The Bakwains Believed That I Had Bound Sechele
With Some Magic Spell, And I Received Deputations, In The Evenings,
Of
The old counselors, entreating me to allow him to make only a few showers:
"The corn will die if you
Refuse, and we shall become scattered.
Only let him make rain this once, and we shall all, men, women, and children,
come to the school, and sing and pray as long as you please."
It was in vain to protest that I wished Sechele to act
just according to his own ideas of what was right, as he found the law
laid down in the Bible, and it was distressing to appear hard-hearted to them.
The clouds often collected promisingly over us, and rolling thunder
seemed to portend refreshing showers, but next morning the sun would rise
in a clear, cloudless sky; indeed, even these lowering appearances
were less frequent by far than days of sunshine are in London.
The natives, finding it irksome to sit and wait helplessly
until God gives them rain from heaven, entertain the more comfortable idea
that they can help themselves by a variety of preparations, such as charcoal
made of burned bats, inspissated renal deposit of the mountain cony -
`Hyrax capensis' - (which, by the way, is used, in the form of pills,
as a good antispasmodic, under the name of "stone-sweat"*),
the internal parts of different animals - as jackals' livers,
baboons' and lions' hearts, and hairy calculi from the bowels of old cows -
serpents' skins and vertebrae, and every kind of tuber, bulb, root, and plant
to be found in the country.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 51 of 1070
Words from 15385 to 15654
of 306638
