Swallow: A Tale of the Great TrekHaggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
History
Swallow: A Tale of the Great Trek
Haggard, H. Rider (Henry Rider)
Historical fiction; South Africa -- History -- Great Trek, 1836-1840 -- Fiction; Transvaal (South Africa) -- Fiction
So we married, and within a year our daughter was born and christened
by the family name of Suzanne after me, though almost from her cradle
the Kaffirs called her “Swallow,” I am not sure why. She was a very
beautiful child from the first, and she was the only one, for I was ill
at her birth and never had any more children. The other women with
their coveys of eight and ten and twelve used to condole with me about
this, and get a sharp answer for their pains. I had one which always
shut their mouths, but I won’t ask the girl here to set it down. An
only daughter was enough for me, I said, and if it wasn’t I shouldn’t
have told them so, for the truth is that it is best to take these
things as we find them, and whether it be one or ten, to declare that
that is just as we would wish it. I know that when we were on the great
trek and I saw the _kinderchies_ of others dying of starvation, or
massacred in dozens by the Kaffir devils, ah! then I was glad that we
had no more children. Heartaches enough my ewe lamb Suzanne gave me
during those bitter years when she was lost. And when she died, having
lived out her life just before her husband, Ralph Kenzie, went on
commando with his son to the Zulu war, whither her death drove him, ah!
then it ached for the last time. When next my heart aches it shall be
with joy to find them both in Heaven.
CHAPTER II.
HOW SUZANNE FOUND RALPH KENZIE
Our farm where we lived in the Transkei was not very far from the
ocean; indeed, any one seated on the _kopje_ or little hill at the back
of the house, from the very top of which bubbles a spring of fresh
water, can see the great rollers striking the straight cliffs of the
shore and spouting into the air in clouds of white foam. Even in warm
weather they spout thus, but when the south-easterly gales blow then
the sight and the sound of them are terrible as they rush in from the
black water one after another for days and nights together. Then the
cliffs shiver beneath their blows, and the spray flies up as though it
were driven from the nostrils of a thousand whales, and is swept inland
in clouds, turning the grass and the leaves of the trees black in its
breath. Woe to the ship that is caught in those breakers and ground
against those rocks, for soon nothing is left of it save scattered
timbers shivered as though by lightning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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