Child of Storm

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This etext was prepared by Christopher Hapka, Sunnyvale, California.

Digital Editor's Note:

Italics are represented in the text with _underscores_. In the
interest of readability, where italics are used to indicate
non-English words, I have silently omitted them or replaced them
with quotation marks.

Haggard's spelling, especially of Zulu terms, is wildly inconsistent;
likewise his capitalization, especially of Zulu terms. For example,
Masapo is the chief of the Amansomi until chapter IX; thereafter his
tribe is consistently referred to as the "Amasomi". In general, I
have retained Haggard's spellings.

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CHILD OF STORM

by H. RIDER HAGGARD

DEDICATION

Dear Mr. Stuart,

For twenty years, I believe I am right in saying, you, as Assistant
Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, and in other offices, have been
intimately acquainted with the Zulu people. Moreover, you are one of
the few living men who have made a deep and scientific study of their
language, their customs and their history. So I confess that I was the
more pleased after you were so good as to read this tale--the second
book of the epic of the vengeance of Zikali, "the
Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born," and of the fall of the House of
Senzangakona*--when you wrote to me that it was animated by the true
Zulu spirit.

[*--"Marie" was the first. The third and final act in the drama is yet
to come.].

I must admit that my acquaintance with this people dates from a period
which closed almost before your day. What I know of them I gathered at
the time when Cetewayo, of whom my volume tells, was in his glory,
previous to the evil hour in which he found himself driven by the
clamour of his regiments, cut off, as they were, through the annexation
of the Transvaal, from their hereditary trade of war, to match himself
against the British strength. I learned it all by personal observation
in the 'seventies, or from the lips of the great Shepstone, my chief and
friend, and from my colleagues Osborn, Fynney, Clarke and others, every
one of them long since "gone down."

Perhaps it may be as well that this is so, at any rate in the case of
one who desires to write of the Zulus as a reigning nation, which now
they have ceased to be, and to try to show them as they were, in all
their superstitious madness and bloodstained grandeur.

Yet then they had virtues as well as vices. To serve their Country in
arms, to die for it and for the King; such was their primitive ideal.
If they were fierce they were loyal, and feared neither wounds nor doom;
if they listened to the dark redes of the witch-doctor, the trumpet-call
of duty sounded still louder in their ears; if, chanting their terrible
"Ingoma," at the King's bidding they went forth to slay unsparingly, at
least they were not mean or vulgar. From those who continually must
face the last great issues of life or death meanness and vulgarity are
far removed. These qualities belong to the safe and crowded haunts of
civilised men, not to the kraals of Bantu savages, where, at any rate of
old, they might be sought in vain.

Now everything is changed, or so I hear, and doubtless in the balance
this is best. Still we may wonder what are the thoughts that pass
through the mind of some ancient warrior of Chaka's or Dingaan's time,
as he suns himself crouched on the ground, for example, where once stood
the royal kraal, Duguza, and watches men and women of the Zulu blood
passing homeward from the cities or the mines, bemused, some of them,
with the white man's smuggled liquor, grotesque with the white man's
cast-off garments, hiding, perhaps, in their blankets examples of the
white man's doubtful photographs--and then shuts his sunken eyes and
remembers the plumed and kilted regiments making that same ground shake
as, with a thunder of salute, line upon line, company upon company, they
rushed out to battle.

Well, because the latter does not attract me, it is of this former time
that I have tried to write--the time of the Impis and the witch-finders
and the rival princes of the royal House--as I am glad to learn from
you, not quite in vain. Therefore, since you, so great an expert,
approve of my labours in the seldom-travelled field of Zulu story, I ask
you to allow me to set your name upon this page and subscribe myself,

Gratefully and sincerely yours,

H. RIDER HAGGARD.

Ditchingham, 12th October, 1912.

To James Stuart, Esq.,
Late Assistant Secretary for Native Affairs, Natal.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Mr. Allan Quatermain's story of the wicked and fascinating Mameena, a
kind of Zulu Helen, has, it should be stated, a broad foundation in
historical fact. Leaving Mameena and her wiles on one side, the tale of
the struggle between the Princes Cetewayo and Umbelazi for succession to
the throne of Zululand is true.

When the differences between these sons of his became intolerable,
because of the tumult which they were causing in his country, King
Panda, their father, the son of Senzangakona, and the brother of the
great Chaka and of Dingaan, who had ruled before him, did say that "when
two young bulls quarrel they had better fight it out." So, at least, I
was told by the late Mr. F. B. Fynney, my colleague at the time of the
annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, who, as Zulu Border Agent, with the
exceptions of the late Sir Theophilus Shepstone and the late Sir Melmoth
Osborn, perhaps knew more of that land and people than anyone else of
his period.

As a result of this hint given by a maddened king, the great battle of
the Tugela was fought at Endondakusuka in December, 1856, between the
Usutu party, commanded by Cetewayo, and the adherents of Umbelazi the
Handsome, his brother, who was known among the Zulus as
"Indhlovu-ene-Sihlonti," or the "Elephant with the tuft of hair," from a
little lock of hair which grew low down upon his back.

My friend, Sir Melmoth Osborn, who died in or about the year 1897, was
present at this battle, although not as a combatant. Well do I remember
his thrilling story, told to me over thirty years ago, of the events of
that awful day.

Early in the morning, or during the previous night, I forget which, he
swam his horse across the Tugela and hid with it in a bush-clad kopje,
blindfolding the animal with his coat lest it should betray him. As it
chanced, the great fight of the day, that of the regiment of veterans,
which Sir Melmoth informed me Panda had sent down at the last moment to
the assistance of Umbelazi, his favourite son, took place almost at the
foot of this kopje. Mr. Quatermain, in his narrative, calls this
regiment the Amawombe, but my recollection is that the name Sir Melmoth
Osborn gave them was "The Greys" or "Upunga."

Whatever their exact title may have been, however, they made a great
stand. At least, he told me that when Umbelazi's impi, or army, began
to give before the Usutu onslaught, these "Greys" moved forward above
3,000 strong, drawn up in a triple line, and were charged by one of
Cetewayo's regiments.

The opposing forces met, and the noise of their clashing shields, said
Sir Melmoth, was like the roll of heavy thunder. Then, while he
watched, the veteran "Greys" passed over the opposing regiment "as a
wave passes over a rock"--these were his exact words--and, leaving about
a third of their number dead or wounded among the bodies of the
annihilated foe, charged on to meet a second regiment sent against them
by Cetewayo. With these the struggle was repeated, but again the
"Greys" conquered. Only now there were not more than five or six
hundred of them left upon their feet.

These survivors ran to a mound, round which they formed a ring, and here
for a long while withstood the attack of a third regiment, until at
length they perished almost to a man, buried beneath heaps of their
slain assailants, the Usutu.

Truly they made a noble end fighting thus against tremendous odds!

As for the number who fell at this battle of Endondakusuka, Mr. Fynney,
in a pamphlet which he wrote, says that six of Umbelazi's brothers died,
"whilst it is estimated that upwards of 100,000 of the people--men,
women and children--were slain"--a high and indeed an impossible
estimate.

That curious personage named John Dunn, an Englishman who became a Zulu
chief, and who actually fought in this battle, as narrated by Mr.
Quatermain, however, puts the number much lower. What the true total
was will never be known; but Sir Melmoth Osborn told me that when he
swam his horse back across the Tugela that night it was black with
bodies; and Sir Theophilus Shepstone also told me that when he visited
the scene a day or two later the banks of the river were strewn with
multitudes of them, male and female.

It was from Mr. Fynney that I heard the story of the execution by
Cetewayo of the man who appeared before him with the ornaments of
Umbelazi, announcing that he had killed the prince with his own hand.
Of course, this tale, as Mr. Quatermain points out, bears a striking
resemblance to that recorded in the Old Testament in connection with the
death of King Saul.

It by no means follows, however, that it is therefore apocryphal;
indeed, Mr. Fynney assured me that it was quite true, although, if he
gave me his authorities, I cannot remember them after a lapse of more
than thirty years.

The exact circumstances of Umbelazi's death are unknown, but the general
report was that he died, not by the assegais of the Usutu, but of a
broken heart. Another story declares that he was drowned. His body was
never found, and it is therefore probable that it sank in the Tugela, as
is suggested in the following pages.

I have only to add that it is quite in accordance with Zulu beliefs that
a man should be haunted by the ghost of one whom he has murdered or
betrayed, or, to be more accurate, that the spirit ("umoya") should
enter into the slayer and drive him mad. Or, in such a case, that
spirit might bring misfortune upon him, his family, or his tribe.

H. RIDER HAGGARD.

CONTENTS

I. ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA
II. THE MOONSHINE OF ZIKALI
III. THE BUFFALO WITH THE CLEFT HORN
IV. MAMEENA
V. TWO BUCKS AND THE DOE
VI. THE AMBUSH
VII. SADUKO BRINGS THE MARRIAGE GIFT
VIII. THE KING'S DAUGHTER
IX. ALLAN RETURNS TO ZULULAND
X. THE SMELLING-OUT
XI. THE SIN OF UMBELAZI
XII. PANDA'S PRAYER
XIII. UMBELAZI THE FALLEN
XIV. UMBEZI AND THE BLOOD-ROYAL
XV. MAMEENA CLAIMS THE KISS
XVI. MAMEENA--MAMEENA--MAMEENA!

CHAPTER I

ALLAN QUATERMAIN HEARS OF MAMEENA

We white people think that we know everything. For instance, we think
that we understand human nature. And so we do, as human nature appears
to us, with all its trappings and accessories seen dimly through the
glass of our conventions, leaving out those aspects of it which we have
forgotten or do not think it polite to mention. But I, Allan
Quatermain, reflecting upon these matters in my ignorant and uneducated
fashion, have always held that no one really understands human nature
who has not studied it in the rough. Well, that is the aspect of it
with which I have been best acquainted.

For most of the years of my life I have handled the raw material, the
virgin ore, not the finished ornament that is smelted out of it--if,
indeed, it is finished yet, which I greatly doubt. I dare say that a
time may come when the perfected generations--if Civilisation, as we
understand it, really has a future and any such should be allowed to
enjoy their hour on the World--will look back to us as crude,
half-developed creatures whose only merit was that we handed on the
flame of life.

Maybe, maybe, for everything goes by comparison; and at one end of the
ladder is the ape-man, and at the other, as we hope, the angel. No, not
the angel; he belongs to a different sphere, but that last expression of
humanity upon which I will not speculate. While man is man--that is,
before he suffers the magical death-change into spirit, if such should
be his destiny--well, he will remain man. I mean that the same passions
will sway him; he will aim at the same ambitions; he will know the same
joys and be oppressed by the same fears, whether he lives in a Kafir hut
or in a golden palace; whether he walks upon his two feet or, as for
aught I know he may do one day, flies through the air. This is certain:
that in the flesh he can never escape from our atmosphere, and while he
breathes it, in the main with some variations prescribed by climate,
local law and religion, he will do much as his forefathers did for
countless ages.

That is why I have always found the savage so interesting, for in him,
nakedly and forcibly expressed, we see those eternal principles which
direct our human destiny.

To descend from these generalities, that is why also I, who hate
writing, have thought it worth while, at the cost of some labour to
myself, to occupy my leisure in what to me is a strange land--for
although I was born in England, it is not my country--in setting down
various experiences of my life that do, in my opinion, interpret this
our universal nature. I dare say that no one will ever read them;
still, perhaps they are worthy of record, and who knows? In days to
come they may fall into the hands of others and prove of value. At any
rate, they are true stories of interesting peoples, who, if they should
survive in the savage competition of the nations, probably are doomed to
undergo great changes. Therefore I tell of them before they began to
change.

Now, although I take it out of its strict chronological order, the first
of these histories that I wish to preserve is in the main that of an
extremely beautiful woman--with the exception of a certain Nada, called
"the Lily," of whom I hope to speak some day, I think the most beautiful
that ever lived among the Zulus. Also she was, I think, the most able,
the most wicked, and the most ambitious. Her attractive name--for it
was very attractive as the Zulus said it, especially those of them who
were in love with her--was Mameena, daughter of Umbezi. Her other name
was Child of Storm (Ingane-ye-Sipepo, or, more freely and shortly,
O-we-Zulu), but the word "Ma-mee-na" had its origin in the sound of the
wind that wailed about the hut when she was born.*

[*--The Zulu word "Meena"--or more correctly "Mina"--means "Come here,"
and would therefore be a name not unsuitable to one of the heroine's
proclivities; but Mr. Quatermain does not seem to accept this
interpretation.--EDITOR.]

Since I have been settled in England I have read--of course in a
translation--the story of Helen of Troy, as told by the Greek poet,
Homer. Well, Mameena reminds me very much of Helen, or, rather, Helen
reminds me of Mameena. At any rate, there was this in common between
them, although one of them was black, or, rather, copper-coloured, and
the other white--they both were lovely; moreover, they both were
faithless, and brought men by hundreds to their deaths. There, perhaps,
the resemblance ends, since Mameena had much more fire and grit than
Helen could boast, who, unless Homer misrepresents her, must have been
but a poor thing after all. Beauty Itself, which those old rascals of
Greek gods made use of to bait their snares set for the lives and honour
of men, such was Helen, no more; that is, as I understand her, who have
not had the advantage of a classical education. Now, Mameena, although
she was superstitious--a common weakness of great minds--acknowledging
no gods in particular, as we understand them, set her own snares, with
varying success but a very definite object, namely, that of becoming the
first woman in the world as she knew it--the stormy, bloodstained world
of the Zulus.

But the reader shall judge for himself, if ever such a person should
chance to cast his eye upon this history.

It was in the year 1854 that I first met Mameena, and my acquaintance
with her continued off and on until 1856, when it came to an end in a
fashion that shall be told after the fearful battle of the Tugela in
which Umbelazi, Panda's son and Cetewayo's brother--who, to his sorrow,
had also met Mameena--lost his life. I was still a youngish man in
those days, although I had already buried my second wife, as I have told
elsewhere, after our brief but happy time of marriage.

Leaving my boy in charge of some kind people in Durban, I started into
"the Zulu"--a land with which I had already become well acquainted as a
youth, there to carry on my wild life of trading and hunting.

For the trading I never cared much, as may be guessed from the little
that ever I made out of it, the art of traffic being in truth repugnant
to me. But hunting was always the breath of my nostrils--not that I am
fond of killing creatures, for any humane man soon wearies of slaughter.
No, it is the excitement of sport, which, before breechloaders came in,
was acute enough, I can assure you; the lonely existence in wild places,
often with only the sun and the stars for companions; the continual
adventures; the strange tribes with whom I came in contact; in short,
the change, the danger, the hope always of finding something great and
new, that attracted and still attracts me, even now when I _have_ found
the great and the new. There, I must not go on writing like this, or I
shall throw down my pen and book a passage for Africa, and incidentally
to the next world, no doubt--that world of the great and new!

It was, I think, in the month of May in the year 1854 that I went
hunting in rough country between the White and Black Umvolosi Rivers, by
permission of Panda--whom the Boers had made king of Zululand after the
defeat and death of Dingaan his brother. The district was very
feverish, and for this reason I had entered it in the winter months.
There was so much bush that, in the total absence of roads, I thought it
wise not to attempt to bring my wagons down, and as no horses would live
in that veld I went on foot. My principal companions were a Kafir of
mixed origin, called Sikauli, commonly abbreviated into Scowl, the Zulu
chief Saduko, and a headman of the Undwandwe blood named Umbezi, at
whose kraal on the high land about thirty miles away I left my wagon and
certain of my men in charge of the goods and some ivory that I had
traded.

This Umbezi was a stout and genial-mannered man of about sixty years of
age, and, what is rare among these people, one who loved sport for its
own sake. Being aware of his tastes, also that he knew the country and
was skilled in finding game, I had promised him a gun if he would
accompany me and bring a few hunters. It was a particularly bad gun
that had seen much service, and one which had an unpleasing habit of
going off at half-cock; but even after he had seen it, and I in my
honesty had explained its weaknesses, he jumped at the offer.

"O Macumazana" (that is my native name, often abbreviated into
Macumazahn, which means "One who stands out," or as many interpret it, I
don't know how, "Watcher-by-Night")--"a gun that goes off sometimes when
you do not expect it is much better than no gun at all, and you are a
chief with a great heart to promise it to me, for when I own the White
Man's weapon I shall be looked up to and feared by everyone between the
two rivers."

Now, while he was speaking he handled the gun, that was loaded,
observing which I moved behind him. Off it went in due course, its
recoil knocking him backwards--for that gun was a devil to kick--and its
bullet cutting the top off the ear of one of his wives. The lady fled
screaming, leaving a little bit of her ear upon the ground.

"What does it matter?" said Umbezi, as he picked himself up, rubbing his
shoulder with a rueful look. "Would that the evil spirit in the gun had
cut off her tongue and not her ear! It is the Worn-out-Old-Cow's own
fault; she is always peeping into everything like a monkey. Now she
will have something to chatter about and leave my things alone for
awhile. I thank my ancestral Spirit it was not Mameena, for then her
looks would have been spoiled."

"Who is Mameena?" I asked. "Your last wife?"

"No, no, Macumazahn; I wish she were, for then I should have the most
beautiful wife in the land. She is my daughter, though not that of the
Worn-out-Old-Cow; her mother died when she was born, on the night of the
Great Storm. You should ask Saduko there who Mameena is," he added with
a broad grin, lifting his head from the gun, which he was examining
gingerly, as though he thought it might go off again while unloaded, and
nodding towards someone who stood behind him.

I turned, and for the first time saw Saduko, whom I recognised at once
as a person quite out of the ordinary run of natives.

He was a tall and magnificently formed young man, who, although his
breast was scarred with assegai wounds, showing that he was a warrior,
had not yet attained to the honour of the "ring" of polished wax laid
over strips of rush bound round with sinew and sewn to the hair, the
"isicoco" which at a certain age or dignity, determined by the king,
Zulus are allowed to assume. But his face struck me more even than his
grace, strength and stature. Undoubtedly it was a very fine face, with
little or nothing of the negroid type about it; indeed, he might have
been a rather dark-coloured Arab, to which stock he probably threw back.
The eyes, too, were large and rather melancholy, and in his reserved,
dignified air there was something that showed him to be no common
fellow, but one of breeding and intellect.

"Siyakubona" (that is, "we see you," anglice "good morrow") "Saduko," I
said, eyeing him curiously. "Tell me, who is Mameena?"

"Inkoosi," he answered in his deep voice, lifting his delicately shaped
hand in salutation, a courtesy that pleased me who, after all, was
nothing but a white hunter, "Inkoosi, has not her father said that she
is his daughter?"

"Aye," answered the jolly old Umbezi, "but what her father has not said
is that Saduko is her lover, or, rather, would like to be. Wow!
Saduko," he went on, shaking his fat finger at him, "are you mad, man,
that you think a girl like that is for you? Give me a hundred cattle,
not one less, and I will begin to think of it. Why, you have not ten,
and Mameena is my eldest daughter, and must marry a rich man."

"She loves me, O Umbezi," answered Saduko, looking down, "and that is
more than cattle."

"For you, perhaps, Saduko, but not for me who am poor and want cows.
Also," he added, glancing at him shrewdly, "are you so sure that Mameena
loves you though you be such a fine man? Now, I should have thought
that whatever her eyes may say, her heart loves no one but herself, and
that in the end she will follow her heart and not her eyes. Mameena the
beautiful does not seek to be a poor man's wife and do all the hoeing.
But bring me the hundred cattle and we will see, for, speaking truth
from my heart, if you were a big chief there is no one I should like
better as a son-in-law, unless it were Macumazahn here," he said,
digging me in the ribs with his elbow, "who would lift up my House on
his white back."

Now, at this speech Saduko shifted his feet uneasily; it seemed to me as
though he felt there was truth in Umbezi's estimate of his daughter's
character. But he only said:

"Cattle can be acquired."

"Or stolen," suggested Umbezi.

"Or taken in war," corrected Saduko. "When I have a hundred head I will
hold you to your word, O father of Mameena."

"And then what would you live on, fool, if you gave all your beasts to
me? There, there, cease talking wind. Before you have a hundred head
of cattle Mameena will have six children who will not call _you_ father.
Ah, don't you like that? Are you going away?"

"Yes, I am going," he answered, with a flash of his quiet eyes; "only
then let the man whom they do call father beware of Saduko."

"Beware of how you talk, young man," said Umbezi in a grave voice.
"Would you travel your father's road? I hope not, for I like you well;
but such words are apt to be remembered."

Saduko walked away as though he did not hear.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"One of high blood," answered Umbezi shortly. "He might be a chief
to-day had not his father been a plotter and a wizard. Dingaan smelt
him out"--and he made a sideways motion with his hand that among the
Zulus means much. "Yes, they were killed, almost every one; the chief,
his wives, his children and his headmen--every one except Chosa his
brother and his son Saduko, whom Zikali the dwarf, the
Smeller-out-of-evil-doers, the Ancient, who was old before Senzangakona
became a father of kings, hid him. There, that is an evil tale to talk
of," and he shivered. "Come, White Man, and doctor that old Cow of
mine, or she will give me no peace for months."

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