Razàka informed me that when tidings reached the province of Vònizòngo of the queen’s illness, he started for the capital with a beating heart. He felt that he was now on the threshold of liberty. When he arrived at the capital he sought out his old friend Andrìambèlo, the pastor of Ampàribè, Antanànarìvo, and asked: ‘How is the queen?’ He was told that she was very ill. Next day he called again and asked, and was told that she was at the point of death. On the third day, while these old friends sat and discussed the possibilities of the future, they saw first one man run past the house, and then others. They went to ascertain the cause of excitement. They were then told that ‘the queen had turned her back on the affairs of this life.’ ‘When we were told this,’ he said, ‘we could not speak. We took hold of each other’s hands, looked each other in the face, and wept. This was all we could do. We wept for joy; we were free.’ I said: ‘Did you weep for joy, Razàka, that the queen was dead?’ He answered: ‘We did, sir, for we knew that we were free from our sufferings and our sorrows, and free to worship God when and where we pleased; and we wept for joy.’ On the death of the queen, Razàka and other worthy men who had been sold into slavery, put in chains, or banished to distant provinces for their faith, were set free, and they set to work to build up what had been broken down, and spread anew the Word of God. Much was done in that direction in the province of Vònizòngo, mainly by the labours of those men. The dire persecution, which had lasted from 1835, came to an end with the death of Queen Rànavàlona I, in August, 1861. Her son became king, as Radàma II, and the cruel laws against Christianity were repealed. ‘Rànavàlona I was the wife given to Radàma I by his father, Àndrìanàmpòinimèrina, the founder of the dynasty, with the express injunction that a child of his, of whom she should be the mother, should be his successor. Rànavàlona was neither the wife of his choice nor the mother of his children.’ Her only child, Radàma II, had been born a year after her husband’s death. It has been said that, cruel and heartless as Rànavàlona was, she was not incapable of acts of personal kindness. She had climbed to the throne over the murdered bodies of the lawful heirs to it, and ‘her position as a despotic queen called into exercise her fiercest passions and her indomitable will--both being fostered and intensified by the superstitions of her country and her time. She was declared to be the divinity incarnate, invested with absolute rule and resistless power. In the overruling providence of God, this woman became the means of testing, purifying, and strengthening in her country that divinely implanted faith which the chief energies of her life were employed to destroy.’ CHAPTER III FROM DARKNESS TO DAWN