And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of the
wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He will go
to the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will get
accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the new
fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: and
at last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying--"Oh
great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and I
will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatter
you, and worship you, and you shall be my king."
And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysterious
bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, and
fear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surely
would, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell his
children not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the wasp-king, and he will
send his children, and sting you all to death." Vanity and ambition will
have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie. The man
will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them
when he has repeated them a dozen times.
And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of
the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children
after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the
fetish of their tribe.
And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The wasp
will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy. The new
chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must sting like
wasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build like
wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they
will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.
Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They will boast that their
king's father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole
tribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym
hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to
build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive