Perceval Gibbon

“ Look—our last chance!'
"Piet did not understand.
"'We have been cutting the Kafir doctors into ribbons,' explained Jacobus, 'and they were no good. But here is a wizard, and a white one, who won't wait to be flogged. If he can do nothing, then there is nothing to do. Let us bring him along, Piet.'
"Piet was a fat youth, deadly strong, who never spoke while there was work to do. He merely dropped from his saddle and caught the Peruvian deftly by the back of the neck. ”

“ But witchcraft is worse than anything. You've seen how hard it is to make a Kafir doctor show his tricks. That's because he's never certain which is master, he or the devil. I knew a man once, a Peruvian, who burned his fingers badly."
A Peruvian, for the Vrouw Grobelaar, was any one for whose nationality she had no name. In Johannesburg it means a Polish Jew; in this instance I believe the man was a Greek.
"He was a smouser" (pedlar) , she went on, "a little cowering man, with a black beard and a white face, who spoke Kafir better than he spoke the Taal. ”

“ After a while it is something else that is calling, something of you but not in you, to which your soul answers at last; and if you go on till the will to call is no longer your own, the soul goes forth in response to it, and you are dead. ”