King Solomon's Mines
never having seen an eland close, he handed his rifle to Umbopa, and,
followed by Khiva, strolled up to the patch of bush. We sat down and
waited for him, not sorry of the excuse for a little rest.
The sun was just going down in its reddest glory, and Sir Henry and I
were admiring the lovely scene, when suddenly we heard an elephant
scream, and saw its huge and rushing form with uplifted trunk and tail
silhouetted against the great fiery globe of the sun. Next second we
saw something else, and that was Good and Khiva tearing back towards us
with the wounded bull—for it was he—charging after them. For a moment
we did not dare to fire—though at that distance it would have been of
little use if we had done so—for fear of hitting one of them, and the
next a dreadful thing happened—Good fell a victim to his passion for
civilised dress. Had he consented to discard his trousers and gaiters
like the rest of us, and to hunt in a flannel shirt and a pair of
veldt-schoons, it would have been all right. But as it was, his
trousers cumbered him in that desperate race, and presently, when he
was about sixty yards from us, his boot, polished by the dry grass,
slipped, and down he went on his face right in front of the elephant.
We gave a gasp, for we knew that he must die, and ran as hard as we
could towards him. In three seconds it had ended, but not as we
thought. Khiva, the Zulu boy, saw his master fall, and brave lad as he
was, turned and flung his assegai straight into the elephant’s face. It
stuck in his trunk.
With a scream of pain, the brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to
the earth, and placing one huge foot on to his body about the middle,
twined its trunk round his upper part and _tore him in two_.
We rushed up mad with horror, and fired again and again, till presently
the elephant fell upon the fragments of the Zulu.
As for Good, he rose and wrung his hands over the brave man who had
given his life to save him, and, though I am an old hand, I felt a lump
grow in my throat. Umbopa stood contemplating the huge dead elephant
and the mangled remains of poor Khiva.
“Ah, well,” he said presently, “he is dead, but he died like a man!”
CHAPTER V.
OUR MARCH INTO THE DESERT
We had killed nine elephants, and it took us two days to cut out the
tusks, and having brought them into camp, to bury them carefully in the
sand under a large tree, which made a conspicuous mark for miles round.
It was a wonderfully fine lot of ivory. I never saw a better, averaging
as it did between forty and fifty pounds a tusk. The tusks of the great
bull that killed poor Khiva scaled one hundred and seventy pounds the
pair, so nearly as we could judge.
As for Khiva himself, we buried what remained of him in an ant-bear
hole, together with an assegai to protect himself with on his journey
to a better world. On the third day we marched again, hoping that we
might live to return to dig up our buried ivory, and in due course,
after a long and wearisome tramp, and many adventures which I have not
space to detail, we reached Sitanda’s Kraal, near the Lukanga River,
the real starting-point of our expedition. Very well do I recollect our
arrival at that place. To the right was a scattered native settlement
with a few stone cattle kraals and some cultivated lands down by the
water, where these savages grew their scanty supply of grain, and
beyond it stretched great tracts of waving “veld” covered with tall
grass, over which herds of the smaller game were wandering. To the left
lay the vast desert. This spot appears to be the outpost of the fertile
country, and it would be difficult to say to what natural causes such
an abrupt change in the character of the soil is due. But so it is.
Just below our encampment flowed a little stream, on the farther side
of which is a stony slope, the same down which, twenty years before, I
had seen poor Silvestre creeping back after his attempt to reach
Solomon’s Mines, and beyond that slope begins the waterless desert,
covered with a species of karoo shrub.
It was evening when we pitched our camp, and the great ball of the sun
was sinking into the desert, sending glorious rays of many-coloured
light flying all over its vast expanse. Leaving Good to superintend the
arrangement of our little camp, I took Sir Henry with me, and walking
to the top of the slope opposite, we gazed across the desert. The air
was very clear, and far, far away I could distinguish the faint blue
outlines, here and there capped with white, of the Suliman Berg.
“There,” I said, “there is the wall round Solomon’s Mines, but God
knows if we shall ever climb it.”
“My brother should be there, and if he is, I shall reach him somehow,”
said Sir Henry, in that tone of quiet confidence which marked the man.
“I hope so,” I answered, and turned to go back to the camp, when I saw
that we were not alone. Behind us, also gazing earnestly towards the
far-off mountains, stood the great Kafir Umbopa.
The Zulu spoke when he saw that I had observed him, addressing Sir
Henry, to whom he had attached himself.
“Is it to that land that thou wouldst journey, Incubu?” (a native word
meaning, I believe, an elephant, and the name given to Sir Henry by the
Kafirs), he said, pointing towards the mountain with his broad assegai.
I asked him sharply what he meant by addressing his master in that
familiar way. It is very well for natives to have a name for one among
themselves, but it is not decent that they should call a white man by
their heathenish appellations to his face. The Zulu laughed a quiet
little laugh which angered me.
“How dost thou know that I am not the equal of the Inkosi whom I
serve?” he said. “He is of a royal house, no doubt; one can see it in
his size and by his mien; so, mayhap, am I. At least, I am as great a
man. Be my mouth, O Macumazahn, and say my words to the Inkoos Incubu,
my master, for I would speak to him and to thee.”
I was angry with the man, for I am not accustomed to be talked to in
that way by Kafirs, but somehow he impressed me, and besides I was
curious to know what he had to say. So I translated, expressing my
opinion at the same time that he was an impudent fellow, and that his
swagger was outrageous.
“Yes, Umbopa,” answered Sir Henry, “I would journey there.”
“The desert is wide and there is no water in it, the mountains are high
and covered with snow, and man cannot say what lies beyond them behind
the place where the sun sets; how shalt thou come thither, Incubu, and
wherefore dost thou go?”
I translated again.
“Tell him,” answered Sir Henry, “that I go because I believe that a man
of my blood, my brother, has gone there before me, and I journey to
seek him.”
“That is so, Incubu; a Hottentot I met on the road told me that a white
man went out into the desert two years ago towards those mountains with
one servant, a hunter. They never came back.”
“How do you know it was my brother?” asked Sir Henry.
“Nay, I know not. But the Hottentot, when I asked what the white man
was like, said that he had thine eyes and a black beard. He said, too,
that the name of the hunter with him was Jim; that he was a Bechuana
hunter and wore clothes.”
“There is no doubt about it,” said I; “I knew Jim well.”
Sir Henry nodded. “I was sure of it,” he said. “If George set his mind
upon a thing he generally did it. It was always so from his boyhood. If
he meant to cross the Suliman Berg he has crossed it, unless some
accident overtook him, and we must look for him on the other side.”
Umbopa understood English, though he rarely spoke it.
“It is a far journey, Incubu,” he put in, and I translated his remark.
“Yes,” answered Sir Henry, “it is far. But there is no journey upon
this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is
nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not
climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross, save a mountain and a
desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he
holds his life in his hands counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or
lose it as Heaven above may order.”
I translated.
“Great words, my father,” answered the Zulu—I always called him a Zulu,
though he was not really one—“great swelling words fit to fill the
mouth of a man. Thou art right, my father Incubu. Listen! what is life?
It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither,
sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried
away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may
perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try
and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the
worst he can but die a little sooner. I will go with thee across the
desert and over the mountains, unless perchance I fall to the ground on
the way, my father.”
He paused awhile, and then went on with one of those strange bursts of
rhetorical eloquence that Zulus sometimes indulge in, which to my mind,
full though they are of vain repetitions, show that the race is by no
means devoid of poetic instinct and of intellectual power.
“What is life? Tell me, O white men, who are wise, who know the secrets
of the world, and of the world of stars, and the world that lies above
and around the stars; who flash your words from afar without a voice;
tell me, white men, the secret of our life—whither it goes and whence
it comes!
“You cannot answer me; you know not. Listen, I will answer. Out of the
dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we
fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of
the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing.
Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the
glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it
is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that
runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.”
“You are a strange man,” said Sir Henry, when he had ceased.
Umbopa laughed. “It seems to me that we are much alike, Incubu. Perhaps
_I_ seek a brother over the mountains.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “What dost thou mean?” I asked; “what
dost thou know of those mountains?”
“A little; a very little. There is a strange land yonder, a land of
witchcraft and beautiful things; a land of brave people, and of trees,
and streams, and snowy peaks, and of a great white road. I have heard
of it. But what is the good of talking? It grows dark. Those who live
to see will see.”
Again I looked at him doubtfully. The man knew too much.
“You need not fear me, Macumazahn,” he said, interpreting my look. “I
dig no holes for you to fall in. I make no plots. If ever we cross
those mountains behind the sun I will tell what I know. But Death sits
upon them. Be wise and turn back. Go and hunt elephants, my masters. I
have spoken.”
And without another word he lifted his spear in salutation, and
returned towards the camp, where shortly afterwards we found him
cleaning a gun like any other Kafir.
“That is an odd man,” said Sir Henry.
“Yes,” answered I, “too odd by half. I don’t like his little ways. He
knows something, and will not speak out. But I suppose it is no use
quarrelling with him. We are in for a curious trip, and a mysterious
Zulu won’t make much difference one way or another.”
Next day we made our arrangements for starting. Of course it was
impossible to drag our heavy elephant rifles and other kit with us
across the desert, so, dismissing our bearers, we made an arrangement
with an old native who had a kraal close by to take care of them till
we returned. It went to my heart to leave such things as those sweet
tools to the tender mercies of an old thief of a savage whose greedy