Maiwa's Revenge; Or, The War of the Little HandHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
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Maiwa's Revenge; Or, The War of the Little Hand
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Africa -- Fiction; Hunting guides -- Fiction; Quatermain, Allan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Revenge -- Fiction
“Next day we spent in preparations for departure. Mine consisted
chiefly in superintending the digging up of the stockade of ivory
tusks, which I did with the greatest satisfaction. There were some five
hundred of them altogether. I made inquiries about it from Every, who
told me that the stockade had been there so long that nobody seemed to
know exactly who had collected the tusks originally. There was,
however, a kind of superstitious feeling about them which had always
prevented the chiefs from trying to sell this great mass of ivory.
Every and I examined it carefully, and found that although it was so
old its quality was really as good as ever, and there was very little
soft ivory in the lot. At first I was rather afraid lest, now that my
services had been rendered, Nala should hesitate to part with so much
valuable property, but this was not the case. When I spoke to him on
the subject he merely said, ‘Take it, Macumazahn, take it; you have
earned it well,’ and, to speak the truth, though I say it who
shouldn’t, I think I had. So we pressed several hundred Matuku bearers
into our service, and next day marched off with the lot.
“Before we went I took a formal farewell of Maiwa, whom we left with a
bodyguard of three hundred men to assist her in settling the country.
She gave me her hand to kiss in a queenly sort of way, and then said,
“‘Macumazahn, you are a brave man, and have been a friend to me in my
need. If ever you want help or shelter, remember that Maiwa has a good
memory for friend and foe. All I have is yours.
“And so I thanked her and went. She was certainly a very remarkable
woman. A year or two ago I heard that her father Nala was dead, and
that she had succeeded to the chieftainship of both tribes, which she
ruled with great justice and firmness.
“I can assure you that we ascended the pass leading to Wambe’s town
with feelings very different from those with which we had descended it
a few days before. But if I was grateful for the issue of events, you
can easily imagine what poor Every’s feelings were. When we got to the
top of the pass, before the whole impi he actually flopped down upon
his knees and thanked Heaven for his escape, the tears running down his
face. But then, as I have said, his nerves were shaken—though now that
his beard was trimmed and he had some sort of clothes on his back, and
hope in his heart, he looked a very different man from the poor wretch
whom we had rescued from death by torture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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