the size of their recent descendants—
Paralysed she stood and could only watch
As the biggest maned lion came crouching towards her.
It sniffed her belly and licked her buttocks
And for a few terrifying moments both woman and beast
Stared deep into each other’s eyes.
With a low growl of deep puzzlement it slowly turned tail
And made off promptly with the rest of the pride!
It dawned upon Amarava after some considerable time,
That these lions had not been molested by humans before
And that the old one’s behaviour was prompted by curiosity alone.
After this rather interesting experience
Amarava spent the night up a mopani tree;
She did not relish another encounter
With four-footed tribes such as these.
Dawn found her wide awake, but exhausted
And only sheer hunger could force her
To descend and start searching for food.
It was as she was eating some wild figs,
That sudden pains like scorpion stings
Erupted on her nipples, right hand and stomach.
She squirmed in agony on the ground,
But the pain mounted to intolerable intensity
With every passing moment.
Through the purple haze of hideous aching
The words of the Great Mother came to her
And she remembered . . . she remembered!
She also realised quite plainly now
That her deed of the night before was no accident,
But plain and straightforward murder!
Maddened by pain she now dashed through the forest,
Hoping to reach the burnt-out hut again,
But having lost all sense of direction
She lost herself in the primaeval wilderness.
Eventually she begged the Goddess for mercy,
But the blue skies kept a stony silence;
Forward she dashed again in blind agony
Until she reached a lake which she mistook
For the river where the hut had stood.
Repeatedly she called out Odu’s name
And with another forward lunge she leapt
The vertical face of a precipice.
At the bottom of the cliff she struck a tree
And that was all she could remember . . .
There were three of them . . .
And the one was more hideous than the other;
Like nightmares torturing a fevered man . . .
They stood on their hind legs with front legs crossed
Over pale-green protruding bellies.
They were taller than a man
And their girth was incredible;
For all the world they looked like
Crosses between frogs and crocodiles,
And they were watching the woman Amarava
Slowly recovering her consciousness.
She cried out weakly in terror when she saw herself surrounded
By such gigantic monsters
Inside a humid smelly cave;
She tried to rise but was gently pushed back
On her bed of damp rotting reeds
By one of her three weird captors.
The biggest opened his terrible mouth
And uttered sounds unbelievably ugly,
To which the second one asked an obvious question
And the first answered ‘Gwarr Gorogo!’
Upon which he left the cave,
Leaving two to guard the female.
On returning he introduced to his friends
A fourth one double their size;
He wore a belt of threaded reeds
And a headdress of crocodile skin.
‘Their Chief’, thought Amarava,
‘Quite an intelligent race of frogs—
They even have a Chief!’
High Chief Gorogo of a dying race
Of gigantic intelligent frog-men,
Looked down upon their very strange foundling
And wondered just what to do.
They classed her as animal, and obviously female,
But Gorogo could not understand
Why the Great Mother had saved her
While the rest of her kind were destroyed.
It slowly entered his mind
That perhaps the Great Mother had sent her
To save a dying race;
That through her the world could be repopulated
With a kind that could rule again.
Then fear filled Gorogo’s soul
As he caught a glimpse of the future
Through
