Thinking black; 22 years without a break in the long grass of Central ...

BLACK SUFFRAGETTES 247
brought upon him by that first human sacrifice long ago
—by blood cometh sorrow, therefore by blood cometh joy.
Yea, I might almost say that all things in poor old Africa
are sprinkled by blood, and without the shedding of
blood there is no—no anything. Little did these old negro
miners guess how symbolic it all was, that spilling of
human blood to celebrate their find of minerals—a Trans-
vaal War, and many another wrangle, all so symbolised in
that shedding of blood over ore.
[Later.
Hurrah ! here they come. With the breaking of the
south-west monsoon here come the royal rains at last—rains
that, at first blush, seem as the angels of God, converting
bare brown Africa into a paradise of green. Let a month
rush past, however, and you begin to take back all your
compliments, for this grass gets out of hand, becomes
erratic and unreliable. For the traveller, too, it is often
one long dismal succession of drip, drizzle, and drench
then, as the rank tangle shoots 12 feet high, the early
ducal-park aspect of the meadows is lost in a wild pro-
fusion of stubborn cane-grass and scrub. And thus, in a
flash, you see the real reason in so logically legislating
for Africa such a clean-cut system of half-and-half weather,
the summer seemingly as absurdly wet as the winter is
absurdly dry. For owing to the great rivers only being
so many mere canals with inadequate banks, the end of
the rains sees them leaping over into the plains where for
months they wallow in merciless marshes. (The truest
snapshot of all this was taken by Isaiah, the Prophet,