England -- Fiction; Magic -- Fiction; South Africa -- Fiction
“Do not wear them again. I will buy you clothes as soon as we get to
England. If you are cold, wear your great-coat.”
“Koos!”
“How is ‘The Devil’?” Ernest had brought the black stallion on which he
had escaped from Isandhlwana home with him.
Mazooku replied that the horse was well, but playful. A man forward had
been teasing him with a bit of bread. He had waited till that man
passed under his box, and had seized him in his teeth, lifted him off
the ground by his coat, and shaken him severely.
“’Good! Give him a bran-mash to-night.”
“Koos!”
“And so you find the air cold. Are you not regretting that you came? I
warned you that you would regret.”
“Ou ka Inkoos” (“O no, chief”), the Zulu answered, in his liquid native
tongue. “When first we came upon the smoking ship, and went out on to
the black water out of which the white men rise, and my bowels twisted
up and melted within me, and I went through the agonies of a hundred
deaths, then I regretted. ‘O, why,’ I said in my heart, ‘did not
Mazimba my father kill me rather than bring me on to this great moving
river? Surely if I live I shall grow like a white man from the
whiteness of my heart, for I am exceedingly afraid, and have cast all
my inside forth.’ All this I said, and many more things which I cannot
remember, but they were dark and heavy things. But behold! my father,
when my bowels ceased to melt, and when new ones had grown to replace
those which I had thrown forth, I was glad, and did eat much beef, and
then I questioned my heart about this journey over the black water. And
my heart answered and said, ‘Mazooku, son of Ingoluvu, of the tribe of
the Maquilisini, of the people of the Amazulu, you have done well.
Great is the chief whom you serve; great is Mazimba on the
hunting-path; great was he in the battle; all the Undi could not kill
him, and his brother the lion (Jeremy), and his servant the jackal
(Mazooku), who hid in a hole and then bit those who digged. O yes,
Mazimba is great, and his breast is full of valour; you have seen him
strike the Undi down; and his mind is full of the white man’s knowledge
and discretion; you have seen him form the ring that spat out fire so
fast that his servants the horsemen were buried under the corpses of
the Undi. So great is he, that the “heaven above” smelled him out as
“tagati,” as a wizard, and struck him with their lightning, but could
not kill him then.’ And so now my father wanders and wanders, and shall
wander in the darkness, seeing not the sun or the stars, or the
flashing of spears, or the light that gathers in the eyes of brave men
as they close in the battle, or the love which gleams in the eyes of
women. And how is this? Shall my father want a dog to lead him in his
darkness? Shall his dog Mazooku, son of Ingoluvu, prove a faithless
dog, and desert the hand that fed him, and the man who is braver than
himself? No, it shall not be so, my chief and my father. By the head of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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