Bertram Mitford - The White Hand and the Black - A Story of the Natal Rising

“I shall be delighted to make the acquaintance of its summit. When shall we start?”

“Oh, not yet. When it’s cooler. It doesn’t take long to go up, and the sunsets from there are simply indescribable.”

Throughout dinner Edala had seemed quite outside of herself. She had descanted volubly on all her favourite topics; had bantered, and argued, and pretended to disagree for the sake of arguing again. Her father was not a little astonished. He had never seen her as animated as this for years – certainly not since she had been grown up. Elvesdon was amusing, and talked well, but Thornhill would never have suspected him of being able to draw Edala out of her shell as he had succeeded in doing.

Dinner was over at last, and an uncommonly good one it had been; so much so as to move Elvesdon to congratulate his host on the excellence of his cook.

“Oh, he’s a coolie,” answered Thornhill. “He’s a great rascal, and was kicked out of one of the hotels in Maritzburg for boozing. I take jolly good care he gets no chance of that here, but he must have been bad if they had to get rid of him, for he can cook.”

(Coolie: In Natal all natives of India, of whatever occupation or profession, are so called. It is an absurd misnomer of course; about as much so as to talk about a ‘Boer Judge’ or a ‘Boer engineer’ – but it sticks, and always will.)

“By Jingo he can!” assented Elvesdon emphatically. “Those sasaatjes were simply divine.”

“Mr Elvesdon clearly appreciates good ‘skoff’,” said Edala. “Great minds skip together, for so do I.”

“I appreciate good everything, I believe,” he answered as they got up, “especially good singing. Won’t you give us a song, Miss Thornhill? I haven’t heard you yet.”

“Immediately after dinner? Why, I should positively croak. No, that’s no time for vocal exercise. To-night perhaps – you will stay the night, won’t you? Well, so long. I am going to take it easy in private life until it gets cooler. Meanwhile I’ll leave you to exchange official news,” she added maliciously, over her shoulder.

“I can’t think what you’ve done to that child, Elvesdon,” remarked his host, when they were sitting alone together on the stoep. “I never saw her so lively before, or anything like it; certainly not since she was a little girl. Yet you managed to ‘draw’ her most effectually.”

Elvesdon was human, and at this profuse anointment of his self-esteem he mentally purred. Yet he did not know what the very deuce to answer. He could not, for instance, tell his host that this sort of life must be rather a monotonous one for a girl, and therefore anyone from outside, he supposed would make a welcome change.

“I don’t know how it was done,” he said, with a deprecatory laugh. “Your daughter evidently has very artistic instincts, Thornhill. I can’t say I have, but I’ve been a bit among people who cut in for that sort of thing, and may have absorbed some of their jargon. I suppose that is what interested her.”

“Heard any more about that suspicious stranger I came over to tell you about the other day?” said Thornhill, characteristically changing the subject without any sort of prelude.

“Yes, I have. As you supposed, he’s a Zulu from beyond the river, one of Mehlo-ka-zulu’s chief men. He’s got no business at all in these locations, but you know as well as I do that it’s sometimes sound policy to shut one eye. To interfere with him just now would do more harm than good; the tax-collecting time is coming on, and the people want smoothing down, not brushing up.”

“That’s so,” said the other, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. “Oh he belongs to Mehlo-ka-zulu does he? M’yes. Mehlo-ka-zulu’s a fine fellow but a bit of a firebrand. If anything went wrong here it wouldn’t be long before he had a finger in the pie. At least – so I predict.”

Thus they talked on, airing official matters even as Edala had declared they would. Elvesdon for his part rejoiced at finding a man such as this, right at his very door, so to say; from the well of whose shrewdness and experience he could draw at will. Then they went round to the stables, and soon the slant of the sunbeams told that the heat of the day was passed.

“Well, are we ready for Sipazi? The sun is going off the valley, and we shall have it splendidly cool.”

They turned. Edala was looking fresh, and even, for her, rosy, after her nap. Elvesdon almost started. This dash of colour was all that was needed to render the face absolutely a lovely one.

“Look, Mr Elvesdon,” she went on. “Now is the time when the sun gets on the big krantz, and makes it gleam like fire. Look.”

He did look. The majestic mountain towered up from the sombre moist depths of the now shaded valley below, its slopes striped with tongues of dark bush, shooting up to where they culminated in a sheer wall of cliff, smooth, absolutely perpendicular where not overhanging. Upon this now, the slanting rays of the westering sun were striking at an angle, and the whole face of the gigantic rock wall, scarcely less than three hundred feet sheer, was glowing and sparkling as though it had suddenly burst into flame.

“ Wo! Sipazi-pazi !” exclaimed Edala, shading her eyes, in laughing imitation of the natives. “Now, haven’t we got something to be proud of, Mr Elvesdon? Fancy owning such a fragment of the globe as that – you see, I can’t help bragging about it. Now come along and let’s get to the top. Here are the horses.”

Those useful quadrupeds were being driven in by a mounted boy, and soon the saddles were on them and the three were in the saddles. In about half an hour they had dived down through the broad, shaded valley beneath, now delightfully cool, and stumbling up a rugged bush path had gained the tree-lined ridge, or saddle, which connected the splendid mountain with the opposite range.

“We’ll leave the horses here,” said Edala. “You can ride to the top by the other side but it’s an awful long way round, nearly an hour, whereas here we can climb up by a cleft in the rock in about a quarter of an hour. Can you climb, Mr Elvesdon?”

“I believe I can do most things when I’m put to it.”

“Well then come along,” she cried, taking the lead. “There are such jolly maidenhair ferns, too, all the way up.”

“I think I’ll wait for you here and smoke a pipe,” said Thornhill.

“No, no, father. You must come up too.”

“Well, I will then. By the way Elvesdon. Take care how you move about when you’re on top. There are some rock crevices there, hidden away in the long grass, and if you got into some of them we should have to send round to about ten farms before we could get hold of enough combined length of reims to get you out, even if we could then.”

“By Jove, are there?”

“Never mind. I’ll take care of you,” called Edala. “Come on after me.”

And in her lithe agility she drew herself up from rock to rock, now poising for a moment on one foot, then springing higher to another point of vantage.

The place they were now in was a very steep, chimney-like rock gully, such as would be known in Alpine parlance as a ‘couloir.’ To those of weak nerve or dizzily inclined heads it would have looked formidable enough, for, besides its own height, from a little way up it seemed as if it overhung the whole depth of the valley. Above, too, craggy jutting rocks, shooting forth savagely against the sky, looked as though about to fall on and overwhelm the invaders of their mountain solitude. In hard fact it was safe enough, being indeed a gigantic natural stairway thickly coated with oozy moss, while the sides were festooned with masses of beautiful maidenhair fern.

“Here we are at last,” cried Edala as they gained the summit. “Confess. Doesn’t this repay any amount of trouble?”