Ghost browser archive5/15/2023 ![]() ![]() Her mother in a blue dressing-gown, dingy with wear and travel, from which one of the ribbon bows hung by a thread, her face turned to the canvas and weeping silently. The hot tent with its flaps turned up to let in whatever air there might be. Dove was lying on a bed made of the cartel, or frame strung with strips of green hide, which had been removed from the waggon, a pretty, pale-faced woman with a profusion of fair hair. When it was all over they returned to her, and there had been a painful scene. Her mother could not come because she was ill with grief and fever in a little tent by the waggon. Rachel and her father were the sole mourners at this funeral, if we may omit two rock rabbits that sat upon a shelf of stone in a neighbouring cliff, and an old baboon which peered at these strange proceedings from its crest, and finally pushed down a boulder before it departed, barking indignantly. Afterwards together they had filled in that dry, red earth, and rolled stones on to it, and as there were few flowers at this season of the year, placed a shrivelled branch or two of mimosa upon the stones–the best offering they had to make. Rachel, poor child, for she was but fifteen, had borne it to its last bed, and her father had unpacked his surplice from a box, put it on and read the Burial Service over the grave. Well, it was buried now he had finished digging its resting-place in the hard soil before he went. Kaffirs do not like death, unless it comes by the assegai in war, and Tom, a good creature, had been fond of that baby during its short little life. For, as he explained to her, in such tempests cattle are apt to take fright and rush away for miles, and without cattle their plight would be even worse than it was at present.Īt least this was what Tom said, but Rachel, who had been brought up among natives and understood their mind, knew that his real reason was that he wished to be out of the way when the baby was buried. Therefore he had gone to a kloof in the mountains where the oxen were in charge of the other two native boys–since on this upland there was no pasturage to drive them back to the waggon. Tom, the Kaffir driver, had told her that a storm was coming, a father of storms, which would end the great drought. Yet there was no sun, for a grey haze hung like a veil beneath the arch of the sky, so dense and thick that its rays were cut off from the earth which lay below silent and stifled. Looked at from the high ground where they were encamped above the river, the sea, a mile or two to her right–for this was the coast of Pondo-land–to little Rachel Dove staring at it with sad eyes, seemed an illimitable sheet of stagnant oil. The afternoon was intensely, terribly hot. At any rate he vanished away after Panda came to the throne.”_ ![]() ![]() He is supposed to have been mixed up in the death of Dingaan also, and to be dead himself. When I asked the Indunas about her at first they pretended total ignorance, but on my pressing the question, one of them said that ‘all that tale was unlucky and “went beyond” with Mopo.’ Now Mopo, as I think I wrote to you, was the man who stabbed King Chaka, Dingaan’s brother. Although fifteen years or so have passed since Dingaan’s death in 1840 the Kaffirs are very shy of talking about this poor lady, and, I think, only did so to me because I am neither an official nor a missionary, but one whom they look upon as a friend because I have doctored so many of them. “If I can find out anything more of this curious story I will let you know, but I doubt if I shall be able to do so. But according to them the curse stopped behind. “Ultimately, it appears, in order to be rid of this girl and her evil eye, they sold her to the doctors of a dwarf people, who lived far away in a forest and worshipped trees, since when nothing more has been heard of her. “She seems to have been the daughter of a wandering, pioneer missionary, but the king, I mean Dingaan, murdered her parents, of whom he was jealous, after which she went mad and cursed the nation, and it is to this curse that they still attribute the death of Dingaan, and their defeats and other misfortunes of that time. Her title was Lady of the Zulus, or more shortly, Zoola, which means Heaven. This girl, they say, was very beautiful and brave, and had great power in the land before the battle of the Blood River, which they fought with the emigrant Boers. ![]() _”The Zulus about here have a strange story of a white girl who in Dingaan’s day was supposed to ‘hold the spirit’ of some legendary goddess of theirs who is also white. _Reprinted March_ 1909.įROM LETTER HEADED “THE KING’S KRAAL, ZULULAND, 12TH MAY, 1855.” Produced by Juliet Sutherland, S.R.Ellison and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.įirst published _July_ 1908. ![]()
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