‘I had several reasons,’ he explained, ’for declining to permit of any change of our military position.  First, it would have been an encouragement to the Kaffirs to attack us, for they would have supposed us in retreat.  Second, we should have been leaving open, country where there were European families.  Again, the appearance of weakening, on our part, would have driven over the Kaffirs who hesitated, to the side of those who clamoured to attack us.  I made it a rule always, and in all things, only to take a step after the most careful and mature thought; but once it had been taken, never to go back upon it.  It’s a very bad business when you begin to retreat.’

Nothing happened in the manner Nongkause and the wily Umhlakaza had foretold, unless the destruction of Kaffir stock and grain.  Two blood-red suns did not flame in the east; neither did the moon, in any of her humours, light the ancient chiefs along, the now precious cattle with them.  A mist came up of an afternoon, but no day of darkness followed.  Breezes blew, cheering the hot air to freshness; never a hurricane which should break the lintels of the white man’s doors.  It was weary to wait and starve, with a Governor on the flank, plucking all guidance out of an insurrection.

If the gods of Nongkause had excited a less perfect trust, there might have been a rush on Cape Colony.  As it was, the belief lived long enough in the Kaffirs to defeat its own purpose.  Their suffering grew acute, nature asserted itself over superstition, and their one cry was ’Give us to eat.’  They dug up roots, and they strove for the supplies which the Governor threw into the country, when famine drove Nongkause’s nostrum out.  Desperate crowds of the hungry surged over hill and plain, while strength lasted, and then lay down to die.  No question remained of keeping a mad Kaffraria at bay.  The whole effort was to rescue, as far as was possible, the Kaffirs from death by want.

Civilisation drove forward in a mortuary cart; but it was civilisation.  The spirit of Kaffraria had been quenched; it was a last wild stand.  Sir George Grey meditated on the means, so unexpected, so beyond man’s control, which had enhanced the securities for peace in South Africa.  He could do that, believing Providence to be an all-wise, if often inscrutable ruler, and at the same time declare:  ’There was a heroic element in the action of the Kaffirs, for we see what they were willing to endure at the bidding, as they believed, of their ancestors, and in the interests of themselves as a people.’

It was in Sir George’s mind that Nongkause, by a queer irony, was the one member of her family who survived the visitation.

XIV A SAVIOUR OF INDIA

It touches the imagination to have a dark Africa put forward as light for a Bible scene; namely, that where Jacob, instructed by Rebekah, obtains the blessing which the blind Isaac thinks himself to be conferring on his eldest son Esau.