H. Rider Haggard

“ Umbelazi replied as he grasped my hand. “Sometimes I think that to live and prosper is good fortune, and sometimes I think that to die and sleep is good fortune, for in sleep there is neither hunger nor thirst of body or of spirit. In sleep there come no cares; in sleep ambitions are at rest; nor do those who look no more upon the sun smart beneath the treacheries of false women or false friends. Should the battle turn against me, Macumazahn, at least that good fortune will be mine, for never will I live to be crushed beneath Cetewayo’s heel.” ”

“ I see you travelling on the Road of Medicine, that is my own road, Saduko, and growing wise and great, till at last, far, far away, you vanish over the precipice to which it leads, full of years and honour and wealth, feared yet beloved by all men, white and black. Only that road you must travel alone, since such wisdom may have no friends, and, above all, no woman to share its secrets. Then I look at the Road of Spears and see you, Saduko, travelling on that road, and your feet are red with blood, and women wind their arms about your neck, and one by one your enemies go down before you. ”

“ By now Masapo had gained his feet, and was roaring out like a bull:
“Kill him! Kill the hyena! Umbezi, will you sit still and see me, your guest—me, Masapo—struck and insulted under the shadow of your own hut? Go forth and kill him, I say!”
“Why not kill him yourself, Masapo,” asked the agitated Umbezi, “or bid your headmen kill him? Who am I that I should take precedence of so great a chief in a matter of the spear?” Then he turned towards me, saying: “Oh, Macumazahn the crafty, if I have dealt well by you, come here and give me your counsel.” ”

“ O Prince and Conqueror Cetewayo, what a tale you will have to tell me when I greet you at the bottom of that gulf, you who will bring your nation to a wreck and at last die as I must die—only the servant of others and by the will of others. Nay, ask me not how. Ask old Zikali, my master, who saw the beginning of your House and will see its end. Oh, yes, as you say, I am a witch, and I know, I know! Come, I am spent. You men weary me, as men have always done, being but fools whom it is so easy to make drunk, and who when drunk are so unpleasing. ”

“ Farewell, Prince Cetewayo. You will never be the man your brother would have been, and your lot is very evil, you who are doomed to pull down a House built by One who was great. Farewell, Saduko the fool, who threw away your fortune for a woman’s eyes, as though the world were not full of women. Nandie the Sweet and the Forgiving will nurse you well until your haunted end. Oh! why does Umbelazi lean over your shoulder, Saduko, and look at me so strangely? Farewell, Panda the Shadow. ”

“ The truth is that I never cared for any man except one whose name you may chance to remember, Macumazahn.”
“I suppose you mean Saduko—” I began.
“Tell me, Macumazahn,” she inquired innocently, “are white people very stupid? I ask because you do not seem as clever as you used to be. Or have you perhaps a bad memory?”
Now I felt myself turning red as the sky behind me, and broke in hurriedly:
“If you did not like your husband, Mameena, you should not have married him. You know you need not unless you wished.” ”

“ I will indeed, Macumazahn. I will try very hard. It is true Masapo is an obstinate pig; still, if he knows that his own life is at stake, he might give way. Moreover, when she learns that Saduko has grown rich and great, Mameena might help me. Oh, I thank you, Macumazahn; you are indeed the prop of my hut, and it and all in it are yours. Farewell, farewell, Macumazahn, if you must go. But why—why did you not run away with Mameena, and save me all this fear and trouble? ”

“ ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA
We white people think that we know everything. For instance, we think that we understand human nature. And so we do, as human nature appears to us, with all its trappings and accessories seen dimly through the glass of our conventions, leaving out those aspects of it which we have forgotten or do not think it polite to mention. But I, Allan Quatermain, reflecting upon these matters in my ignorant and uneducated fashion, have always held that no one really understands human nature who has not studied it in the rough. ”

“ Umbelazi and most of the princes, and thousands upon thousands of the Zulus, whom I, the Dwande, hate, dead, dead! Mameena’s work, Macumazahn! Panda’s hand grown strengthless with sorrow and his eyes blind with tears. Mameena’s work, Macumazahn! Cetewayo, king in all but name; Cetewayo, who shall bring the House of Senzangakona to the dust. Mameena’s work, Macumazahn! Oh! a mighty work. Surely she has lived a great and worthy life, and she died a great and worthy death! ”

“ I love her, and I had rather die with her than live with any other woman.”
“The question is, Saduko, whether she would rather die with you than live with any other man. Does she say so?”
“Inkoosi, Mameena’s thought works in the dark; it is like a white ant in its tunnel of mud. You see the tunnel which shows that she is thinking, but you do not see the thought within. Still, sometimes, when she believes that no one beholds or hears her”—here I bethought me of the young lady’s soliloquy over my apparently senseless self—“or when she is surprised, the true thought peeps out of its tunnel. ”

“ Glory or no glory, I do not wish to share it, Mameena. I will not make war among a people who have entertained me hospitably, or plot the downfall of their Great Ones. As you told me just now, I am nobody—just one grain of sand upon a white shore—but I had rather be that than a haunted rock which draws the heavens’ lightnings and is drenched with sacrifice. ”

“ Macumazahn, I am his House, I, the only son of his chief wife, for Zikali the Wise Little One, the Ancient, who is of the Amangwane blood, and who hated Chaka and Dingaan—yes, and Senzangakona their father before them, but whom none of them could kill because he is so great and has such mighty spirits for his servants, saved and sheltered me.”
“If he is so great, why, then, did he not save your father also, Saduko?” I asked, as though I knew nothing of this Zikali.
“I cannot say, Macumazahn. Perhaps the spirits plant a tree for themselves, and to do so cut down many other trees. ”

“ Come back thence and tell me, Bangu, for there are so many worlds beyond the sun, and I would learn for certain which of them such a one as you inhabits: a man who for hatred and for gain murders the father and the mother and then butchers the child—the child that could slay a warrior who has seen war—with the spear hot from his mother’s heart.’
“‘Do you mean that I shall die if I kill this lad?’ shouted Bangu in a great voice.
“‘What else?’ answered Zikali, taking another pinch of snuff.
“‘This, Wizard; that we will go together.’
“‘Good, good!’ laughed the dwarf. ‘Let us go together. ”

“ Is it not so, Amangwane?”
“It is, it is so!” came the deep, unanimous answer, that caused the stirless leaves to shake in the still air.
“I understand, O Tshoza, brother of Matiwane and uncle of Saduko the chief,” I replied. “But Bangu is a strong man, living, I am told, in a strong place. Still, let that go; for have you not said that you come out to conquer or to die, you who have nothing to lose; and if you conquer, you conquer; and if you die, you die and the tale is told. But supposing that you conquer. ”

“ From the beginning I have always loved Mameena as I have loved no other woman and as no other woman was ever loved. But while I was away with Macumazahn, who sits yonder, to destroy Bangu, chief of the Amakoba, he who had killed my father, Umbezi, the father of Mameena, he whom the Prince Cetewayo gave to the vultures the other day because he had lied as to the death of Umbelazi, he, I say, forced Mameena, against her will, to marry Masapo the Boar, who afterwards was executed for wizardry. ”

“ Shortly after dawn I was awakened by a voice calling me, which in a hazy fashion I recognised as that of Umbezi.
“Macumazahn,” said the voice in a hoarse whisper, “the reeds below us are full of buffalo. Get up. Get up at once.”
“What for?” I answered. “If the buffalo came into the reeds they will go out of them. We do not want meat.”
“No, Macumazahn; but I want their hides. Panda, the King, has demanded fifty shields of me, and without killing oxen that I can ill spare I have not the skins whereof to make them. Now, these buffalo are in a trap. This swamp is like a dish with one mouth. ”

“ After all we were stealing these people’s cattle, and now were going to kill as many of them as we could. I had to recall Saduko’s dreadful story of the massacre of his tribe before I could make up my mind to give the signal. That hardened me, and so did the reflection that after all they outnumbered us enormously and very likely would prove victors in the end. Anyhow it was too late to repent. What a tricky and uncomfortable thing is conscience, that nearly always begins to trouble us at the moment of, or after, the event, not before, when it might be of some use. ”

“ It is true that I entered the hut of Nandie and set the medicine there. I say it because by nature I am not one who hides the truth or would attempt to throw discredit even upon a humble serving-woman,” and she glanced at Nahana.
“Then from between your own teeth it is finished,” said Panda.
“Not altogether, O King. I have said that I set the medicine in the hut. I have not said, and I will not say, how and why I set it there. That tale I call upon Saduko yonder to tell to you, he who was my husband, that I left for Umbelazi, and who, being a man, must therefore hate me. ”

“ Matiwane, the father of Saduko, was my friend, as he was yours, O King, and when Bangu slew him and his people, by leave of the Wild Beast [Chaka] , I saved the child, his son, aye, and brought him up in my own House, having learned to love him. Then, when he became a man, I, the Opener-of-Roads, showed him two roads, down either of which he might choose to walk—the Road of Wisdom and the Road of War and Women: the white road that runs through peace to knowledge, and the red road that runs through blood to death. ”

“ But why should you mind being compared to a flea? A flea works by night and so do you, Macumazahn; a flea is active and so are you; a flea is very hard to catch and kill and so are you; and lastly a flea drinks its fill of that which it desires, the blood of man and beast, and so you have done, do, and will, Macumazahn,” and he broke into a great laugh that rolled and echoed about the rocky roof above.
Once, long years before, I had heard that laugh, when I was a prisoner in Dingaan’s kraal, after the massacre of Retief and his company, and I recognised it again. ”

“ Cetewayo took the ornament and examined it, showing it to one or two of the captains near him, who nodded their heads gravely.
“Yes,” he said, “this is the war plume of Umbelazi, beloved of the King, strong and shining pillar of the Great House; we know it well, that war plume at the sight of which many a knee has loosened. And so you killed him, ‘Eater-up-of-Elephants,’ father of Mameena, you who this morning were one of the meanest of his jackals. Now, what reward shall I give you for this mighty deed, O Umbezi?” ”

“ And you, too, Macumazahn. Well, you do not look grand. You look like an old cow that has been suckling two calves on the winter veld. But tell me, what are all these warriors for? I ask because I have not food for so many, especially as we have just had a feast here.”
“Fear nothing, Umbezi,” answered Saduko in his grandest manner. “I have brought food for my own men. As for my business, it is simple. You asked a hundred head of cattle as the lobola [that is, the marriage gift] of your daughter, Mameena. They are there. Go send your servants to the kraal and count them.” ”

“ A great man plunged past me, breaking through the bush like a buffalo, and came to a halt upon a rock which overhung the Tugela, for the floods had eaten away the soil beneath.
“Umbelazi!” said Scowl, and as he spoke we saw another man following as a wild dog follows a buck.
“Saduko!” said Scowl.
I rode on. I could not help riding on, although I knew it would be safer to keep away. I reached the edge of that big rock. Saduko and Umbelazi were fighting there.
In ordinary circumstances, strong and active as he was, Saduko would have had no chance against the most powerful Zulu living. ”

“ You see, Macumazahn, Saduko is now living with a ghost, which he calls the ghost of Umbelazi, whom he betrayed.”
“Is that your way of saying he is mad, Zikali?”
“Oh, yes, he lives with a ghost, or the ghost lives in him, or he is mad—call it which you will. The mad have a way of living with ghosts, and ghosts have a way of sharing their food with the mad. Now you understand everything, do you not?” ”