame and untiring energy. A keen sportsman and keener
adventurer, he was ever on the look out for the possibilities underlying
up-country life; and, in curious contrast to his normally hard and
philosophic nature, was a tendency to fits of almost boyish excitement
and recklessness; which would break out when least expected, and with
apparently inadequate motive, and which were wont to land their owner in
positions of peril or difficulty, but which, by a curious compensating
element in nature, were none the less available to extricate him
therefrom right at the critical moment.
Now he made no reply to his companion's very confident and more than
ominous forecast. But more than one wistful glance did he send in the
direction of the great natural mausoleum. The King's grave! This rock
sepulchre would hold all that was weird and uncommon, and into it no
European eye had ever gazed. That was sufficient for one of Hilary
Blachland's temperament.
Soon the last resting-place of Umzilikazi, the Great King, was hidden
from sight behind. A few miles more and a strange phenomenon as of a
mighty cloud of dust and smoke, crowning a distant eminence, broke upon
the view in front, and through it a vast cluster of round grass roofs,
from the silent throne of the dead the pair had turned to front the
throne of the living, pulsating with humanity and its primitive
impulses--Bulawayo, the great kraal of Lo Bengula, son of that
Umzilikazi whose bones lay within the sombre heart of that great rock
pile behind.
Not on this, however, were their steps bent. Down in the valley a camp
was set, and the white tents of three waggons rose among the scant bush
on the banks of the Matya'mhlope, at the foot of the abrupt ridge of
shining stones which gives to that insignificant river its name. And as
our two wayfarers gained it the sun dropped, and in this latitude
without twilight the night began to fall.
Two other white men were seated in camp as these two arrived. Like
Christian Sybrandt, Young and Pemberton were traders and hunters, and
looked it; whereas the presence of Hilary Blachland with the outfit was
inconsequent. But that word more than rather summed up Hilary
Blachland. He was all keenness, however, on anything new and strange,
and now the impression had grown and grown upon him that Umzilikazi's
grave came under both these qualifying adjectives.
Wherefore later, when the fire was roaring up brightly with red and
cheery glow, and the sable antelope steaks, hot and fizzing, had been
transferred from the frying-pan to the metal enamelled camp plates, he
must needs drag in the subject again.
Pemberton, the elder of the other two traders, whistled and shook his
heavy beard.
"It's a thing that won't bear meddling with," was his laconic dictum.
"Well, I should like to meddle with it to the extent of having a look at
it anyway," persisted Blachland. "Any one here ever seen it close, by
the way?"
"No, nor likely to," answered Young. "I saw it once, about a mile off;
near enough to get a good look at it through a glass. It's a tall
cleft, running right up the face of the boulder, and overhung by another
boulder like a porch. There's a tree in front too. I'd just time to
see so much when a lot of _majara_, spotting my binoculars, started for
me, yelling like blazes. I judged it wise to take a bee-line for
Bulawayo, and get under old Lo Ben's wing; but they ran me hard all the
way--got there nearly as soon as I did, and clamoured to be allowed to
kill me. Lo Ben wouldn't have that, but he hinted to me quietly that
the country wouldn't be healthy for a year or so, and I took the hint.
No, take my advice and leave it alone. Apart from the risk, there's no
luck meddling with such places--no, none."
"Oh, skittles about luck. It's the risk I take count of, and that only.
The fact is, Young, you old up-country men are as superstitious as
sailors," returned Blachland, with that strange, eager restlessness
which now and then, and generally unexpectedly, obtruded to give the lie
to his ordinarily calm and immobile demeanour. "I'll risk the
_majara_--luck doesn't count,--and sooner or later I'll explore
Umzilikazi's grave."
Sybrandt was conscious of what, in a less self-contained man, would have
been an obvious start at these words. A dark form had glided silently
in among them all. It was only one of their camp servants, but--a
native of the country. What if he had heard--had understood? He knew
some English too!
"Even if you got through the pickets of _majara_, Blachland," struck in
Sybrandt, when this man had retired; "you'd have another factor to
reckon with. The King's Snake."
"Eh?"
"The King's Snake."
Blachland spluttered. "See here, Sybrandt," he said. "Are you
seriously trying to fill me up? Me, mind? No, it can't be."
"Well, the Matabele say there's a big snake mounting guard over
Umzilikazi's remains. It is the King's spirit which has passed into the
snake. That is why the snake comes in such a lot when they go
periodically and give the _sibonga_ at his grave."
"And you believe that?"
"They say so."
"What sort of a snake is it?"
"A black _imamba_. Mind you, I've never seen it."
"Don't you be so cocksure about everything, Blachland," grunted
Pemberton, who was fast dropping asleep. "Luck or no luck, there's
mighty rum things happen you can't explain, nor scare up any sort of
reason for."
"Won't do--no, not for half a minute," returned the other, briskly and
decisively. "You can explain everything; and as for luck, and all that
sort of thing--why, it's only fit for old women, and the lower orders."
Pemberton grunted again, and more sleepily still. His pipe at that
moment fell out of his mouth, and he lurched over, fast asleep.
Sybrandt, too, was nodding, but through his drowsiness he noticed that
the native, a low-class Matabele, Hlangulu by name, was moving about, as
though trying to sidle up near enough to catch some of the conversation.
He was drowsy, however, and soon dropped off.
Blachland, sitting there, felt anything but inclined for sleep. This
new idea had caught on to his mind with a powerful hold. It was full of
risk, and the object to be attained _nil_. The snake story he dismissed
as sheer savage legend, childish and poor even as such. The luck
theory, propounded by Pemberton, smacked of the turnip-fed lore of the
average chaw-bacon in rural England. No, the risk lay in the
picket-guard. That, to his mind, constituted the real peril, and the
only one. It, however, might be avoided; and, the more he thought about
it, the more resolved was Hilary Blachland to penetrate the forbidden
recess, to explore the tomb of the warrior King, and that at any risk.
Strangely wakeful, he lounged there, filling and lighting pipe after
pipe of good Magaliesberg. The stars gleamed forth from the dark vault,
so bright and clear and lamp-like in the glow of night in those high,
subtropical latitudes, that it seemed as though the hand had but to be
stretched forth to grasp them. Away over the veldt, jackals yelped; and
the glimmer of the camp fire, dying low, emboldened the hungry little
beasts to come nearer and nearer, attracted by the fresh meat brought in
during that afternoon. The native followers, their heads in their
blankets, had ceased their sonorous hum of gossip, and were mingling
their snores with the somewhat discomforting sounds emitted by the
nostrils of Pemberton. Away on the northern sky-line, a faint glow
still hung, and from time to time a muffled snatch of far-away song. A
dance of some sort was in late progress at the King's kraal, but such
had no novelty for Blachland. The exploration of the King's grave,
however, had; and he could think upon nothing else. Yet, could he have
foreseen, his companions had uttered words of sound wisdom. He had
better have left Umzilikazi's sepulchre severely alone.