Our rain-sweet wavelets salt with human tears.Our tideless glasses gleam resplendently
High o’er the rockings of the restless sea.
THE CONGO
Through jungles spawned from fever-drunken sod
Where, sleeplessly, the foul man-hunters hide.
The bitter lees from God’s dread wine-press trod
By desperate feet, drain down my tepid tide.
Leviathan there wallows in his wrath;
There range the hordes of mighty Behemoth.
THE ZAMBEZI
The spoils the sky had of the world-wide main
I bear, new-gathered from ten thousand rills
To where the thund’rous gates my steps enchain,
Clogged with the wastage of a million hills.
Thence, breaking forth in triumph, full and free,
I render back my booty to the sea.
ZIMBABWE
I housed the brood of Carthage; they the earth
Deep rifled for its treasure. On me fell
The hand of Doom. No rumour speaks my birth,
No legend shrines my death. My citadel
Glares at the cold fane of my obscene god,
O’er which the feet of ancient ruin trod.
THE SOUTHERN DESERTS
The wayward Spring, in dalliance afar,
Forgets us for long seasons, till the sky
Weeps for our burning woe; then, star on star,
Rich blossoms from our glowing dunes arise.
Thirst, with his legioned agonies, still stands
Warding the barren empire of our sands.
THE BLACK PEOPLES
God smote us with an itch to dip our hands
In one another’s blood. Our long travail
The ages hearken to. The ocean sands
Than we are not more myriad. Men hale
Us forth in chains o’er every moaning sea
Foul with the trails of Man’s iniquity.
KIMBERLEY
I sprang from ’neath the desert sand, and cast
A double-handed shower of living gems
I’ the world’s astonished visage. In my vast
Black, echoing chasm, whence the bright diadems
Of half Earth’s thrones are furnish’d, I can hear
The lost souls wander, wailing, far and near.
JOHANNESBURG
A maenad seated on a golden throne;
My plaything is a nation’s destiny;
My feet are clay, my bosom is a stone;
The princes of the Earth are fain of me,
But, stark, before the splendour of my gates,
The grim Boer, leaning on his rifle, waits.
THE WHITE COMMONWEALTHS
To-morrow unregarded, clean effaced
The lesson of unhallowed yesterday,
We rail against each other; interlaced
Albeit are our fortunes. So we stray,
Blind to the lurid writing on the wall,
Deaf to the words Fate’s warning lips let fall.
(1899)
Chapter One.
The Lepers.
“All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”—Leviticus XIII. 46.
One
The Magistrate sat in his office, deep in thought. Before him, on his desk, lay a pile of documents of foolscap size—clinical reports as to some forty odd natives in the district, who had been cursed by God with the most bitter of all curses—the disease of leprosy. The Magistrate noted that the documents were livid white in colour—a variation from the orthodox blue of the ordinary printed form, and even this trivial circumstance seemed to have an unpleasant significance.
It was a month since the receipt of the circular from the Government, directing that the long-dormant “Leprosy Repression Act” be put in force, and the District Surgeon had, in the interval, been busy riding from kraal to kraal in these locations where the disease existed, obtaining the voluminous data required in each individual case. This data had now been transferred to the fateful livid forms, the imposing pile of which the Magistrate was regarding with troubled eyes.
In response to a touch upon the bell a smart-looking native constable entered the room, and a message sent through him brought Galada, sergeant of the native police, and four of his men, who stood before the desk in an attentive line. After the Magistrate’s order had been explained to them, Galada and his men left the room, went to where their horses stood, ready saddled, and rode forth respectively in five different directions. The sun was shining brightly. The season was early summer, but a light, refreshing breeze was making glad the land. The previous day had been hot, but a short thunderstorm at sunset had cleared the atmosphere and lowered the temperature, so the morning was sweet, as only a South African morning can be when cool, sea-born wind and gently ardent sunbeams flatter and caress.
Galada, the sergeant, took his course along the footpath which leads over the bush-covered “Black-water” Ridge. To his right arose, in precipitous terraces, the noble mass of the Umgano Mountain. The valleys were full of long lush grass, on which the sleek-limbed kine were greedily browsing. The long-tailed finches lilted over the reeds in anxious pursuit of their short-tailed, and therefore more nimble, mates; the crested lories called hoarsely from the mysterious depths of
